CUPdate 19: Back to Game Dev

After participating in the Global Game Jam, it inspired me to dive back into game development! Also with the RPG Maker Festival going on last week, it's really gotten me in the mood for making games in it. I've been slowly getting back into things, but also taking it slow to get back into the swing of everything.

To start, I decided to take a look at everything I planned out for Compass Nays since it's been a few months since I last worked on this game. I decided to start to plan out what needs to get done in a Notion page. Through this, I prioritized tasks, sorted them by focus, and really tried to figure out the MVP for this game.

After that, my brother and I virtually met up on a Saturday to revisit our GGJ project. We looked at all of the feedback we received on the project and made some fixes to the game so it's easier to play. We also finished some of the art that was still in progress and added a few new dialogue lines to connect the story better. You can download the updated version on itch.io here!

I took a break from my personal projects on weekdays for a couple of weeks to relax and play some video games because it's been awhile since I did that. So when I came back to working on projects over the weekend, I started by updating some of my game dev sites with the updates we made to Prisoners of Time Fabric. I also made a video playthrough of the game, just like I've done with previous years.

After this year's GGJ experience, I learned a lot and started to reflect on some of what I wanted to apply to my Compass Nays game and future games. One of the things I realized from some feedback and just playing our game myself was that I haven't actually been doing parallax mapping in an efficient way. I've been parallax mapping my RPG Maker games for about 8 years at this point and I never really researched how to do it and mostly just made up my own way. Previously I had been just leaving everything on one layer and occasionally using events for anything that the player could go behind, but sometimes that would allow the player to be able to walk over something if there were some parts that should be behind and some parts that should be above the player in the same tile, which made some awkward collisions. I've been using the Cyclone-Maps plugin for all of my MZ games but never properly researched how to use it to its full potential until now. So I finally looked into it a bit and figured out how to properly layer my maps like you'll see in the video below!

Then I went back to work on the battle system for Compass Nays. I streamlined the code a bit more so it could be universal for different groups of enemies and then I expanded upon that to make sure it works with a different number of enemies as well. I updated some plugins which meant revising a lot of my picture code, which took some time. Luckily I had some help from Eliaquim and Roninator2 on the forums to fix some of the plugin bugs I was experiencing. And it was also good to know that it wasn't an error on my end and really was errors within the plugins themselves.

But then I put in some placeholder art for the game over and victory screens and started to flesh those out more than just rough text boxes. I made some custom experience bars and placed the character names on the screen based on who's on your team. Next I'm planning to add images of them, text if they leveled up, and stats on how many Link points they receive from it.

And because of that, I took a side trip to start working on the Link system. I have 43 playable characters planned, so I'm making use of arrays to hold tons of values that I need for this system. So far I just set up those arrays and made sure that data was being properly stored in there. Next I need to actually figure out the system for updating these, keeping track of them, and also determining how to add points to those and keep them balanced.

Then I decided to actually start putting together more of a formal Game Design Document on Notion. I've had a lot of Notion pages and notes in various places, but this is now a way for me to bring all of those links together and organize them a little better. It's still pretty massive and there's a lot of filling in to do. I want it to be more custom than just feeling very template-y, but it'll be a good working document to go to for now.

So not a ton of visual progress this time around, but a lot of behind the scenes progress and I'm back into development on Compass Nays, so I'd say that's a big accomplishment in itself since it's been months since I last worked on it prior to this!