#64 Improving, fixing,… And gameplay video

This week I spent most of my time improving and fixing multitude of bugs, anoyances and other things.

Firstly, I changed the way choice window was showing. I also aligned the NPC name window. Here are some screens. Before and after.

Next thing I worked on was the farming system. I worked very little on this thing because I never really felt like it needed much improvement. There were some things that bothered me though. First, every crop could give you only one produce. I fixed this months ago. Next, the entire system worked in real time. You could only set the growth time in seconds. I “fixed” this by making this growth time really high (like 24 hours) and then I just advance it by few hours every time your character rested or worked. It worked, but I felt like idiot about it the entire time. So I decided to fix it for good. Now it works as it should. Growth stages advance only when told to.

Another thing I worked on was the “random” NPC placement. Every NPC will have like five predetermined locations where you can find them. They will leave you note at their home telling you where they are so won’t have to search for them across the entire map. I talked about this before. Now I converted one NPC to this new system and works flawlesly.

However, there was one problem. Mainly with NPCs following you. Up until now, NPC followers worked like this: You ask NPC to follow you, NPC accepts and tells you to wait outside. The moment you step outside their house, the NPC will join your party. If you wished to dismiss this NPC, you had to walk back to its house and it would leave your party automaticaly. This was fine and all, but became obsolete with random NPC placement. I could try and improve the system to make it work, but that would be too mmuch work for little to no reward so instead, I did this.

You press “Q” (Left shoulder button if you use gamepad) and this thing will pop up. Then you just select NPC you want to dismiss and they will disappear from your party and return to their previous spot. It also shows you their HP, SP and status, so you can dismiss them when they end up too hurt and get someone else. In the future I will improve this and add some dialogue for NPC leaving your party and other things. But for now, it works good enough.

I also did some minor fixes that I won’t be talking about (because I don’t remember them). And I have a small suprise for you. I started making some sort of “dev play” videos. I will add writen commentary and talk about different features, how they work now and how will they work after I improve them and so on. I would like to make this videos weekly but I am a pretty busy person (almost 12 hours of work and travel 5 days a week is a lot) so don’t count on that.

Here is the first episode. Yeah, the thumbnail is shit and my video editing skills leave a lot to be desired. Still, I hope you end up liking it just a little bit.

Alright, that’s about it. See you next week.

 

 

#63 Less clothes, more talking

This week I spent most of my time reworking the clothing system to make it easier to work with. It is basicaly 90% complete. All I need to do is to add more clothing and render new weapon sprites.

Weapons became a really big problem actualy. Weapons will now show holstered on your character. Big weapons can just “float” behind your charater and nobody will actualy care. (Hell. Many AAA games do it to this day) The problem are the small weapons. They can’t just float next to your character and they can’t float infront. This would require me to create belt and sheath sprite and then I would have to alter it for every single outfit, weapon, pose and so on. The reason I simplified the system was to prevent this.

So I decided like this. Small weapons like knives and pistols will be invisible, big weapons like swords and rifles will appear behind your character.

Here are some pictures of “new” outfits. I just took some old pictures, put them together and edited them slightly to make them look passable.

I also added another feature. If your character wears some kind of face obsuring helmet, then its graphics will change while you talk to someone.

As I said before. This change will result in less clothing options, but each piece will look much better than before. Plus I will try and do atleast three different poses for each one of them.

And the last thing I worked on is the NPC chatter system. It is very simple and I will most likely be redoing it from scratch, but for now it works just fine. It basicaly shows dialogue boxes while you can walk around and do stuff. Simple, but it will make the world feel much more alive. You will see NPCs talking to each other or they will just greet you when you enter their house.

And thats it for this week. Next week I will try and polish everything as much as posible.

 

#62 Fixing old problems

This week I spent some time improving the old code I writen. Mainly the character window and job window.

I downloaded a new program called GEMINI. This is basicaly improved script editor for most RPG maker engines. It has plenty of nice features but for me the most important one are the colapsable tree structures.

So I decided to rewrite / improve the old code I did long time ago and make it more efficient and easier to work with (Some of that stuff was a mess). I started with the character window.

Not much has changed. I just changed each layer into seperate def to make this thing easier to work with. And I found out that this thing already has shitload of them.

And there is going to be more of them. This also reminded me of the “transparency” problem. Some pieces of clothing just don’t work with each other well. This results in some ugly graphical errors like lower clothing layers going through upper layers. And as far as I know, there is no easy way to fix this.

Look at this. It’s a mess. But I know of some solutions to this. Sadly, none of them are feasible.

1.) The is a function that would allow me to create some kind of transparency mask so that upper clothing layers will block the lower ones. The problem is, this thing is useful only for small images (say 32*64) because it redraws the entire image pixel by pixel or something like that. Doing this would slow the game to crawl.

