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[MegaTiny]

Glad to hear you guys like it. Games often go one way or the other, either time is just a pretty day/night cycle (Skyrim), or it's a constant stress (Majora's Mask). Much like the character development thing I will probably throw in a toggle to turn off quests being affected by time if they don't rely upon it for progress, so if someone prefers to always get the straightforward outcome they can.

It's already coded for debugging so it's just a toggle to add in options, however I will have to see if it's implementable once I start adding content. I don't want to waste huge amounts of time adjusting quests to always work no matter what the time is. We'll see  


UI Revamp

Been working on UI this week, as it's been looking quite shonky. Here's the skills UI to give you an idea of the look:

The skill text is plaaaacehoooooolder.

I have Skills, Quests and Inventory UIs revamped and ready as I just adjusted the layout and images to make them.

Health and ATB UI's have been created from scratch in photoshop however, and I need to re-write the display code for them before implementing.

I'm hoping to have all UI's created and coded by the end of the week, then I can finally move on to adding content to the presently empty scenes.


While I work on that I'll leave you with this lovely gif of the 'Flee' status being applied to the player:

Arrrgggghhhhhh

Cheers for reading  

[Devilkay]

mhm, not so sure about the assets :-/

[MegaTiny]

mhm, not so sure about the assets :-/

Hey thanks for the feedback. Which assets are you referring to, and why don't you like them? Cheers!

[Trixler]

I really like the aesthetics of the game so far. This devlog is also quite interesting to read.

[MegaTiny]

I really like the aesthetics of the game so far. This devlog is also quite interesting to read.

Thanks a lot. I think it's looking quite good, and am happy with the direction it's headed 

I've been beginning the process of moving in with my girlfriend over the past couple of weeks, so progress was briefly halted. But I'm back on track now.


Reactive Health Bar

This weekend I finished up my Adaptive UI and ATB bar. The UI adapts and changes it size/shape/colour depending on two factors:

• How much total health there is (size and shape)
• Which types of health make up this total

As the percentage of health to armour changes the display updates dynamically:

Way more work thatn I thought it would be

New ATB Bar

The ATB bar simply fills up and gives you a massive indicator to let you know you can now act. It also has two extra states:

• Yellow: your ATB charge is being slowed by something
• Res: Your ATB charge is being stopped by something

Here's a little gif of it below. There's been some nasty compression on the ATB charge. You'll have to trust me that it has a nice glow, and not a hideous blue line around it.

Stupid gif compression. Shoo!

Thanks for reading!

[Davi Vasc]

Cool, nice work on the UI!

I was wondering, do you plan on having different party members join the main character? I don't think I've read anything about that yet. Or maybe I did and I forgot :D

[MegaTiny]

Cool, nice work on the UI!

I was wondering, do you plan on having different party members join the main character? I don't think I've read anything about that yet. Or maybe I did and I forgot :D

Hey thanks! Yes party members are a go. The code is in there and running for their combat AI, I just need to implement an 'In the party/Out of the party' system before I show anything. I'm still deciding the best course of action for that right now. I don't want them just trailing around behind you like a conga line, but I also don't want them to merge into you a la ff7."

This may be something I have to settle on in the end due to time restrictions.


UI work continues

I continued to cry in UI as I struggled to make the assigner for this hotbar work properly. But now, finally, you can hover over a skill in the menu and press the Trigger + face button on your controller to assign a skill and have the hotbar display it correctly.

This took ages due to a classic case of 'missed something obvious in the code' and I really should have had this had it done in an evening. My debugging skills have improved some what at least 

This will haunt my dreams

Now that it's working I can polish the look, which is of course the fun part.

Cheers for reading 

[MegaTiny]

Spent my weekend fixing various UI bugs that have been annoying me. This leaves me in a good position to actually start adding more content to the game. I'm starting by focusing on creating a good base of equip-able clothes so that my NPCs can be dressed to impressed. In order to do that I've set up the default female character for animations and equipment:

Y-fronts outfit for male is top of my 'to make' list for equip-able clothes

Now that she's done she can be put into the game, where I will equip her using the vamped up Inventory UI:

The armour stat in the UI does update correctly. All these armours just have their stats set to 0 right now

Cheers for reading! 

[Paszq]

It looks great. Is there some kind of watercolor filter / post-processing on the characters? Because they match the backgrounds like they belong to them!

[MegaTiny]

It looks great. Is there some kind of watercolor filter / post-processing on the characters? Because they match the backgrounds like they belong to them!

Hey thanks! Yeah it has an oil paint camera filter that I found on the asset store. It cost almost nothing and has been absolute life saver. There's also some Unity post processing in every scene to hide all the seams

All assets are sharing an adjusted version of the same shader too, to ensure continuity and no shiny weirdness.

[Davi Vasc]

Hey thanks! Yes party members are a go. The code is in there and running for their combat AI, I just need to implement an 'In the party/Out of the party' system before I show anything. I'm still deciding the best course of action for that right now. I don't want them just trailing around behind you like a conga line, but I also don't want them to merge into you a la ff7."

This may be something I have to settle on in the end due to time restrictions.

Again, bringing up Silver, I can't think of a game that dealt with the conga line issue better. Check this out: https://youtu.be/GHzUpDZKQ8Q?t=871

Starting from 14:31 you can see how the party moves organically and somewhat independently from each other, no goofy conga line. Not sure if that is something you can/want replicate but it might give you some ideas

[MegaTiny]

Again, bringing up Silver...

