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[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

forgot to update it last monday, so here's another update: i've been continuing to write dialogue for the past two weeks, and also (in order to write certain bits of dialogue) coded a system similar to FF6 where some text isn't displayed unless certain characters are in your "party"

most (but not all) of the dialogue is now in at least first draft form, and is at ~56000 words / ~140 pages (most of it optional and non-linear so the typical player won't see most of it in any given playthrough unless they're a completionist)

there's still some dialogue to write for the game before the first draft of it is completely finished, and i hope to finish up the rest of it this week

[starsrift]

Quick question for you, as I'm wrestling with the decision for a project of my own - did you put together a scripting language for dialogue, or is it hard-coded?

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

it's just normal text files with a few special codes. each line of dialogue is a textbox.

name: = show that line with that person's portrait if that person is on the party, but don't show the "name: " part
[blahblah.png] = show a bg image centered above the textbox while the line is being displayed
@name = only show that line if that person's on the party

the dialogue is text files that look like this:

Spare: The patterns in the writings about the Raberata also resemble the patterns on some official documents, and those patterns are unique.

@Spare Mercedes: You can figure all that out without having ever been to Earth?

Spare: Well it's not exactly Lake science.  And remember that I am the epitome of all wisdom. [lake.png]

that part of the dialogue is shown only if spare is on the party; the second line is shown only if both spare and mercedes are on the party. during the third textbox, it also shows an image called 'lake.png'

there are a few other codes which i intend to add later (like dramatic pauses and such)

[starsrift]

So a mini-scripting language, yeah. Hmmm, cool, thanks!

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

he's a music sampler i put together just now:





has 11 songs from the soundtrack, about 20 seconds from each

i got the idea from spelunky's xbla music sampler and thought it'd be fun to do a similar thing

[Happy Shabby Games]

The music is solid and shares a common theme. I especially liked the song that started at :48. It helped looking at in-game graphics while listening to the tunes to see if the two meshed well. I think you've got it.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

thanks-thanks

semi-weekly update!

- wrote the dialogue for all the remaining "first-encounter" scripts for creatures (when you first encounter a new creature the characters mention it)
- wrote the terraforming scripts (as the lake's poison becomes more "purified" by the player dialogue occurs at certain %'s along the way to 100%)
- wrote 8 "entrance" scripts; the first time you enter a new area the characters mention it, but i haven't yet integrated these into the game (they don't appear in the game yet, but they are written)
- began working on the lilypad system a bit more: creating a meter to display what % of an area's lilypads have been touched by the player for instance; the meter itself isn't very pretty so far though (pictured) but i'll probably improve it eventually

next week i'm going to continue working on the lilypad system and hopefully finish up all the tasks remaining for that system


you can see the lilypad meter on the left side of the screen

i'm not really sure how much about this system i should explain, since it's a story spoiler, but basically a lot of the game centers around touching lilypads, after which they gain a red glow (and later mutant lilypads with a green grow appear which approach your red ones and try to change them green). it's optional though, and in practice works a bit like the seiklus system of collecting those floating dots (which was designed to highlight exploration by causing players to want to touch everywhere), although unlike seiklus it has other uses/benefits besides just collecting them

[Happy Shabby Games]

Hey Paul, I'm watching Miyazaki's "Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind" for the first time and it's giving me the same vibe as the screens of your game  . If you haven't seen it, check it out. I think you'd be really into it. You can watch the whole movie here http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8704790173215648057

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

i've seen it and read the manga (the manga's better, but that's to be expected) a long time ago; clysm also said that my game reminds him of that movie, but there's no real conscious influence or anything

i'd say the game is more inspired by the nes games zelda1, crystalis, guardian legend, and by my knowledge of biology and biochemistry that i picked up majoring in those in college, and by the novel solaris

the game crystalis actually was inspired by nausicaa to a great degree so there may be some second-hand influence going on -- the ohmu in nausicaa resembles one of the bosses in crystalis for instance

and of course pretty much every alien world always has mushroom forests, it's sort of a cliche almost (but not so much of a cliche that i would intentionally avoid it)

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

i moved the 'memory cell meter' from under the player to the side of the screen, alongside the 'lilypad meter'. finished up the 'terraforming' section of the task list. added a few more needed scripts (almost finishing up the dialogue first draft section of the task list). also did a bunch of little polishing issues like making the player's location on the map blink rather than just be a static dot, and gave textboxes a border, tiny stuff like that. i also added an 'unread conversations' counter for camp mode etc. etc.



