This time I wasn't super focused and kind of worked on a variety of projects. I'm still trying to get back into creating more often. Work has been super hectic recently so I've mostly just had time to work on my own projects over the weekend and not so much on weekdays. I'm slowly trying to motivate myself to get back into it regardless, so that's why I've been kind of all over the place for this CUPdate.
I started out by working on the Link Point system in Compass Nays. This started because I wanted to add how many LPs each character got on the victory screen after a battle, which meant starting this massive mechanic. I was able to set up a ton of loops to actually make these 40+ playable characters fairly manageable. And I set up a system where even if I add up to 60 characters, I won't have to change anything internally, which is great, because this is a huge part of the gameplay system and I'm happy I got it all set up and working so I won't have to touch it unless I have to debug anything down the line.
Then I took a break from my game to get back into writing and working on The Nays. Last weekend my brother and I spent most of our time rewriting the Piko's Concert Eventure. We originally wrote it back in 2009 so it was pretty bad, honestly, since it was one of our first Eventures ever written. But I think we made some good improvements overall this time around! I've been working on figuring out some new ideas revolving around Kali in general, so I was able to sprinkle some of her first moments in there, to connect things better. We still have a few scenes left to rewrite, but we'll come back to it.
So after rewriting a lot of this Eventure, I drew a bunch of storyboards for it. I had already drawn 6 of these when I was brainstorming, but now I went through and drew the rest. It was fun to just be really rough with these and not worry about accuracy or being on model, just to get the first rough pass out on these. It helps me draw a lot more fluid drawings and get the emotions and composition down on the page.
And then also with another month complete, I finished my February digital sketchbook. I started to draw characters each day relating to what I drew the previous day to kind of make it feel like a continuous story. And then towards the end I had the idea to draw characters whose birthdays fall in February. I kinda like these ideas, so planning to carry some of them over into next month as well. I also got some splashes of color in there this time!
So overall I did some game design, some writing, and some drawing. And a little bit on all of my projects! I guess it helps to have projects I can bounce between depending on what I'm more motivated and in the mood for working on.
I'm thinking about getting back into reading Eventures more so I can get all of those proofread and fully into the new Google Docs format. Maybe I'll even be able to draw some storyboards or write some more through this too. Right now I'm still kinda figuring out if I want to focus on something specific, but it's been kinda working by switching between what I'm most in the mood for. This way I'm making progress on a bunch of different projects relating to The Nays, like I wanted to do for this year anyways.
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!
So I ended up skipping making a blog post for the last CUPdate, so this is counting as 10 and 11. I've been taking a break from working on this game for the past month or so, so still not a whole lot to show, but I've got a few updates.
I started out by working on the Mission menu. You can access the Missions screen from the main menu, and I used events to create a menu screen to store all of the quests. You can view different lists of active, complete, or failed lists of missions, and the information about the mission will appear on the right side of the screen. Because all of the mission data is stored in arrays, the order that the missions appear is based on when you accept them in the story, starting with the oldest missions at the top. I learned a lot while doing this and used a lot of arrays, and even some loops. Definitely one of the more coding-intensive eventing that I've done!
Then I made some colored/more finished sprites for some characters from the Prologue. I'm aiming to slightly clean up the rough sprites I made without a ton of extra work to save on time and keep the life in them. Here's Firebreath, Larry, and Capillstation.
Then I made some more sprites, focusing more on creating poses that fit with the characters' personalities. My goal is going to be to turn these into idle animations at the very least, since I know full walk/turnaround animations would take a lot more time. This is Haru, Izumi, Rocko, Celia, Jaboo, Shaw, and JrTr.
And then a few more sprites! These are the orphans: Pigger, Chila, and Frank.