2.) Edit EVERY clothing image to be compatible with every clothing image. This is obviously out of question. I want to have something aroun 100 clothing pieces in the game. Your character will change every year. Game will last 8 years. This makes 800 images. Now your character has different poses depending on the weapon she carries. So lets say, each image has 5 pose variations. My calculator says this is 4000 images total. Redrawing manualy most of those pictures will most like kill me and I dont want to die just yet.

3.) Ditch the RPG maker and start using some 3D engine that would allow me to do this stuff automaticaly (not gonna happen. This would mean scraping all of my work)

4.) Simplify things

This is probably the thing I am going to do in the end. I will limit the equipment slots to 5. Weapon, head, face, body, other. This would make a lot of things much easier for me. I would put weapons on the character back / hip so there would be no need for 5 different poses for each weapon. Instead of having leather jacket, peasant tunic, peasant trousers and peasant hat, you will only get peasant outfit and peasant hat. On one hand, this will make it much easier for me to make new clothing compatible with other pictures and I will finaly be able to make different poses for different emotions. On the other hand, this will greatly lower the customisation options for your character looks. I will have to think about this more but as I see it, these are the only two options. Have cliping clothes and armor or make things more simple and more polished.

And the last thing I worked on was the job window. I changed the way it was called and the way the values were edited. Now it will take me much less time to edit this thing and it also shows much more information. It is still a work in progress, but it works flawlessly.

Thats it for this week. I will try and finish the job window and I might also try and change the character screen for the “simplification”.

#61: Hoarding

This week I had very little free time and I was in no mood for doing anything really serious. So in the end I ended up improving some old systems already in the game.

Let’s talk about simple things first. I did some improvement to the mutation / potion system. I added new variable. At the begining of the game, it starts at 100. Everytime you drink a potion or do something stupid (eating meat from a mutant) it will go down by certain amount. Resting raises it a bit. If it goes below 0, you gain random mutation and then the counter goes back to 100. I also added some buff potions. You will have to drink these before fight and they will increase your atributes by 10%. Useful in early game.

Next thing I was working on was the visual representation of collected items. This feature was in the game for quite some time (Look at post #52), I just never spent much time improving it. Basicaly, the items you collected will be shown in your hideout. Not EVERY item individualy, but rather the item group as a whole. Right now, there is a pile of wood next to your hideout. It changes its graphics depending on the amount of wood you have. “0” means no graphics, “1-20” small pile of wood, “21-60” bigger pile of wood, “61-200” big pile of wood.

I want every kind of item to work like this. Bookshelves, rock piles, weapon racks, larders, wardrobes  and so on. I started working on the weapon rack. It is not finished yet, but I can show you what little I have.

This feature doesn’t change the gameplay in any way, but it makes the world feel more alive and as I like to say, the more detail, the better.

Lastly, I spent some time working on the MC model. Nothing major. I just toyed around with the lightning and made the skin color look better, but nothing else. I am still not 100% satisfied with it though.

Thats it for this week. Next week I will have even less free time so I will be able to work on this probably only through the weekend.

 

#60: More alive

This week I spent most of my timerevorking the way NPCs work. For people who worked with rpg maker, I put everything NPC related into common events. This means that I can put one NPC on multiple maps and it will be using one event. This makes it easier for me to change NPCs since now I have to edit them only once.

This also means that I can now make NPCs appear at multiple locations without doing much work.

Up until now, all NPCs were static. They just stood in one place from day one until the last day of the game. Ofcourse, this was unacceptable so I decided to change it.

If you played harvest moon or stardew valley, you know that all NPCs in those games have some kind of schedule. The problem is, the time in this game is handled differently so even the NPC movement has to be handled differently.

After some thinking, I came up with two options. First, the NPCs will have static schedule depending on the week of the month (later this schedule will change depending on season). Lets say NPC n.1 will spent 1-7 day siting at home, 8-14 day walking around the forest, 15-21 day drinking at a inn and 22-31 day visiting some friend. Now. This sounds strange at first but because the player will only walk around the place for like four days a month, this will be a non issue.

The second option is the random schedule. Every NPC will have like 10 different places to be in. Each week the game will chose one at random. To make things easier, NPCs will leave a note at their home saying where they are.

I might even do combination of both of these options. The framework for NPC placement is basicaly done. Now I just have to actualy think about the locations.

And thats it for this week. Next week I will try and finish atleast one NPC and see how it works. No screenshot this week though. Sorry. Instead, here is one picture of a thing I want to implement. And yes, I will try and implement all skills into the demo. (This will take me like one day. It is not that hard or time consuming.)