next i'm just gonna continue plodding through the huge list of tasks to complete in attempt to get the task list down to a manageable number of tasks. i might also make a first 'teaser trailer' soon, because i do need to start promoting the game if i expect it to sell anything

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

over the last week i changed the way the ship's engine is drawn and added a particle 'wake' effect behind the player's ship as it moves along the surface of the lake (pictured). i also wrote three more of the ending variations and coded the criteria for them to be chosen in, as well as slightly rewrote the other two existing ending variations

as well as doing a few minor tasks: recoloring of lilypads, moving some early-accessible dialogue scripts that revealed more information than the player should know at that point to a later-accessible point, made some changes to the title screen menu to make it look more polished, added symbols next to the friending and health meters of the creatures, fixed a few bugs, etc.



next week i will try to finish up a few more tasks, the major ones have to do with editing the soundscapes a bit more to reduce their file size a bit and to make them more interesting, and to give sound effects to creature actions which do not yet have sound effects associated with them

[TeeGee]

The color of the water in this one. I love it so much .

[RichMakeGame!]

damn, looks fantastic! would love to see a vid of these later screenshot levels

[Christian Knudsen]

Yeah, video please. I'd love to see that wake effect in action.

[PsySal]

Looking awesome as ever. I love the color of that water, too.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

weekly update:

- edited a bunch of soundscapes (not adding any new ones but making the ones that exist better by making them feel fuller)
- gave sound effects to most of the creatures which did not have sound effects to correspond with their actions
- added some fmod effects to various conditions in the game (for instance, adding reverb to darkness areas, and increased the pitch of all the sounds when the player is dashing)
- made the player choose between three difficulty modes at the start of the game and started implementing the differences between the difficulty modes

[s0]

- made the player choose between three difficulty modes at the start of the game and started implementing the differences between the difficulty modes

What are the differences going to be?

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

here are the major ones that i plan to implement (the ones that are starred are already implemented)

- *in easy and normal modes, if you die, you return to the last screen, and if you exit the game and return, you begin where you left off. in hard mode, you return to checkpoints if you die (teleport points, like in sotn), although you keep what you earned when you died (like in zelda, where if you get an item then die, you still have that item, but it moves you back to the start of the dungeon or link's house etc.)

- *in easy mode, if you touch all the lilypads in a room, all the creatures in it are friended; in normal mode, one creature at random is friended, and in hard mode, you just get bonus memory cells. this is important because a lot of rooms require that you friend all the creatures in order for a passage to open up, and if that can be done just by touching all the lilypads in a room (converting them to ledapads) it becomes much easier to get through the game, and is a different or more exploratory experience since you can access many areas much earlier in easy mode through that method, and don't really need to learn how to friend each creature in the "normal" way through your actions, because most of them can be friended through the lilypad method

- *creature health and healing rate are affected by difficulty level (on easier difficulty modes creatures have *more* health and self-healing, since it's bad to kill them in the game, so they're easier to accidentally kill in hard mode)

- creatures become hostile when damaged in normal and hard mode but not in easy mode. in hard mode, all creatures become hostile in an area when one of the creatures is hurt, rather than just the creature you hurt as in normal mode

- the player requires more memory cells to upgrade their ship functions in harder difficulty modes, but only in hard mode can the player upgrade all the way to the 11th upgrade level for each ship function

- some clues / dialogue do not appear in hard mode, so the player has to learn by experimentation. some dialogue / backstory / optional information doesn't appear in easy mode but appears in normal and hard and some doesn't appear in easy or normal but appears in hard

- creatures are harder to friend in higher difficulty modes -- the way this works is that all creatures are modified by a 'difficulty' factory related to their distance from the center of the map (so that creatures near the edges of the map are harder to friend than creatures near the center); this factor is changed with difficulty too, so that a creature on the edge of the map on easy might be as difficult to friend as a creature in the middle of the map on hard; this factor affects different creatures in different ways (for instance, some creatures move faster, some pull the player more strongly, etc.)

[s0]

That sounds like Hard Mode is going to be the "full experience." Maybe you should call the difficulty levels Normal, Easy and Very Easy or something instead to make that more clear. I usually select the normal difficulty when I play a game for the first time because I assume it's the way it's "supposed" to be played. I'd feel a bit cheated if I found out I missed out on some dialog and backstory because I was playing on normal.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

i haven't decided what to call them yet, i'll probably go with some weird system like:

- casual gamers
- modern gamers
- classic gamers

and you miss out on something regardless, since some of the clues (which appear in the form of dialogue) don't appear in hard mode