So, now the project is coming to a close. It feels a little bit sad for me, as it’s also my last year of college. Overall, I thought that I could have done so much better than I did, but given the issues that I had, such as having to restart about half way through the project, I think I managed reasonably well. There are so many things that I would have loved to do and add, but with the time constraints, it would have proved to be impractical.
One thing that I have learned from this project is to be more realistic in my goals and approaches; I’m not a “AAA” game studio. I’m just one person, so I shouldn’t expect to be able to make something bordering on professional right off the bat. I need to work towards it slowly, rather than trying to rush towards it. I guess the expression would be “don’t run before you can walk”.
At some point, I am going to have to try and experiment with more complex software and techniques. Although RPG Maker MV is fine, and I love it dearly, I need to become familiar with software like Unity or Unreal at some point. Also, I need to iron out what I want to make beforehand. I spent most of the early part of the project faffing around and not focusing on making progress. Lesson learned I guess.
One thing that I felt went well was my Photoshop skills. They’ve really come on well because of this project. I never had much experience with it, and now I’m able to create and modify images to a moderately good standard.
If I had to sum up this project in one sentence: “I should have done better” would be an accurate summary. I really need to up my game if I want to do well at University next year.
Here’s a link to the final export of my project (available on PC, Mac, and Linux):
So I’ve gotten some feedback from my presentation. Personally, I thought it went quite well, although about half of the audience were either asleep or distracted before I even started presenting. I went through all of the feedback, and tallied it below:
Now I know that the feedback sheets didn’t use the exact wording, but I tallied based on the meaning of what was written. Some of the feedback I’m fine with, but some was a little bit unfair or unusual. One in particular got me; it said that I didn’t show any 16-bit art in my presentation. I loaded my custom character sprites into my presentation, so I’m not entirely sure what they’re on about. This may have been due to the length of my presentation, as I also noticed that some people were lost or distracted around half-way through.
The audience noted that I had good presentation, communication, and body language skills as well as an interesting concept and content, however it came across as quite negative. Some people even said that my project presentation was “over-detailed”. To an extent, I can agree with this. I tried not to put too much into the presentation, and was constantly cutting bits out; maybe I should have cut some more out, or rebalanced what I had? The other thing that would have helped is if I had timed my presentation beforehand.
So I’ve finally finished writing up my project plan! I couldn’t share the finished version with you until now, as I had to add bits like the bibliography to it. But anyway, here it is:
Dnd.wizards.com. (2019). D&D Official Homepage | Dungeons & Dragons. [online] Available at: https://dnd.wizards.com/ [Accessed 5 Apr. 2019].
HBO. (2019). Game of Thrones – Official Website for the HBO Series – HBO.com. [online] Available at: https://www.hbo.com/game-of-thrones [Accessed 11 Apr. 2019].
Gaming,
D. (2017). First Impressions MV – Asylum Secret Of Caledria – Very Well
Done – Hard to even find any flaws. [online] YouTube. Available at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6SDEeefpZM&t=28s [Accessed 21 Mar. 2019].
Museum of Witchcraft and Magic. (2019). Home – Museum of Witchcraft
and Magic. [online]
Available at: https://museumofwitchcraftandmagic.co.uk/ [Accessed 20 Mar. 2019].
As this project winds to a close, I thought now would be a good time to go back through the entire project, and bring it all together with what I’ve done.
Looking back, my initial proposal was incredily non-specific, lacking any mention of narrative or specific gameplay features. It basically said “I’m making a JRPG”. Whilst that’s not bad in-and-of itself, it doesn’t really do anything to anchor down what I’m ACTUALLY making. JRPG is quite a broad genre, and although I narrowed it down by using the words Final Fantasy, that still doesn’t do much to describe my project.
Ah, the project plan. That didn’t go as expected. It started out fine, but by the end of week 3, it had pretty much gone straight out of the window. the one thing that killed was the story framework. It took me so long to come up with one that it ate most of the time that I’d allocated elsewhere, knocking back my progress until eventually, it became useless. To be fair though; I’ve never been good at sticking to plans. Ever. I guess it’s just something I’m gonna have to learn eventually.
