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Weekly Update - More Intro Revisions, Scripting System, Psychepelago Arena

3 years ago1,047 words

I worked through some not-very-exciting but necessary details this week. I composed some dynamic music for the first bit of the intro, added a simple custom scripting/events system and rewrote some previous code to allow me to add events fairly easily, and I finally got around to making a model for the battle arena for Collie's Psychepelago.

A couple of months ago (god, that long??), I had this video:



It shows an intro where Collie fights the Preyloot, gets berated by The Beast, meets (dream) Savitr, and battles with him against The Beast, all in one single battle scene with dynamic music. It was too much all at once, though, and I've spent the past few weeks basically trying to fix that.

So to be clear, since I don't know how much of these posts people actually read, that video's old and outdated and something I'm moving away from, not something I made this week!

I've got essentially the same events, but now spaced out across a small dungeon. I composed some general background music for that dungeon last week - which I posted on ∞ my Patreon ∞ - but I found myself missing the dynamic shifts you can hear in that video, and wanted to add something like that again.

So I spent a big chunk of this week composing some new music for that, going from the beginning to the point at which Collie meets (dream) Savitr, at which point they join up and the Collie's Psychepelago music begins playing.

The new music shifts around based on the circumstances, and I feel it adds a cinematic quality that wouldn't be there with a single background track. I think some other games have done similar things with their intros; the game Vagrant Story is the only one that comes to mind, though (I should replay that one day).

It was a pain getting it all to work correctly though, and I ended up adding a simple custom 'scripting' system to allow for the conditional execution of events. For a while I've already had ways for custom events to be kind of 'scripted' from certain sources, like conversations, but I essentially had a scattered set of different things all with their own ways of triggering events or checking conditions, which felt like such a mess. They now all use the new system, which feels much nicer to work with! Took time setting up though, and tough to succinctly describe.



I did do one thing I can show in an image: I made a battle arena for the Collie's Psychepelago dungeon, which I'd been putting off for ages. It's not complicated or anything - and I should probably tweak it; one of those two electric trees next to each other could be rotated a bit - but I just hate making battle arenas for whatever reason!

I've set up almost all of the intro's events now, but they all have placeholder dialogue (so Savitr can join and everything, but only says "I WILL JOIN NOW" as he does so), so I'll need to write the actual dialogue next week. Then I'll need to do a bit more tweaking, I'll need to rework the Sprouting Isle area (the place from the alpha test), and then finally I should have enough to do another alpha test, start trying to draw attention to the Steam page to accumulate wishlists, and maybe I could even consider a Kickstarter at that point too.

That's still a few weeks off, though, and it's been constantly on my mind how loooong this whole process is taking. I keep wondering whether people get frustrated at the rate of progress, or if it's just me.

The algorithm recommended this to me earlier in the week:



It's a short animation by one of those I'm-so-awkward-and-quirky-and-relatable youtube animators you may or may not have seen (he's got 17 million subscribers), where he talks about how ridiculously long the process is to create even a short, simply-animated cartoon. Years, at least. And that's with a team of people!

It baffles me how I was able to finish MARDEK 1 and 2 as quickly as I did; I think both came out in the same year, and I'd worked on them alongside going to school? Though my memory's foggy so that might not be accurate at all. The third taking three years annoyed me, but I didn't even spend most of that time working on it; I jumped around between a bunch of projects, from what I vaguely recall.

I'm hoping I'll be done with Atonal Dreams before the end of 2022, but who even knows! All I can really do is keep working on it as much as I'm able to every week day.



Oh, actually! I need to write the dialogue next week, as I said, but I've been wondering about how exactly I'll portray this imaginary version of Savitr. He's just a dream figment of Collie's, and he's supposed to be a tropey JRPG protagonist, in a way that's recogniseable and amusing, but I'm uncertain how exactly to go about doing that.

One possibility is making him mute, like many of those old JRPG leading guys were, but that limits how much can be communicated. Still an option though.

Any thoughts, suggestions for how a character might register as 'light parody of JRPG protagonists'?



Other than that, I had a spike of painful loneliness again this week, but managed to work despite it and it passed.

I've also been playing Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, which is apparently the second game in that huge saga. I played and completed the original version on the... GBA? DS? Whatever it was on, years ago when it was new, though the version I'm playing is a surprisingly elaborated 3D remake which they for some reason bothered to make. Seems I have essentially no memories of playing the original, though, and the whole thing feels new. Its card-based battles took some getting used to! But I have got to the point where I'm enjoying it. Well, other than some annoyance about some stupid system I'll talk more about in the exhaustively long post I'll likely write when I'm done.