If you worked with RPG maker in some way in the past, you surely remember this image.
This generator allowed many people to make high quality character sprites very quickly. I use it too to make quick and good looking placeholder sprites. You don’t even have to know japanese to use it. It is that simple.
However, some time ago, yahoo shut down geocities and with it this site. Thankfully, there are multiple ways to get access to it. I will now detail one of those ways. This won’t really be a in-depth tutorial, but i’m sure you can figure the intermediate steps out your self. If not, you can still ask in the comment section.
The rest is self explanatory. From my experience, there are like two colors missing for one outfit, but otherwise it works very nice. Hope that helped you.
About one month ago, I released the first sinathir version to the public. It is time I write something here about the release itself, the future and so on.
The release
Everything went pretty smooth all things considering. The initial version was pretty messy and even the current version still is. However, I can safely say that the amount of old bugs is decreasing every new version (and new one crop out)
The release itself was pretty silent and the game itself still is pretty silent. I expected that and I don’t really mind. I can see the numbers. People visit the game page and people are downloading it. Some people started even following me.
Gif from the game page, showing different outfit and weapon options as well as the character aging system
The lack of comunication makes me slightly sad however. I don’t care about praise, I care about bug reports or ideas for balance or new features. I received one e-mail with some ideas and bug report and honestly, e-mails like this are much, much better than receiving blind praise or something like that. I have very few people playtesting the game and even then they can’t play it all the time, so receiving bug reports from other people is very helpful. So, if you care and you find a bug, tell. Write me an e-mail, comment below this post, on the game page, it doesn’t matter. I will find it.
Progress
The lack of communication didn’t discourage me. As I said, I’m making this game primarily for my self. Even If I receive no comment for a year, it doesn’t mean I will stop working on the game. Unless I die, or I somehow loose all game files (Unlikely. I back up regularily both online and offline), I will continue working on it. Since the release, I released multiple patches adding features and fixing bugs, I changed the game page design a bit and I’m working on new game version even now. The general long term roadmap can be found on the game page. The shorterm goals are:
Add placeholder graphics for dialogue with all major NPCs.
Add missing dialogue for existing topics with all major NPCs.
Add more functionality to overlooked NPCs (Helena, George, Arf).
Add more skills to overlooked NPCs and make existing ones more useful.
Make walking around more enjoyable by adding new events and adding more fast travel points.
Ofcourse, there is more. But these are the most important to me right now.
So, to close this off, I’m generaly pretty happy with the game launch, I will continue working on it and I would apreciate more comunication.
Just a small update. Testing is going all right and the number of issues is getting smaller. To make it easier for you to see how the progress is going, I decided to put the most recent updates from my changelog / bug tracker online instead of the offline document I was using up until now.
I want to apologize for lack of post this past few weeks. Simply put, my PC shat the bed.
That was basicaly it. My PC died and getting new parts together wasn’t really cheap or quick since they are pretty expensive in my country. Luckily I lost no progress on the game since I back up all the data every day now.
So, it is time for me get back to work. Regular reports will return next week.
This week I spent most of the time preparing quests.
I finished three flowcharts detailing the way quest will progress. Rewards will need balancing so I didn’t really bother with writing them down properly.
The plan for the initial demo release will be one quest for every major NPC + some quests for minor NPCs. After that, I will add more, but I want people to test the thing while there is not that much to go wrong.
This article is late. This didn’t happen in quite some time. And you can thank Elex for that. New game released by developers of the gothic and risen games. And I really like it. Much more than the earlier risen games. So I spent my free time playing it. I will post something proper next week.
I wanted to make this post a little special and talk about the actual project it self. Why did I actualy start working on this thing, what inspired me etc.
Why did I start?
As all of you guessed, I really like video games. I am one of the few people that can play pretty much every genre there is and have fun. Adventure games, shooters, racing, sport, strategy,… You name it. I played games since I was like six. First game I ever played was super mario bros. But my first console was not NES, but one of those chinese bootleg famicon things. Back then everyone I knew owned one of these. It was cheap and new games were like 5$. It is really hard to decide which game I liked the most. My favorites are probably double dragon 2, contra and batman.