That's brilliant. I can't believe I didn't remember that from Silver. It's like a simpler version of FF15's pretty incredible party AI. I can actually think of a really easy way to do that too with a little work on my existing system too.

Thanks a lot  

[MegaTiny]

Hello everyone. I had to go in for a rather unexpected surgery last Monday, so I've been out of action. All is fine now and am back on the game. Been working on getting female clothing and armour options into the game (which involved fixing a bit of code/rejigging models that I'd been being lazy about).

Anyhoo proper update soon, but here's a lady wearing some lovely armour after being tragically defeated in battle by yours truly:

I'm sure she's fine. She'll pop right back up in a minute.

[MegaTiny]

I have very much enjoyed the resurgence of Infinity Engine style games that have been coming out lately, but one thing continues to truly annoy me about them: everyone stands perfectly still while they talk.

Couple with the voice overs you may as well be playing visual novel most of the time for all the 3D models really add to the scene.

To this end all my characters have at least three talking animations. They don't take long to do and are shared across creature types (so all humans share the same ones for example).

Here's one for when a gobbo gets excited about what they're saying:

"Gob gob gob" - The gobbo, 2018

I can trigger them by simply selecting from a drop-down in the editor when writing conversations. And if the character is missing the animation, then they simply do their base talk animation (or nothing at all, if they haven't even got that).

Not much more to talk about right now. so thanks for reading!

[MegaTiny]

Hobbo (what big gobbos are called in the game) armour and weapon equips are now working. To celebrate I had a quick scrap with them.

MLG gamer right here, as you can see. Though I am cheating a bit with the immediately refilling ATB gauge...

Ignore the health bar weirdness at the end after I run out of armour, I accidentally left a second health bar UI below the first one before I ran the game!

[feelblitz]

This game is showing some super steady progress, nice to see you maintaining and improving on your goals! I'm picking up some Final Fantasy Tactics vibes in the world setting, which is great to see. So many games tend to focus more on the combat of that game series, and not on the lore and thematic presentation of rural period life under monarchies. Your environments and cinematic details hint at something of a similar nature, if I'm not mistaken.

Out of curiosity, are you planning on doing the majority of art and programming for the game up until competition? I've seen a couple of solo devs make a go at doing everything themselves, which is absurdly impressive, yet I imagine incredibly taxing at the same time. I'd also be worried about how much art is in this game, as it probably packs a decent sized asset list, with the customization, multiple different characters, weapons, and environment biomes.

Then again, I have no idea how far you plan to go with this project in terms of length and focus. Though its a bit hypocritical of me to say as a simple bystander, I think having a full feature story would turn a project like this from good to amazing, though that could be said about any game now that I think about it. Either way, best of luck on the endeavor. Should you ever need any 3D modeling or texturing work done, I'd be more than happy to lend a hand for free.

[MegaTiny]

Thanks a lot for the kind words feelblitz!

Out of curiosity, are you planning on doing the majority of art and programming for the game up until competition? I've seen a couple of solo devs make a go at doing everything themselves, which is absurdly impressive, yet I imagine incredibly taxing at the same time. I'd also be worried about how much art is in this game, as it probably packs a decent sized asset list, with the customization, multiple different characters, weapons, and environment biomes.

Well the good news is that I've been slaving away at the coding building blocks first and foremost. So everything from AI to dialogue to quest and relationship trackers are already good to go. This is a well learned lesson from my last attempt to make a game of this scope, where everything fell apart when I dived into art first.

Regarding the art though, I'm pretty open about heavily using assets from the store and CC Attribution sources. I am very particular about animations however, as I feel they bring most of a character's life to the fore, and 90% of these are done by myself.

The only thing I'm fully doing myself is the human armour, and you are not wrong in saying that it's an absolute chore. So I'm purposefully restricting myself. I have a list of armours to do and I'm not going past it for love nor money (well, maybe money).

The game is moving in a sensible direction and sticking to achievable goals right now. I have a personal deadline to start showing it off properly next April, which I am currently well on track to achieve  

Should you ever need any 3D modeling or texturing work done, I'd be more than happy to lend a hand for free.

That's really, really kind of you. And I may take you up on it in the future if you still find yourself available. For the time being I have more than enough in the way of assets to work with.


For the benefit of anyone else that clicked on this post looking for an actual update, here's a Mobbo (a little Gobbo) showing off his archery talents:

Cranking your ear up is very important to shot power, as any good Mobbo knows

Cheers!  

[MegaTiny]

I've mostly been adding content these past few weeks, but now I'm diving back into coding. I've fixed my quest trackers to work better with the dialogue systems, and am about to deep dive into integrating combat in the same way.

In the meantime, here's the player deciding that discretion is the better part of valour after encountering a group of mobbos and hobbos (please excuse the weird compression, I'm still absolutely crap at making gifs)

The result of a failed sneak attempt. You can also choose to fight or surrender in this scene.

Enjoy your weekends, and good luck if you're working on a project!

[MegaTiny]

Implementing new enemies, which means getting rid of placeholder animations. Here's the lizard enemy's new bite attack mid-chomp. This animation key only holds for two frames but makes the whole thing crunchy.

Om nom nom!

Hopefully have a proper update for you lot on Christmas Eve 

[MegaTiny]

My wild promise of a proper update makes an appearance once more. Soon I promise! Just a couple of shots from Cynthia's Athenaeum today. This is the large dungeon area I'm currently building:

The service in this place is hauntingly bad

Time for a quick game of 'The floor is skin melting goop'

Cheers for reading