I looked at all of this, and still nothing was quite leaping out at me. It was if my head just didn’t wanna know. I managed to filter some of this into my gameplay, such as the elemental magic of Golden Sun, and some of the aspects of Jeanné d’Arc. All in all though, it seemed like I was going nowhere. Then suddenly I remembered a project that I’d made a few years ago, which I’d left on a bit of a cliffhanger. I thought I could build on that, and wrote about it here: https://sldesignfmp.game.blog/2019/04/03/story-outline-potential-inspiration-and-other-ideas/
Neither of these really came to anything, but it was interesting to explore none-the-less. I mean, if I had the time, I probably would have used a Tactical Battle System, and the music wasn’t all in vain either. It made me appreciate the importance of audio in gaming.
Luckily for me, as the project continued, I finally managed to get the core aspects of my project sorted out:
I managed to FINALLY get the story ironed out, at least at a basic level. The gameplay started to come together. It was all looking so promising. And it was.
Gradually, I managed to start putting together a very basic construct of my game, as I’d managed to get hold of some playtesters. But that turned out to be not worth that much. I sent it around, and I got one response. ONE RESPONSE!!! With only one response, it wasn’t really worth anything. You see, when doing primary research, you need a decent sample size otherwise the research is generally considered invalid. It’s just how it works.
With three weeks to go, I started production, as I’ve recorded here:
There’s quite a lot here, and I eventually managed to produce a technical demonstration of what I was hoping would be at least a full demo. I suppose that I should have managed my time better.
Overall, I feel as if I could have done SO MUCH BETTER. I haven’t really been on it as much as I should have been with this entire project. Maybe next time I do anything like this, I should come up with some kind of Game Design Document to work from. Even if it’s just two or three pages on a word document, I honestly think it would have helped.
I’m probably my own worst critic though. I’ll let you make up your own minds about how I’ve done. So there we have it. One project.
As the project winds to a close, I’m going to take a look back at the issues I had during the design and production.
I was unsure of what style of game I wanted to make;
This first one has haunted me throughout the entire project. Right from the start, although I knew that I wanted to create a JRPG, I didn’t know anything else about it. What was it going to look like? What was I going to use? These were things I really needed to know, and I didn’t really have much of an idea of any of it.
I was unsure of what my story was going to be;
This one has also been a total pain to contend with for the entire project. Normally, I’m quite good at coming up with story ideas, but right when I needed them, my mind went blank. It took me several weeks to come up with something, by which time I needed to be in production. That threw off my original plan more than anything else.
I wasn’t sure what gameplay elements I wanted to use;
This one feeds off of the story issues, as without the story, how could I plan for what features I wanted to add? Often, the story and the gameplay go hand-in-hand, so without one, the other tends to suffer. This took way too much time to sort out, which cost me in the long run.
I couldn’t visit real-world locations;
This one killed off my original project plan. Due to time and money constraints, I couldn’t visit any of the historical locations that I wanted to visit in order to draw inspiration from them. This led to the original plan being scrapped, as it hinged on this part of pre-production.
I couldn’t work consistently;
Now I know everyone has good days and bad days, but during the project (for mostly personal reasons), I had way too many bad days. This had a massive knock-on effect on my work and concentration. I just didn’t feel motivated enough to do anything, but at the same time, I wanted to do the project. It was a bit of a catch-22, and it drove me insane! Towards the end of the project, the personal issues that were causing me hassle were resolved, but by then, the damage had been done.
I was completely disorganised;
For over half of the project, I was in complete disarray. I kept drifting around from one thing to the next, with very limited direction. After a while, I managed to get my act together, but it did cause some damage to my production schedule.
So when it came to the mapping for my Town’s shops, I remembered a game that I played not that long ago; Bravely Default. In that game, instead of having the shops as interior maps, it uses a menu-based system instead. This cuts down on the amount of maps required, as well as not stuffing the game with unneeded filler content and NPC’s.
