That's cool. Just figured I'd offer. I'll be downloading and playing it as soon as you release it in .psv format.

I'm with Dray on that. It's crazy how much you guys are managing to fit on one system card. Well, good luck and I can't wait.

I'm just hoping everything converts over to the PS3 format without any trouble. I spent a few days helping Valk and Ix convert all the RM1 games in vault over... and a good few of them had a single block that would corrupt in the conversion. Even though the game ran fine in it's original .gme format. Not sure what I'm going to do if that happens in one of the cards for AA.

As for system, it's going to be very close. We are just about out (with only a few thousand left) but we have all the maps finished, and we have majority of the spells, monsters, and items created. So minus the random encounters (which take up 21 per map) we've got most of everything in there. Just not with any stats. So I think we'll make it. The only additional things we'll need for the Battle Arena are maybe one or two additional enemies and a few items.

If we do run out, I'll have to either go in and shrink some custom maps down or just replace them entirely with a pre-made. I would really prefer to avoid that though.

Okay, I've been keeping this under wraps for a very long time now, and I think I just want to go ahead and put this out there. I don't think that many people really check on this thread that much so it will still be a fairly big surprise when I put it out.

When the game is finally finished and release, I want to release a trailer for it. I made a trailer a long time ago, and I am almost ashamed how terrible the video editing is. Over the years, I think I've gotten a good grip on how to properly edit a video now. But not only that, I'm getting some help. Aside from having artwork done by Archie Comic artist Lamar Wells, we are having voice acting work done for the trailer. And the narrator for it will be none other than Rina-chan. She's already given me her audio and I'm very impressed with it. As of now, SK and I are looking into finding someone out there to make a custom track for the trailer, and I'm kind of looking into getting the music composer for the Yogscast. If he can't do something specifically, I think he may have at least some royalty free tracks. But that's just kind of up in the air.

But yeah, I wanted to share that with you guys. Also, I updated the first post. Something I seem to only do about once a year now.

So I just got the finished artwork in for the main antagonist for Arc Arath. I'm really happy with how it turned out.

The Almighty Dragon, Xenobia Sefiros.
(added it to the media thread)



As previously mentioned in the post above, I've put together a bit of what will be the trailer for Arc Arath's release. Along with Rina-chan's voice acting and Ninanai's artwork, it's coming together nicely. I was even able to get Shadow of Israphel's composer, Daniel Yount's work in the trailer. I think once I get a a good bit of it fleshed out, I could post a few seconds of it here to see if you guys like it or not.

That aside, SK and I did manage to finish up all the loose end as far as optional quests and that kind of junk is concerned. Dialog wise, we only have the final dungeon and the ending, and we are done. All that will be left is playtesting and battle balancing.

That looks awesome!

And I am thrilled that the core game is nearing completion. Keep it up.

That's some nice artwork there.

I'm looking forward to the trailer just about as much as the game! Kudos, Lantis and SK. The work seems to be paying off, for sure.

Wow, that's pretty nice. Looking forward for that trailer now!

I really appreciate all the interest, guys. It really a moral boost when a page in this thread is actually more of you guys than SK and/or myself (if only just). But yeah, SK came by this weekend and we made a good deal of progress... but it was rather frustrating. We've finally finished the majority of the final dungeon. So basically, a lot of the switch work and all that jazz is done. The rest of the game is literally just scenes (of course with the boss fights within).

The problem is (and this is a reoccurring problem) that we've once again ran out of scenario data. I'm sitting there working on the final dungeon and I look down and notice only 400 MEM left. So SK had to go back and shorten some NPC dialog... which I don't like any more than he does. In fact, we're always going back and trimming off things. And it's really the source of all our frustration these days. But I kind of knew it would get to this. The longer the game got in scenario count, the more data that would be missing when we started a new one.... and because of that, each scenario would be a bit shorter than the last. We've been able to kind of work around this by limiting the player from backtracking to earlier towns and such. But hopefully the player won't actually try to go back there as there's no real reason to. And if they don't, then the world will feel as open as we intended it to be. I absolutely hate this, but SK and I have absolutely no other option. We honestly believe that RPG Maker 1 just wasn't developed with big games in mind.

Anyways, we're almost done with the story. Just a few more months and we'll be playtesting and battle balancing. THEN we get to fight with the system data limitation. Yay.

It almost feels like a dream that this game is getting closer and closer to being done.

A lot like a dream, apparently. I went to sleep thinking about things to include in SOE's ending and I ended up dreaming that Lantis, Ix, SF, and myself were all on the mountain dungeon in the game fighting demons and stuff with the Elvenians, and all Jersey kept doing was trying to cast a spell at a monster and somehow tripping and falling on her face instead. ... Girl's a klutz.


Too bad I didn't dream more about being the only one to stumble upon the three Elvenian ladies when they were bathing in a hot spring at the half-way point of the dungeon, instead. You know in anime that kind of situation usually turns out good for the lone guy involved.*Quagmire arm-thrust*


(Not that the cliche itself of female party members bathing in a spring actually happens in the game. That'd be kinda lame.)

