CUPdate 7: In-Depth Story Outline, Game Progression, & Backgrounds

So I don't have a lot to show this time, but that's because I've been working a ton on the story and overall game progression ideas!

I read through/at least skimmed and wrote notes about, the first 100ish Eventures that I've written for The Nays (which, for the whole story at least, comes out to over 1 million words in total—it was at around 1,094,365 words in February of this year). 

So I basically read everything and really in-depth figured out what I wanted to keep and what I could cut or mark as optional. When I wrote my first story outline for this game, it was based on memory and trying to simplify and cut as much as possible. As I progress through development, I am starting to feel like I wanna bring back as many of my favorite moments as I can, so I'm trying to figure out ways to stay true to the original story with it still being a reasonable length that I can finish in my lifetime. There was a lot of rearranging that happened, and it was pretty challenging to figure out how to simplify, but I spent the majority of my time creating this document that lays out main story points after reading them, and how to make those work in a game format (and apply to this whole new game outline!).

And after all of that, I made a very difficult decision to cut most of what I worked on for this week and stick closer to the structure of my original plan. It's hard because I want to keep so many of those moments, but I decided that in order to make this shorter, I have to keep those cuts. I did bring back a few of my favorite scenes because I think they would fit really well with things, but overall, I did make the ultimate decision to cut a lot of this work so that I can keep the original story separate from this game. It'll still be there and if I ever finish writing it, it'll be a story with story beat drawings, or maybe even a comic, who knows! But what I do know is that it's a different project than this game. So in the end, I did end up making some changes to some of the structure, like moving Mr Dude World to later in the story and to be more of its own arc, because that's when most of the time travel stuff starts to happen.

And earlier on, I started to plan out the overall game progression and what the game loop would be. So in a very general sense, it will likely be that there's an introduction to the location, then the player has the option to go on missions, play games/do activities, or social hangout events with the characters. From there, I started to boil it down to what game mechanics will be needed. And I started to break down which tutorials I'll need to create so the player can understand how to play through each of these. I started to split them up by Eventure so the player won't be bombarded with tutorials at any given time, since I know that's something that usually overwhelms me in games.

Then once I had a more solid order, I started to plan out all of the missions. I'm sure there will be more that are less involved and not really as story-related, but these are all of the optional and required ones that I thought up so far.

And along the lines of making more Notion pages, I made one for the "Nays Hangouts", which are basically the social events that happen. I tried to set aside one per Nay per Eventure, some are combined, and then some I know I'll come up with later on. Generally, I'm planning for these to either be flashbacks to flesh out their pasts, or little social events that happen between characters in the present day. These were just ones I knew I wanted to show and had ideas about right now. I still need to go back and read some Eventures that I've already written and add those flashbacks and story moments in too. And I'm sure I'll come up with a lot of them, especially for the main characters, as time progresses.

Another thing on the writing side is that I ended up spending some time learning Google Scripts for Google Docs. So now my conversion from mIRC logs to Google Docs to Ink scripts to RPG Maker MZ message boxes can go much more quickly! Still working on some of the details to make it work even easier, but it's in a good spot for now.

But other than writing, I did do a little bit of drawing and game design, but not a lot. I started this CUPdate off by continuing to draw the interior maps and place them in the game, so I could start to populate this World. The only one I did for this CUPdate was the Braves/Ragger house, which was quite a challenge since it's a big place. Luckily I had references that I made in The Sims to make this go a bit more smoothly.

I made some small updates to my dialogue test, including a new text box (to make the lines cleaner) and text color for when characters are thinking. I also added a custom placeholder animation for the continue button to replace the default arrow at the bottom of the box. And some small updates like the top of the name box shape and resizing character faces for this test. Overall small tweaks, but I think they'll help enhance the look!

I also tested out a few different thought bubble styles initially, based on feedback from last time. I sneaked in some feedback early on from my friends and we all decided that the D one below looks best, and it turns out that's one of the easier ones to implement, so I went with that style.

So again, not a lot to show, but I am making major progress on my story, and it's starting to feel much more involved, which is a plus! I'm planning to figure all of that out to really help me figure out more game mechanics and ways to turn my story into a game, so stay tuned for more visual progress next time!

