CUPdate 8: Backgrounds, Script Progress, Character Sketches, Random Battles, and Menu Prototyping

I ended up doing a lot of smaller tasks for this CUPdate, but made a lot of progress overall!

I started off this CUPdate by working more on backgrounds! For the interiors, I've decided to draw all of the rooms on the same map. This means that characters need to be able to walk under the walls for the doorways. To do this efficiently, I needed to figure out a way to create events that characters can walk under, while still lining up correctly with the parallax background. Eventually, I decided to recreate the RPG Maker grid in Photoshop, so I can see how events line up on the grid, and where to place them. This allows me to have very precise placements. It also means that each background needs to be divisible by 48 so that they fit perfectly on the grid. With those calculations down, my doorways are a lot more believable!

From there, I drew more backgrounds. I decided to block out a lot of the areas that you can't explore to save on time of drawing locked rooms that don't have to do with the story progression, for the time being. So I finally drew the second floor of the Ragger/Braves house.

I imported the beginning of my script into Ink, and then into my game, to test out importing Ink dialogue with in-game events, and it worked out really well! Here's the first clip (obviously still with placeholder faces and not final art):

Then I went through and added expressions and split up the scenes for everything that I've written from the prologue so far. This was a good way to proofread what I had written as well, and update a few lines as well.

I decided to plan ahead and start drawing character sketches of the next Eventure. I got a little carried away and drew more characters than I thought I was going to include in the game, so we'll see how many of these end up in the actual game, but I do like the idea of having a bunch of background characters, even if they don't end up doing a lot.

And then I designed the monsters that The Nays run into during the prologue in Mayon Woods. I'm aiming for two that are native to the Mayon Woods and two that come from other Worlds. After asking around, I made some decisions based on the most popular voted ones. 1 and 6 will be native to Mayon Woods, and then 7, 8, and 13 are going to be the other World ones (potentially one outside of the cave and the other two inside of the cave):

Then I worked in the game some more. I added a picture file for the name of the map that displays when you're on the map. 

After that, I worked on the Mayon Woods map a bit more. It's still a rough layout, but I made some collisions and filled in the map with trees so you can walk around it more. And I set up regions for where the different types of monsters show up.

Using some plugins and events, I set up enemies to spawn in specific regions, then once they're within a certain distance, they chase after the player. I'm still working on if there's a way to make them stop chasing once you've outrun them, but for now, that'll do. Also the whole chase event does end up making the game lag a bit, so I might need to find ways to optimize that better, since right now a lot of parallel process events are running at once to accomplish this.

Then I spent some time prototyping the menu screens to get the general progression for how I want the menus to work. Some are still super rough sketches, while others are using VisuStella MZ plugins. But I put the rough prototype together to help with planning in Adobe XD. I still need to update the Links and Party screens to have back buttons in the top-right instead of the top-left, and then I need to plan out what I want the Journal to look like.

My biggest accomplishments for the VisuStella MZ plugins were customizing the location and Eventure on the Save screen (as well as adding the BG image) and creating a custom variable on the Options screen that changes the Input Button types (also one for the Difficulty of the game). I also worked on the main menu screen a bit to try and match this prototype more closely, but it still needs some work.

And lastly, I tried really hard to think of a name for this game, but nothing is popping out to me just yet... so I might need to brainstorm a bit more. I might end up just going with a slight variation of my WIP title, which is now "Nay Recruits", since the rest don't sound right. But I'm not sure yet. I'll have to think about it some more.

So overall, a lot of progress this time, and I'm slowly picking away at different areas. Thanks for reading!