Side Track: Posting Games
And then I strayed off the path of working on Compass Nays a bit as I mentioned above. I've been slowly uploading all of my previous Global Game Jam projects to various websites to get my games out there so more people can play them. They're all playable on itch.io, but we weren't getting any feedback on there and not many people were finding the games. So I made a Game Jolt account a few months ago and have been uploading a game a week on there, and have been getting some people to play my games. I've also been uploading web versions of the games that can be played in the browser, so people that don't want to dedicate time to downloading my games can quickly preview them in their browser. For example, try the Play link for I Wanna Go Home here!
In addition to that, I decided to revamp some of the itch.io pages to include links to play it online or point out the download link. These are through header images, since I think those really help. I'm starting to think that I should spend some more time really fleshing out these pages to look more attractive with imagery and potentially gifs, but that's a project for the future potentially. I also added favicons and further customized some of the backend information on these pages. Check out the Complex.net page here for an example!
I've also been uploading games on RPGMaker.net, and I received my first game review on SOS.WAV! They gave a lot of valuable feedback that I look forward to applying to future games and gave it a 3.5, which is fair for how short it was and all things considered. I've been receiving ~700 page views and 3-5 downloads per game, which is a really high volume in comparison to what I'm used to, so I'm really happy with this site.
Then I decided to search for other popular sites for uploading games. I found out that some people were saying Newgrounds actually has pretty good traffic for games, which makes sense since they only host browser games. I was a bit hesitant to dig up my Newgrounds account because I had some really bad experiences with the site 10 years ago, because the community was really toxic. Back then, I was posting my first Flash animations and early digital art, so I was getting a lot of negative attention to the point where I almost quit art entirely. But I've removed all of that content or unpublished it so that it's all in the past now, and I'm thinking maybe my games will attract less negativity, but I'm not holding my breath. So far I haven't received any feedback, but I did upload SOS.WAV on there.
So while a lot of this isn't directly related to Compass Nays, it is preparing me for whenever I finish the game in many years from now, so that I'll have a better idea which platforms work best, how to apply feedback from previous games, and just practicing uploading to game pages and customizing those in general. So it's all good practice and I'm having fun doing it! I'm planning to have more updates next time though!
So this time around, I don't have a ton to show, but I did do some important things that will help me in the long run, so overall good progress.
With big news to start off, I finally have a title for my game! After hours of brainstorming, I finally came up with Compass Nays as the title. And from there, I made the logo to go along with it.
And to get here, I did a bunch of concepts. I started with a font called A Aha Wow, and my drawing of The Gek for the O, then I sketched my own version to make the letters look waxier. Then I just started to apply a bunch of effects in Photoshop until I got to the final version!
Since I finally have a title, I made all of the social media pages that I'll need. I don't plan to start posting on those until I have final art to show, but I wanted to at least get those set up so I don't have to worry about them down the line when I'll need them. So I made the Website, Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram.
In addition to social media pages, I also made accounts on Game Jolt and RPGMaker.net so I can start to share my progress there. I'm slowly uploading older projects first before I start sharing this game's progress there, but I wanted to be involved in more game dev platforms so I can share my progress with more people!
Then I made an asset list for all of the characters and backgrounds I know I'll need for the entire game, so I can start working on art for some of the later parts when I feel like doing art more than the game design parts. So once I did that, I sketched some characters I forgot about in The Gek Eventure.
Though nothing visually changed, I did improve the mechanics of enemies chasing the player with a VisuStella movement plugin instead of using a bunch of manual events that required parallel events. This way, the performance will be much improved, and there's no longer lag on maps with a lot of enemies! It may not look like a huge update, but a lot of work went into this! Now enemies are alerted when the player enters their range, then they chase the player, and stop when the player exits that range.
So overall, not a lot of updates this time around, and I'll be pretty busy with life things in the weeks to come, so I'm not expecting a huge post next time around either. But I'll try to get what I can do!
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!
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!
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.
We had three weeks to work on CUPdates, so I ended up finishing a lot more than usual. My goal was to just finish the story outline, but without images to accompany the outline, that would've been kinda boring. So I made a lot of concept sketches to figure out locations, character progressions, and more!
