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[El-Metallico]

Man, this looks amazing, creepy yet fun!

[Cranktrain]

Oh my, that crocodile. That shark.

Loving the enemies.

[FrankieSmileShow]

http://www.twitch.tv/frankiepixelshow
Streaming some work right now, going to draw characters and monsters for the eastern city manor, and possibly work on implementing em too. I'd like to finish that dungeon before the end of the month. Its going to have an NPC to recruit, several enemies, a normal boss and a few optional boss battles/unique enemies too. Might also work on some unique tiles for the manor.

[FrankieSmileShow]

Drew some cultists today, and finished a bit sprite I started last weekend.
The cultists are encountered in a dark manor, the first dungeon area you find if you pick the east path through Chapter 1 and dont explore around much.
When an encounter starts with one of the cultists, they all start with the same sprite: a distant silhouette of some guy in a hooded robe.
As turns pass, the silhouette gets closer, and you get to see what's up.
Some of them are monsters, warped into demons by a ritual that backfired. Some of them are NPCs you can talk to, some just tell you to leave them alone. Some of them seem human but attack anyway, too.
Didnt implement any of that yet, just did art for it. Going to implement this next weekend, or maybe in my free time this week.

[FrankieSmileShow]

Drew Cerberus yesterday, inspired of its text description in Le Dictionnaire Infernal. It has the body of a wolf, crows' legs and feathers and a mane of snakes! Heres what it looked like halfway through yesterday, though I did finish it since:


Then I started on Bhael, also inspired of its description and depiction in Le Dictionnaire Infernal.


Going to finish this on my stream tonight and start on another monster, Argus, the mythological monster with 100 eyes.
Check out my twitch to watch the stream: http://www.twitch.tv/frankiepixelshow

[Quicksand-T]

I started reading from the first post and got scared that the last post would be someone saying "hey whatever happened to this?". But I'm happy that didn't happen. These monsters are glorious.

I want to see more overworld, or out-of-battle, areas. If there are any in a showable state, that is.

[FrankieSmileShow]

I dont have much to show there yet, Ive been working more on technical stuff and monsters than level design. I did make a bunch of new tile sets though, so I should be able to make new places soon.

This weekend was very productive! Not only did I finish these two monsters, but I drew a third one! The 100-eyed monster of greek mythology, Argus.

Depicted here looking a little bit like something from Nuclear Throne perhaps.

[FrankieSmileShow]

Hep, im streaming right now, drawing slime monsters a plenty today! Check it out. Should be streaming for like 5 hours at least.
http://www.twitch.tv/frankiepixelshow

[FrankieSmileShow]

A little update. Been spending a lot of time drawing tiles for new areas and putting together maps, although many of them are still bare. I would like to finish one of the first side-areas completely this weekend, although I dont think I'll stream too much of it, I'd like to keep the details secret. I can show some screenshots of rooms with new tiles tho:





Also made a bunch more enemies, but not showing off all of em, keeping some secrets!

Heres a bunch of slimes from the sewers


And heres some undead:


Got a lot of good progress going, starting to see the end of Chapter 1 at the horizon. I'll get there eventually.

[FrankieSmileShow]

Another little update.

SPOKY UPDATER




So, whats new recently:
-Finished up a lot of work on small icons, for items, weapons, armor, potions etc
-Did lots of boring data entry in the database. items, Weapons etc again. Boring, but you gotta do it eventually! Almost all the weapons are in the game now.
-Added three new special status effects that increase in strength linearly instead of just being on or off: Bleed, Pain and Fear. Bleed is meant to be a pretty nasty danger for the player, but also a very useful tool, as all slashing weapons do good bleed damage, making em really good against enemies with little defense but a lot of HP (bleed does damage based on a % of max HP)
-Did more work on status effects in general: made it that a status effect can trigger another one when it times out. Will use this for poisons especially: Some poisons take a few turns to kick in for instance. Could also use this for the berserker rage ability: it makes you really strong, but when it ends, the character is weakened for some time and cannot go into another rage right away.
-Loooots of clean-up work in code and other things, too many to count here. I should probably keep a list of these.


Also, I will be streaming on twitch at 2:30 PM EST today, just about 30 minutes after posting this. I will be drawing monsters probably. Check it out if you're interested!
http://www.twitch.tv/frankiepixelshow

[QOG]

Amazing art, looking forward to the game.

[Eniimal]

I like these hideous monsters
I have never played Sweet home but I'm really curious about your game.

The demo on the first post is not available, do you plan to make it available again ?

[FrankieSmileShow]

Sorry Eniimal, its about one year old at this point (for a game I've been working on for about 13 months!), getting less and less representative of what the game is now. I don't think I will put up another build publicly until the game comes out.

I really recommend you try out sweet home! If you both like RPGS and survival horror games, it really is a great mix of the two.
It is more or less the progenitor of Resident Evil 1: As I understand it, RE1 as a project started out as a 3d remake of Sweet Home, but they lost the rights to the IP so had to change things up to their own story.

Its a very good game. It aged remarkably well compared to other RPGs of its era, on the NES overall. It still has some of the issues you might expect, like random battles interrupting your play, but their frequency is fairly low and the game is easy enough that you don't really need to grind to get through it. You will fight enough enemies and get enough XP to beat the game just through exploring it normally. The only people who would need to grind are those who know exactly what to do and where to go, so they get a lot less battles than a fresh new player normally would, exploring around at their pace.

[Eniimal]

Sorry Eniimal, its about one year old at this point (for a game I've been working on for about 13 months!), getting less and less representative of what the game is now. I don't think I will put up another build publicly until the game comes out.

I understand perfectly. There is nothing worse than seeing people use a version that does not represent anymore the quality of your work.

