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[alexandersshen]

The shots look beautiful. 

I agree with some of the others in which the most important part is that the story is engaging, not trying to shoehorn in x amount of gameplay time.  It's like when Paper Mario 2 you have to keep backtracking through the game to progress further... just to add more gameplay time. Something about that just rubs me the wrong way.

In any case, looks very nice.  Please let us know when a demo is available!

[StephenAnthony]

It'll be a long time before a demo is ready... *mutters about ambitious RPG projects*... But thanks for the compliments!

I agree with tacking on gameplay just so you can brag about play time. I won't be doing that, and I'm just guessing total game time will be nearing 50 hours. There's a lot of walking, but we're going to add in a fast travel system similar to Oblivion (only you have to be in a safe zone such as a town or camp to travel). Once you get control of your airship, you'll be able to travel across continents without needing to travel between ports... So, hopefully that'll be a nice balance of walking around and being able to move quickly.

[Greg Game Man]

woah, all the art looks incredible, will look great once its moving...

i especially like the desert area, because there arent so many crazy colours, its easier to focus so i think it works better...

..my only criticism, is that the edges of the dirt could be a bit more jagged, and not so straight, and im some places its visible where youve joined tiles, like the colour changes a bit, so sort that out i guess..

i dunno if its just me, but i think the characters are too stiff, they stand very straight and are symetrical mostly, i think they look too vertical or something haha. looks amazing though and thats a ridiculous amount of gameplay to aim for!

[Lachie Dazdarian]

The pixel art is really awesome by my opinion. I wish I had such an artist under my belt.

[StephenAnthony]

Where do you see dirt that should be more jagged..? If you mean the road in the middle screenshot, we're not using that any longer... If you mean the sides of the cliff, they're so uniform because cliff tiles are difficult to make. They have to tile correctly in so many directions, but still look nice, so they're kind of complex... If that's not what you meant, I'm not entirely sure where you're talking about.

As for the characters being stiff and rigid, we haven't done it yet, but I'd like for  most of them to have little poses they do when standing still, like shifting their weight from side to side, blinking and their hair blowing in the wind. However, that can be kind of complicated with all the other poses, so I may just leave it.

[Cray]

Your screenshots are some of the best I've seen with Rpg Maker so far. You've also managed to make that ugly canopy tile look good for once! You should consider going commercial if you haven't already, there's a small but receptive market towards them - enough that even a "90% RTP" game has a chance.

The artist has improved quite a bit. Her art is both better looking in general & less distracting from important objects.

I remember from RM community games that the lighting effects (your sunrays) look nice in screenshots, but were horribly static during gameplay shown over the area. Have you made yours animated somehow?

[Melly]

I can see quite a bit of improvement in between the shots, especially in the use of colors.

[StephenAnthony]

We've tried to animate the light beams, but it doesn't come across very well and I'm not entirely sure how to get it done. Programming it is easy, but the actual images required for that, we just can't get it to look right. It's something I'd love to figure out how to do correctly, since I think the light beams add a lot to what's supposed to feel like a fairy world... At least RMXP supports alpha, so they look much better than previous versions you might have seen.

As for going commercial, we are, actually... We've pretty much completely rewritten a lot of RMXP's base code and we're really only using the engine's default map making stuff. If RPG Maker does nothing else well (and you could argue it doesn't =P), it's really great for making complicated and detailed maps easily, which will be one of the bigger draws to play the game. I think.

[William Broom]

No wonder it's a desert if they let all their water just pour out through holes in the ground.

[Cray]

As for going commercial, we are, actually

Great choice!

We're going to be competition then, but targeting different types of players. Yours should sell well if the early game is as polished as those screenshots, and I'll be sure to carry it as an affiliate if you get on reflexive

We've tried to animate the light beams, but it doesn't come across very well and I'm not entirely sure how to get it done

Yeah.

I guess you'd have to look into how people using other engines do their lighting effects.

Fun fact about RMXP: Just waving the mouse over the window can drop a game's FPS in half. I tried API'ing around that by turning off the cursor, but it seems unfixable due to the horrible built-in Graphics code they have

If you need any help with optimizing the engine, feel free to send me a PM. Good luck with it! (And be sure to protect vs. de-encrypting if you haven't worked on that yet - someone released a tool for it)

[StephenAnthony]

Thanks for the offer! Our programmer actually recoded a huge amount of RMXP's default stuff... You're right, it's absolutely terrible. But we've optimized it to the point that, while the default framerate still isn't great, we can pretty much do whatever we want without slowing it down...

Oh, and we've changed the battle system to something more like Secret of Mana (instead of Final Fantasy). In doing so, we've pretty much dropped all the game's default code...

As for protection the encryption, thanks for mentioning that. I hadn't thought of that (we just redid the save game files and encrypted those, but not the whole thing...) Cray, I'd be happy to have you look at the code and I really appreciate the offer... but I'd hate to pester you with something I'm ... fairly certain we have under control.

This won't mean anything to anyone who isn't familiar with RMXP, but here...

www.arafell.com/casting.avi

This is a little video showing all the events we can have on screen without slowing down the framerate. Something that most other engines could do easily without messing with it, but we had to work hard to get RMXP to do this. =P

(Those are almost entirely temporary graphics, by the way. It's a really early shot.)

[MekanikDestructiwKommando]

Yeah yeah, the characters look "a little weird".
But the art is great!

[Annabelle Kennedy]

The artist is getting loads better, im really liking the tilesets here.

I think the characters could use a bit of structure, as they appear a little flat,
but the scenery is beautiful.

anyways this is looking great.