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[FrankieSmileShow]

Woa, put up a new timelapse vid:



Drawing a big ol tree. Some more of these are coming, got a big backlog of footage to put through youtube.

[FrankieSmileShow]

Alright so I think its time for me to bring this topic back!

I have not been posting publicly about this game at all, but I've been working on it quite a bit.
I have remade the whole damn game in Game Maker Studio 2, which I am much more familiar with. It also now has a new resolution and feels a lot more smooth than before.









I've been working on a little vertical slice style demo for a few months, based on the game's prologue, before you reach the city proper.
I am planning to send this to some publishers soon.

Still haven't decided on an actual name for the game, though I have a few in mind.

A few major improvements so far:

• Enemy encounters are now actually based on the enemies on the map around you at the start of a battle.
• You can now be interrupted by enemies when you are searching a treasure chest or opening a door.
• Bashing a door open or forcing a lock makes noise, which alerts nearby monsters which come to investigate.
• Enemies chase the player with much better pathfinding (now uses an A* algorithm. It used to just be the regular RPG Maker "move towards player" thing). Pathfinding also accounts for the size of monsters.
• Enemy movements in battle are now smooth, and use scaling in addition to unique frames.
• Character portraits in battle have little animations to go along with their attacks.
• Items can be randomized, and are sometimes unidentified, enchanted, cursed etc.

Work on this is still pretty slow! I'm still working on Barkley2 and doing some freelancing, but it has been very steady. If I can get some funding, I might be able to speed this up though. That's what I am hoping for!

[and]

Ah it's just like the good old days again. Welcome back!

It's looking pretty awesome.

[FrankieSmileShow]

Thanks and! Yeah, its good to be updating this thread again. I have a lot to talk about, the game has evolved so much over the past year.

Just made a pretty substantial change this weekend!
The player movement in the game is no longer tile-based like it used to be back in the RPG Maker version, you move around freely now. Enemies still move tile-based though, it makes the pathfinding easier to handle, and makes their movements feel a little more predictable in a somewhat fun way. Might make a few enemies that break the grid however, that might mix things up.

I have been sending versions of the game around to a few testers, and this has led to pretty substantial tweaks and improvements in the past year. The grid-based movement was one of the most common recurring criticisms, but I was wary of how complicated it could be to change the player movement this drastically, considering almost every trigger and collision in the game works by tile position. Turns out it wasn't so bad, just took a few days of hunting down a bunch of bugs the change introduced.

[Gazillion]

Man I'm so glad this is still in the works. I posted in here way back when and I think of this thread every once in a while. Every once in a while I'll search for "weekend RPG" as the original thread had a similar title (I believe). Anyway, this still looks super wicked and can't wait to see more.

[ProgramGamer]

This looks really slick, looking forward to more posts!

[FrankieSmileShow]

Drawing some more of those cockroach monsters on my twitch stream tonight.
Tune in here: https://www.twitch.tv/frankiepixelshow

[FrankieSmileShow]

I have been working on this game a lot, but have not been updating this topic whatsoever! I'll try to update it more in the future, I'll try to maybe update it once a week at least?

I have been hard at work on Chapter 1, been making a lot of encounters and NPCs, and been working on the overall sequence of it. The goal right now is to have chapter 1's main sequence be complete and fully playable by the end of november, and then have Chapter 2 be sequence-complete by january.

Heres a few other things I've been doing:

• Better support for different languages, with the game's text taken from external spreadsheet files
• Been making lots of special "test" enemies/bosses to add much-needed features to the combat system: Enemies that protect another enemy, enemies that charge an attack over several turns, enemies that spawn other enemies, enemies that transform into another enemy, enemies that counterattack, or react to being hit by a specific damage type with a specific action, etc.
• Equipment-given status effects. Also allowed Cursed items to work, cant unequip them until uncursed.
• Made a proper auto-map, that also marks doors you haven't opened or unlocked yet.
• Improved the message boxes to have smoother text with support for in-line color changing and text effects
• Put in various special in-game languages/codes that NPCs can speak in, that get partially transl-ated if you have the right skills
• Trimmed down the use of data structures in saving the game to only use them when absolutely needed; when I save the state of some objects, it automatically figures out whether to save a full version of that objects' data or a truncated version where its just a single value (like, an empty crate doesnt save the contents of its inventory or whether its been unlocked etc, it only saves wheth-er you checked inside yet or not)
• Added little notification pop-ups for messages that are not important enough to use the main message windows which take away player control. They are a bit like desktop push notifications.
• Added a bunch of debug features to my in-game debug console: instantly build a party of a certain level, etc. Also added a "get through this instantly" button in debug mode that instantly kills all opponents in the current battle, instantly unlocks a door you are examining, identifies all carried items etc.