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Weekly Update - Dream Skins, Battle Demo Video, What is a Standard RPG?

4 years ago645 words

I didn't do as much as I'd like this week due to a bunch of factors, so I worked on trying to address those. I also (mostly) made the dream versions of Collie and Savitr, I've included a video showing a basic battle to hopefully clarify some stuff I've previously only written about, and I'm curious to hear your thoughts about a question: What, to you, is a 'standard RPG'?

Bleh, unproductive

After a string of highly focused and productive weeks, this one was an annoying dud! I barely did anything, largely due to distracting soreness from sitting, constant tiredness from insomnia, and a general lack of motivation from depressive anhedonia (essentially a dampening of the brain's ability to experience pleasure). Frustrating.

I started on making a few life changes, hoping they might help. I've been sitting in cheap office chairs for years, so I bought a more comfortable one, which arrived yesterday and already seems to be helping. I've started going out for walks first thing in the morning. I've also updated a tool I've mentioned a few times that I made to track my moods and productivity (I was going to talk about it a bit, but since it's not something I'm intending to make available for others to use any time soon, it's not really worth it!). Hopefully I'll see some improvement next week!

A big part of it's probably just burnout though, which is to be expected. I'll probably take at least a brief break soon, though I'd like to push through to the next testing phase first.

Dream Skins

I worked on these alternate versions that'll appear in the new dream intro, in which Collie is a Blight Wolf and Savitr is her dreamy saviour:



...Though I didn't even finish the Savitr one! Still needs a lot of tweaking.

I thought I'd finish them both on Monday morning, because they seemed much less complicated than the monsters I'd made from scratch in about twice the time, but - due largely to the aforementioned factors together with indecisiveness about details - they ended up taking like three days. Pfft!

Hopefully Collie looks more like a rough barbarian/bandit than a sex object to those of you who take issue with such things.

Battle Video

Since I felt like that wasn't very much to show off, and I got the impression from some comments that maybe I hadn't explained the whole monster-skills concept very well, I've also included this (~1 minute) video of a basic battle:



There's a conversation at the start of that battle, but it needs revising and I just skipped it here.

Watching gameplay is hugely different to playing it (it's much harder to really engage), but hopefully you can at least get a feel and an understanding of what I'm talking about when I say the monsters are skills, but they're also essentially physical attacks. You can also hopefully get an idea of how taming monsters to your side and summoning them have different useful purposes.

You can also maybe see that there are a whole lot of things that need work! I've yet to change animations to fit this new system, for example - Savitr still blocks as if holding two resonars - and most skills don't have proper sound- or particle effects yet (they're fairly low priority compared to other things).

Discussion

Finally, I'd also like to hear some thoughts regarding something that's come up in recent posts. So, a question:

What, to you, is a 'standard RPG'?

Especially in terms of combat mechanics. And can you list specific games that would fall into this category, or games that claimed to be RPGs but which you disliked because they deviated from the set of qualities you'd expect from the genre?

What's your favourite RPG? Is it a 'standard RPG'?