The Nays Origins Devlog 4: MVP, Ability Puzzles, and Character Art

For this update, I mostly worked on getting the MVP in there, so all characters are moving in scenes that they should be. That part is done, though I’m still working on the MVP of the ability puzzles. And then other than that, I finished all of the character sprite art! So I got a lot done!

I started by troubleshooting the abilities that I was having issues with prior. I just had to update how some of them work. Previously, the abilities for Xalt, Meushi, and Fegg weren’t working because I was trying to use triggers for those. I updated them to use actors instead (which does unfortunately use more of my limits up), but they work now. I may just need to rework some of my puzzles due to this. But they’re all working from Scripts now.

I also started to think about what I wanted to do for dialogue boxes some more. I found this really nice plugin that allows you to type a name that goes above the dialogue box instead, which will save me a lot of space! It also has the option to show portraits, and I thought about adding them for a bit. I feel like that may take up too much space in the dialogue boxes, but I wasn’t sure if it would be worth it to show which character is talking a bit more, so I decided to not go that route. But at least I have the option to think about it if I want to revisit this idea.

And then I decided to figure out how to flash sprites. I wasn’t able to find an option in GB Studio, so I found a workaround where I can just set one of the sprites in the spritesheet to be a white overlaid version with a black outline. So that’s probably what I’ll be doing.

After that, I went through my script and started to finalize some character movements in my game progression. While doing this, I also updated all of the dialogue boxes that I already added to be the new plugin.

I was having a weird bug where text would overwrite itself in dialogue boxes even if there were only 3 lines, and after doing some research, I found out that only happens if you don’t have Color Mode enabled. So I decided to take the leap to turn this into a GBC game so I could expand my limits a bit. I turned everything to the original GB colors for now though just because I’m not ready to add color, so this just means it takes a little longer to compile for the time being, but I think it’ll be worth it.

Then I finally started to draw some character sprites! I started with Rotle and Xalt to get one animal character and one human-like character figured out. And both of them walk in all 4 directions, so I wanted to make sure I had a good grasp on making the more detailed ones first.

Then I tested out a new idea for adding dialogue! I didn’t want to take up too much space on the screen, so I debated with a few ideas. I thought about making a portrait in the text box, but that would mean my text boxes would get pretty long because I already have a lot of text. Then I thought about adding a bubble sprite on the top to indicate they’re talking. But I ultimately decided to go with an animation that looks like they’re opening and closing their mouth. They also face forward to better show who’s currently talking. This way players will be able to match the names with the sprites more easily!

Then I continued to make more character sprites! All of the R Nays are finished (all directions). Adding all of these animations into their sprites is making them take up a lot more resources in my scenes though, so I might need to figure out more efficient ways to conserve on those… Even just 7 of them in the same scene already exceeds what I have available.

So I ended up doing a lot of troubleshooting to split some of these spritesheets out into multiple so that I could just strategically switch between them if a character needs to move or face a different direction. I really only did this for the First Generation Nays since they’re really the only ones who are all in the scene at the same time for flashbacks. This was a little disappointing since I was looking forward to using the Animation States, but there are just some character sprites that won’t work out for.

Then I ran into even more limitations. When creating a really long cutscene, I ran into an error about “object files too large to fit in bank”. It turns out you can only have about ~100 event commands in a single object, so I ended up having to break up my scene into multiple scenes to manage those. It kind of worked out anyways because I needed to do that for a couple of scenes that had too many sprites moving around anyways. It’s kind of awkward that it’ll flash in the middle of the scene, but I tried to make them at natural stopping points to look more intentional.

And so then I also reorganized my Notion a bit to create a new calendar of smaller tasks I need to do. This’ll help me get more on track since I was getting a little lost where I was previously.

And then I made a new database to hold all of the outstanding bugs that I need to fix so I can keep track. I like to write them down as I’m playtesting, so in a database, it makes it easier for me to remember which ones I fixed and which ones are still left to go back and fix.

I finished all of the basic movements in the cutscenes. I still need to finish adding all of the dialogue, but I at least have movements in there where they need to be! I’m sure there will be a few more days of just importing dialogue once I get there. I would show one of the longer ones, but I don’t wanna spoil too much here. So here’s the previous cutscene updated with character sprites:

Then I worked on creating the puzzles! These had some more new limits because I was adding a lot of sprites and actors. Who knew that the sprite limits would be where it’d get me! I thought for sure it’d be actors. But so I ended up modifying a few of my dungeons so they could fit into these limitations, and I also had to edit a few more of the spritesheets to remove states to help account for this.

And then I made a little proof of concept video to show it working on the GBA. You’ll be able to see the Meushi puzzle in action at the end of the video after the intro (on the GBA!).

For next time, my goals are to have all of the puzzles finished and then also most of the backgrounds. I may be a bit busier though so we’ll see how far I can get! But that’s next on the list of what I want to do!