[FrankieSmileShow]

A little update:
Worked on some boring but important systems: picking locks (uses either bobby pins or lockpicks, and requires a skill) and finished the more complex version of skillbooks: One skillbook can now contain up to six different skills or spells you can choose from, and skills can have various skill or class requirements to learn em. It all works properly so far, just need to add one last missing requirement type for skillbooks.

Heres a few other pics I didnt show here before:

Those arent finished obviously, theyre freak cultists from the eastern mansion.




Did a lot more sprites that im keeping secret, too.

[Moth]

Picked up the suito homu vibes as soon as I saw the screens. Holy shit. Appallingly gorgeous and gorgeously appalling.

Love how your special systems for the game sound, and... this is probably going to be the most visually striking RPG Maker game ever made, no other way to slice it. Maybe the most visually striking indie RPG in general. God, this is perfection.

As I understand it, RE1 as a project started out as a 3d remake of Sweet Home, but they lost the rights to the IP so had to change things up to their own story.

Going on a tangent myself here, but yup... Resident Evil itself is a callback to the Mamiya estate, the "house of residing evil" (or maybe the SH rom translators put that in retroactively... it sure would be amazing if it really is a throwback to such a line, though!)

[FrankieSmileShow]

Another monster. This guy is gonna be a tough one to find in the game.

Its a huge head biting down the ground, with the front and back jaws extending in either direction, looking like a big centipede with its teeth.

Didnt do much work on this last month, had some other things to do, went to Pax last week, but did a lot more this weekend.
I should finally be finishing off one of the first side-areas completely, soon enough.

[FrankieSmileShow]

Did lots of polish work on this last weekend, but it was too boring to stream or record.
No images to show, big ol text post!

-Almost finished up the system for learning skills, which have their separate "Learn Skills" menu now, to reduce the clutter in the items list, skill books not showing up in the items menu anymore.
When picking a player to learn skills, it shows you the character's Potential points instead of their health, other polish like that. Its looking good so far, but could use some more. Should probably pick the skill learning target first, and the book second, so the book menu could show which books are available to that character. That'd be more work tho, id need to modify/figure out the menus for real instead of just copy pasting code around.

-Actually implemented a bunch of the passive skills, took a lot of scripting, changing how Players fetch their stat values as opposed to battlers, how weapons fetch their range values. Weapons no longer have just a range value too, they have two: minimum and maximum range, so some weapons could have max accuracy at both ranges 2 and 3 for instance. Weapons all have the narrowest reach if you don't have their proficiency skills, and it tends to widen on level 1 and 3 of those skills, making that weapon type more flexible to use.

-Made all dialogue boxes automatically stop enemy encounter events from walking around, instead of doing this manually in events. This makes things simpler, and makes it less likely to cause errors in the long run, but it breaks all room transitions because of the game's vision range/darkness/candles code, got to go over all of em and change how room transitions handle these to make them look smooth again.

-fixed a whole bunch of little bugs, like weapon range not showing up properly, some in-game item pickups pointing to the wrong item index.

-Did lots of data entry for skillbook items, tying the books to the various skills they teach using Note tags.

-Finally put in some text files to find and read in the game. This is making the game's narrative side come out more, feels good. Thinking about how text files collected might be sorted in your Files menu, as you might collect a lot of them, and the non-linear nature of the game makes their order of collection uncertain...

-Programmed in more stuff that happens while you explore the slums, and figured out some of the last details about the slums' narrative.


Stuff I added a little while ago:

-I don't think I mentioned this before, but maybe I did? A regular attack can now do more than one hit. Weapons have weight, and agile characters have a chance to swing a lighter weapon more than once.

Number of attacks = Random number between 0.1 and Attackers' agility, divided by the weapon's weight, rounded up.
If the weapon's weight is above the characters' base strength (including strength bonuses from passive skills, from special gear, but not including weapon damage bonuses), the attackers' agility is halved for this calculation.
Player isn't supposed to really worry about the details. Should just feel like, light weapons can attack more, especially if character is agile.

-Another thing I added a little while back, that I'm not sure if I mentioned it:
Weapon durability loss and armor durability loss are no longer a static value.

Weapon durability loss is based on the enemy's defense value, after damage type modifiers.
If the enemy's  final defense is 0, the weapon loses half a point of durability instead of a whole point.
If the enemy's final defense is 1-5, the weapon loses 1 point. 6-10, weapon loses 2 points. 11-15, 3 points, and so on. 16-20, 4 points. 21 and above, 5 points.
Most enemies in the early game are those squishy rubber monsters. so they all have 0 defense.
Since crushing damage halves defense, it makes crushing weapons inherently more resilient against hard targets, and makes sharp weapons much more fragile, even at equal durability numbers, but against soft targets, both would be fine.

Armor/Equipment durability loss is also variable now, based on the final damage amount, after defense is applied. 0-4 damage is 0.5 durability loss, 5-14 costs 1, 15-34 costs 2, 35-54 costs 3, 55-74 costs 4, 75 and above costs 5.

Again, not really meant for players to figure out the specific details, just to feel that hitting something tough hurts your weapons more, and being hit by something tough hurts your gear more.
The armor/equipment one was an important addition because, as it was before, a very weak multi-hit attack that did almost no damage would completely wreck your gear. Theres some balance there now, and harder hits are much more scary.

These changes also make your equipment last a lot longer in the early game, which is good, since your options are more limited then.

[goob256]

Wow these monsters are cool! How long does it take you to make one of those (sorry I have yet to watch the videos)? Eh maybe I'll answer that myself and check them out.

[RujiK]

Crocodile with the hoodie is really cool looking.