CUPdates 6: Dialogue, Battle System, and Background Locations

Wow, these weeks really flew right by! I realize that one extra week to CUPdate really makes a difference, since this time I don't have quite as much to show. But that's due to a lot of it being writing and programming.

So first, I spent an entire Sunday morning/afternoon writing a huge portion of my prologue in the form of an Eventure! I skipped ahead to the Compass World parts because I had more ideas on how I wanted to write that, so I wrote that in its entirety and converted it to a Google Doc, from the original .log file that mIRC creates. So far that translates to 17 pages in Google Docs, which is a pretty decent amount. Based on how some other Eventures translate over, they're usually around 30-40 pages at least, so considering this is only about half or less, it seems that each "chapter" or "eventure" of the game will be roughly the same, if I base that assumption off of the prologue so far.

I ended up spending a lot of time trying to optimize my code so I didn't need to use so many event commands for a single line of dialogue, because I realized this could end up looking pretty messy down the line when I start to import dialogue into RPG Maker. So I cleaned it up a bit by making my own text codes in the VisuStellaMZ Message Core plugin, and Eliaquim made a plugin for me to help manage this even more! It's finally getting to a reasonable length, though I'm still working to make it compatible with the Ink Integration plugin that theartofme created.

From here, I was able to start experimenting with how I want to import text into RPG Maker. I'm planning to use the Ink Integration plugin, because it'll go a lot faster to just convert the Eventure formatting into Ink formatting, rather than copying each line into individual message boxes. I remember that was always my least favorite part of turning stories into games, was that long process. So I'm aiming to cut down on dreading the dialogue porting into the game itself. I had a few bumps along the way, but I did get this dialogue system pretty solidified! So first I did a test where some of the transitions were still missing:

Oh and as you may have noticed from the video above, I exported all of my existing character sketches out as charsets so that I can put those placeholders into the game as actual events, instead of just being on the background layer. I found this program that made exporting these quick tests a lot quicker for when I only have one direction sketched out.

 

Luckily there were some updates to the Ink plugin that now allow me to optimize my code even more! Everything can be imported straight from Ink into RPG Maker, and character variables and expressions are all set up in Ink.

After that, I decided to play around with some dialogue effects, so I can play little animations over the text to further spice up the dialogue a bit more! I added a sighing effect around 25 seconds into this video:

And then I made a lot more progress on my battle system! I re-ordered the sprites to be diagonal and added a new UI to fit with this style, just like I had initially sketched out. Also, thanks to Eliaquim's help, I was able to get variable bars fully working through event code, and picture files that dynamically change based on a variable. From there, I made some of my code more efficient so it's easier to edit it all at once, like the move routes that are controlled by variables and common events.

Then I finally decided to work on some art for the past few days. I started by making some layout sketches for The Link Between Worlds, based on the maps that my brother made for our GGJ project back in 2019. I loved how those looked, and wanted to carry over that design here a bit as well!

Then I started to lay out the maps I made for the interiors. I made the Saku house and Ragger/Braves house in The Sims a while back, so I started with the Saku house! Having The Sims reference for the floor plan was super useful and I actually kind of ended up enjoying drawing a background in the end, which is super rare! I usually struggle and don't enjoy backgrounds, so I'm glad I'm starting to figure them out with references. I imported the background into RPG Maker and recorded Gair exploring it.

I also already made The Gek's World entirely in RPG Maker MV back in 2018. Back when I made The Gek's World map, I made each area be its own map, but I'm planning to create one massive map to explore for each floor in this version instead. So I started by taking the floor plan I had, and reconstructing each map into where it would roughly be, so I can further figure out how I want this to look. Next time, I'm planning to actually draw this all out and further reconstruct it, so it'll be ready for the next part of the game.

I realized while I was writing the prologue that there were a few characters I forgot to draw in my initial character line-up, so I doodled a few more of them.

And lastly, as a bit of a sidetrack, I uploaded all of my previous progress videos to YouTube so that I didn't have to rely on various social media embeds anymore. You can view that playlist here! And I'll be uploading there going forward.