So that’s what I’ve done. When you enter a shop, it will still tranport you to a new map, but this map is in fact blank, with but a single autorun-type event on it. The autorun will display a bust image of a character, with a menu. The menu has two commands; shop and exit. Selecting shop will bring up additional choice boxes, asking what type of item you’d like to buy. Exiting the shop, or by selecting exit will automatically transport the player back outside the shop.
As each shop only uses a single event, it also keeps the processing requirements down, meaning that it won’t lag the game out.
Another topic I’d like to talk about is the exported version. RMMV has the ability to export for a variety of systems, so i’m going to take advantage of that fact. I’m planning on exporting for Windows and Mac’s at the very least, and I may add Linux compatibility if I have time.
The other thing that RMMV’s deployer (which builds the game) can do is encrypt image and audio files, protecting them against piracy. This comes in super-handy when using pre-made or licenced material, as it prevents unauthorised useage of the assets.
I’m not sure how easy the encryption is to circumvent, but I’ve never heard of anyone hacking an RM game, so I doubt it’ll be an issue.
Anyway, I’ll be back soon with some more content, so I’ll see you later!
I’ve finally implemented the custom sprites that I made the other day. They look fine, but I think the undershadow may need a bit of realignment. That’s just me nitpicking though.
I’ve also finished the mapping of the Town’s Exterior!:
Town
The central courtyard area surrounded by water may look a bit wierd. That’s because I’ve added some events to it to make it a central point. Only problem with saving maps as images is that it doesn’t save any events to a map, making it difficult to see any manual tweaks. It also makes showing off parallax maps a bit of a headache.
As I don’t have time to show off everything, I’m going to have a “battle arena” where you can test yourself against varying opponents. That way the battle system gets tested properly, but it doesn’t involve insane amounts of mapping, plugins, and other pains. The location of the battle arean is the wooden structure in the bottom right of the map.
Anyhow, I’m gonne get everything finished up, so I’ll be back in a bit!
After looking at character devlopment systems (https://sldesignfmp.game.blog/2019/05/01/character-development-systems/), I tried to find a way to fuse aspects of the Esper (Final Fantasy VI) and the Materia (Final Fantasy VII) systems, but the plugins I’m using seem to want to fight on this. I have the Yanfly Equip Augments plugin that allows for the specifics of the Materia system, and the Moogle-XEpuipment Learning plugin that gives me the capabilities of the Esper system.
Only problem is that these two plugins don’t want to work the way I want them to. When I tried to set up the “Materia” object to teach spells based on AP (using the “Esper” plugin), it worked fine. Until you want to change what “Materia” your characters are using. Then it’ll ERASE all of the skills that your character learned from the item; thus rendering the entire system redundant.
For the time being, I’ve decided to shelve the “Materia” aspect of the system for now, as it’s causing me more problems than it’s worth. If I had more time, then I’d work on getting the two to marry up, but for now, I’m gonna go with simplicity.
The Equipment Learning system relies on notetags; <EQL Skill: X>. By inserting this notetag into a weapon or armour, it allows it to teach ‘X’ skill. By stringing them together with commas, a single item can teach multiple skills.
There is a part two to this, as you have to set up the amount of “Ability Points” (AP) that are needed to actually learn the skill. You can do this by putting <EQL AP: X> into the skills notetag box, with ‘X’ being a number.
Tonight, I decided to add a travelling merchant who can sell the player various healing and curative items. The other purpose of the Merchant is for the player to sell any loot they obtain from slaying monsters, which lets them make more money.
It’s quite a simple shop, with five items for sale; Healing Potion, Magic Potion, Minor Status Restore, Greater Status Restore, and a Revive. The items aren’t that expensive, but they will probably end up being a bit of a gold sink, as they get used more than anything else.
Something else I’ve done is set up a level-based growth system for my monsters. Basically, it works the same way as the character ones I made earlier, but this time is affects monsters.
This effect only needs Yanfly’s Enemy Levels plugin in order to work, and it makes it so that monsters aren’t too weak or too strong. I just need to adjust the maths, as the battle test I performed showed that a few tweaks were in order.
SLGameDesign FMP 