Speaking of which, all the dialog for the final fight is complete. All that is left is just the ending sequences, which SK is working on presently. There are three different endings, depending on how the final fight plays out. So SK actually has to type out three different endings instead of one. It'll take a while, but I think the game will be all the better for it.

For the first time in the creation of this game, it looks like we'll actually hit a goal within the projected time limit. Completing everything but playtesting and battle balancing by the end of the year.

Hey, guys, just wanted to update while I have the Internet access.

I've started working on dialogue for the endings, and I predict about 60 to 70,000 more bits of data to type in before we can finally be done with the story and work on the battle system. Yes, it will be a long ending, but with good reason. It is definite that we'll end at scenario 18 and I think it will be more more expedient and fun to work on the next phase of the game. We already have a fair idea of what we want to do for battle at every part anyway.

_____

EDIT:

You said this in ths very thread a long while back, Lantis ->


... Ain't gonna be no problem. Because it's like saying the Square guys who made FFVI, IX, and so many others with more than a static group of party members throughout the game faced the same challenge, and hey, they did just fine. I can't wait for this part to come up in our work, actually.

The thing about the two aforementioned games, though, is that a lot of times certain characters were a requirement for certain portions of the story. Heck, FF9 didn't allow you to switch party members until the end of disk 2. =P

Actually, it's quite similar to that. I guess my biggest worry was I didn't want the player to be punished for using a variety of characters vs the same they've been using. I mean, they will all have their different uses in battle, but... we'll see. Actually, I'm really looking forward to the new work we'll be doing. Here recently it was just typing out dialog, making dungeons and minigames, and managing switches. Once SK finished the dialog and I tie up the loose ends, all of that will be finished. I shouldn't have to touch another switch again. And of course that frees up SK from is seemingly never ending ocean of RPG Maker 1 GUI inputted text.

We both expect that this major change in the development process is going to go a heck of a lot faster.

I'm sure it's not surprise that we actually DIDN'T finish the dialog for the game before the end of 2012, but we have a track record to keep of never meeting deadlines. ^_^

Good news is that one of the endings is complete, and the other two are well underway. I genuinely THINK we could finish the game in 2013... but then again, there's that track record to keep.

Made a little progress this weekend. Took a bit of the dialog and started working it into scenes. SK and I have come to find it takes so little time in comparison to do this kind of work. Specially when were both there working on it.

As far as the other two endings go, they are both around half way complete.

So there's a fairly important update. SK is pretty close to finishing up all the dialog in the game. And he's suggested I go ahead and start working on battle balancing. The reason we've held off until now is that more often than not we both have things to work on. And say, I decide to start working on battle balancing for scenario 1, and he goes back and finds some grammar or spelling issues and changes those, we now have two different scenario 1's and someone's going to have to lose work they've done.

So SK told me he won't be touching system or scenario 1, so I have a go to begin the process of fiddling with the battle aspect of the game. I've waited many years to start this, so I'm moderately excited.

Updates are usually rather slow in this studio... but now that I have the ability to work on the game whenever means I've been putting a good deal of time into it now. I've completed the battle balancing of the first scenario card and have just started the second. I've played it through several times just making sure everything worked out the best it could.

I hit a few snags with the system, but have worked around it. Such as wanting enemies to use magic spell before the characters have access to magic... is impossible. Also, there's also balancing money drops from enemies vs price of goods in the shops and just how effective they are. Also figuring out when spells and techs should be learned and in what order has taken a good deal of thought as well. SK also did a run through the first scenario and he seemed rather happy with the difficulty as well.

An interesting problem I also found out is that it is impossible to test play a second scenario. From the end of the first in test play, you can not load a second. As such, you can not carry over levels, money, and items from one scenario to another in test play. So what I've had to do play through the first scenario a few times and get a general idea of what is an average of all the previously mentioned, and in the second scenario in test play, create an event that gives that all back. That'll be the base in which I balance the second card to... all the way up to the 18th. Once that's done, we can actually start test playing with the actual game. Though it seems it takes about two weeks to get a full scenario card balanced if the first is anything to go by. So it'll be very unlikely that Arc Arath will be finished this year considering it would take around 34 weeks to get the rest finished... and that's if I keep up the momentum I've got now. Not to mention all the play testing and bug searching.

I believe we have all the enemies, spells, items, and random encounters already in the system data. So we should have successfully fit the entire game in one system card. We have about 150 bits of data free. I think I can free some of that up in the dungeon maps if I go and look for blocks that the player might not actually be able to see. I'm actually looking forward the large amount of work I still have ahead of me.

Also I would like to add that I came up with good ending scenes for the normal and best endings for the game while we were away at MagCon (I found the seclusivenss of the front lobby balcony to be great for the creative mind as well as playing Axe Cop Munchkin), so I'll be typing that up tonight.


Really the only thing still missing are a few various chraacter epilogue scenes in both endings.