So after the last CUPdate, I got some feedback from my friends on the dialogue boxes. These were the results:
I did a few more tests based on the favorite ones, because the winner (4) wasn't quite sticking with me. So I made these ones:
Based on the initial reactions from a couple of my friends, I decided to go with either D or H. So I made some more tests with those two, to test out the longest character name (that I could think of) in the game, as well as a different color style. I think I've finally settled on which one I want (2), but these were the two options:
I also imported all of these art assets into the game and animated the different assets to see what it would look like in-game! I'm still tweaking the timing, and I'm not 100% sure on the actual dialogue box, but I'm progressing with this. I also need to tweak the font because it uses quotes as apostrophes for some reason.
After that, I decided to start thinking about the story more so that I could plan out where to go next. I planned out detailed story beats in the form of a Twine story, so I could listen to the music that plays at the same time as writing out these descriptions. It helped me really start to enjoy this new path that the story is taking.
Then I planned even bigger. I made a Notion page with the main Eventure/Chapters, and broke down some of the big plot points. Then I planned out when each character comes into the story and decided who was to be an optional character, and who was required for the story to progress. I also fully planned out locations and which ones were required vs. optional. Once I had all of that, I figured out a timeline and how much time passes in the story. I also found places where I could include time skips, so that more time does progress.
Because I realize a lot of time goes by in this story, I decided that I want to have costume changes and height changes throughout the story. I realize this is probably a huge wishlist and I'll be lucky if I include 2 different costumes per character, but I think it'd be really cool to include. So I started to put together drawings I have of my characters in their various costumes and determined what point these costumes are worn throughout the story. I haven't finished this obviously, but it's something I plan to work on more at some point.
Then I decided to sketch out a character lineup sheet to show size comparisons between all of the characters that are planned to make an appearance in the prologue. There will probably be a few more characters, but these ones have story moments planned already.
From there, I started to think about my biggest struggle: Backgrounds. I started by going into The Sims and built the Ragger/Braves house so I could have some 3D references of what I want the background to look like. I did this a while back with the Saku house here, and it helped a lot, so I wanted to do that again!
Before getting into drawing the interiors for these bigger house locations, I decided to start with one of the smaller ones: Rocko's cabin. So I tried out a more perspective look, referencing some Mother 3 and Deltarune backgrounds as inspiration.
Something felt off and the characters didn't seem to fit into the backgrounds from their current perspective and I wasn't really happy with how it was looking. So I tried redrawing from more of a front view instead, and I think it works a lot better with the characters, so this is the direction I'll likely take for interiors, going forward.
And then I added colors to that test to try and get a quick sense of if this was working or not. I think for right now this seems like a good direction to go in, since it's more simplified and quicker to draw. Because backgrounds are a struggle for me, I think going more simple with them will really help out a lot in the long run.
I started to draw the other maps that appear throughout the prologue. I started with expanding upon the Mayon Woods some more, so I designed the forested area that Nick takes The Nays to for hiding.
And then I planned out the cave that Capillstation guards and what the portal area looks like.
Then I decided, for now, I'm going to stick with the beginning of the game being the flashback scene where Rocko and Haru fight to become a World Leader in the World Leader Exam, so I designed the room that they start in.
And I also drew the battle platform, based on an old sketch of this area that my brother drew of this location.
I had this idea to create intro screens for every character that you meet in the game. Maybe it'll only be this dramatic for party members, but I do really want some kind of intro to show the characters when they're introduced for the first time, to help keep track of characters.
Then I did a test where I made a sketchy walk cycle of all directions for Gair so that I could get a better feel for the types of angles I want to go for. I also updated the map of North Harbor to be a bit smaller.
And then I decided to get back into the programming side, so I revisited my battle system a bit. I was looking for a plugin that could add health bars above events that are controlled by variables, but I couldn't find any, so I decided to just program my own from scratch with events and JavaScript. Thanks to Eliaquim's help on the RPG Maker forums, I was able to figure out how to get the health bar moving smoothly and being attached to the event on the map!