After that, my father bought a PC. And thats when I started to really enjoy gaming. I don’t know the specs, but I remember it had grayscale monitor. The first game I saw on that thing was Wolfenstein 3D. Other games I played and really liked were Biomenace, another world and abuse. As you can see, there are no RPGs yet. Few years later, my father bought another PC. This badboy had whooping 300MHz processor, 96MB of ram and some graphics card I don’t even remember. I played games like unreal tournament, half-life, colin mcrae rally and the game that I like to think really changed my life, Gothic. It ran like shit, loading saved game took like ten minutes but I didn’t really care. Partialy because I didn’t really care about performance back in the day and partialy because the game was just that good. It was first game I ever played with open world, day-night cycle and all those things that are so common these days. I could talk for hours about gothic, but there are plenty of videos showing how great this game really is. Try watching this video if you want. I think it explains most things pretty good.
After like two decades of playing video games, I gathered plenty of experience with RPGs. I played sandbox games like morrowind, daggerfall or runescape, linear rpgs like icewind dale, evil islands, diablo or dungeon siege. All was good untill I tried this little game called Princess maker 2. This game singlehandedly changed the way I looked at RPGs. PM2 is a management game. Not really a RPG. You set the schedule for your daughter and her stats will get higher depending on the things she does. You have to pay attention to her mood, money and some other needs too. After she gets 18 years old, the game ends and you get a ending depending on your stats and some things you did.
Sounds pretty ordinary right? The big difference is, your daughter “levels up” realisticaly. Every thing you tell her to do takes one week. So at the begining of the game she sucks at fighting, but after five years of intense training she becomes a really dangerous warrior. This is what I never saw in any RPG ever. There are some games that did something similiar like Fable but that is not really what I wanted. In every RPG ever, your character turns from farmer to king of everything in about one ingame week. Gothic, skyrim, diablo, fallout,… All those games do this.
So after playing PM2, I started looking for similiar games. And there were plenty of them but not really. Stat raising games are pretty common, but very few of them do the “age progression” thing. In most cases, you play as adult person and the game takes like two – three years to finish. This kind of beats the whole point of time advancement mechanic. You should be able to see you character change physicaly too.
So after searching for so long with no results, there was basicaly only one thing left to do. Make the game my self.
I wanted to create small scale openworld RPG (gothic) with plenty of activites (Runescape) that will increase individual stats (RS, PM2) and your character will change not only mentaly, but also physicaly over the course of the game (PM2). I wanted the game to have some kind of story and main quest that the player will be able to follow (every rpg ever) but I also wanted to be able to just walk around and ignore it if I felt like it (Gothic, TES). That was and is my goal.
I decided to start working on the game imediately. First big decision was to choose the game engine. I decided to use RPG maker because:
It is easy to use and it does plenty of things right out of the box.
It is pretty old so there is plenty of documentation and tips around the net.
User made scripts and resourcess are plentiful and free to use 99% of the time.
I had some experience with it already and it should be suficient for what I wanted to achieve.
So that was it. I downloaded RMXP and started working. After few weeks I created this blog and started posting news every week. And the rest you can clearly see if you look at the older articles on this site.
When will It end?
I work on this game for free. I want to release it for free. This blog gets like 10 hits a week. I am not doing this for money and I am not doing this for attention or fame either. I simply want to see this game to exist. There are three posible scenarios that will make me stop working on this game.
I finish the game (duh)
I die
Someone else makes game that does all the things I want to have in my game.
1 is still years away and so is (hopefuly) 2. And 3 is unlikely to hapen too so I will continue working on this game untill it gets finished or I just die or something.
So I just want to thank you all
I want to thank every person who visits this site every week and reads this badly writen stuff I put here. I want to thank everyone who wishes to play this thing I am working on and I want to thank everyone who just likes what I am trying to achieve.
And as a bonus, here is a picture of a WIP outffit I am working on.
Just a quick message for you guys. Happy holydays, christmas and all that stuff to everyone visiting this site. Hope you enjoy this time of year as much as posible.
I will write proper blog post next week since I have very little free time right now. So stay tuned and stay happy.
pmhmproject.wordpress.com 