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Weekly Update - Some Screenshots!

3 years ago1,242 words

I've made some decent progress this week towards FINALLY moving beyond the nightmare intro and combining that with the tutorial island I already mostly made months ago. I've changed a lot with the game's fundamental mechanics since I last worked with it though, so I'm having to clean up a whole lot of stuff to get it all working. Let's look at some screenshots!

(Another Friday update!)

At the end of a climactic battle against The Beast at the end of the intro, Savitr says this:



And the screen fades through whitely to this:



It's a huge relief to have finally connected those two parts, after wondering about how exactly I'd go about it for months, assuming I'd have Savitr destroy The Beast with some dramatic, flashy spell that I was unsure how to animate and code... I just decided not to bother with that at all, and I don't feel anything is lost or lesser for it. Impractical stuff must get cut all the time in all kinds of media.

It was tricky getting the characters mounted on the Mysteed working with the existing dialogue system; I spent a couple of work sessions just fiddling with code surrounding that. The Mysteed will no longer hover in the corner of the map when selecting where to 'Fly' to, like I had last week; now it only appears during certain dialogue scenes. I also made it cream-coloured rather than white because their feet blended in before (plus it looks more like an ivory chess piece now). Little details! Still needs texture painting though.

(I want the background to be blurred more during conversations here; another detail that'll take time and work.)



You now land on this beach, and have to run towards Pierce to trigger the battle against him (that's where the game started during the first alpha test).

I'd made some major changes to how maps are stored and drawn since I last worked with this one, and assumed I'd have to remake it. Thankfully I was able to salvage what I had after making a few tweaks to the XML file, though, so that saved me some work.



This whole dialogue scene is something I spent weeks on - and revised several times - months ago, and now a lot of it's broken because of the aforementioned changes. Those floating resonars, for one thing! And some dialogue stuff from before all skills were figmon summons no longer fits, so I'll need to rewrite it.



Pierce talks about his 'friend' - his dagger - for example, which he doesn't even have here, and shouldn't have since I've done away with physical attacks for the human characters. So I'll need to rethink that. A shame, since I like some of the dialogue around it which won't work anymore, but I'll figure something out. I get the feeling there's probably too much dialogue here anyway.



Dialogue also used to be line-wrapped and positioned procedurally, because that was the obvious and sensible thing to do, but for various reasons I decided all line breaks and speech bubble positions should be manually specified instead. I think the end results are better, but I've been having to go through all the dialogue to set them. Thankfully there are only a handful of conversations at this point so it's not overwhelming or anything.



Just today, I also decided on what to do with this Pawnight, which is something I've been wondering about for a while.

They were originally designed to be basic, simple-to-fight opponents for the starting island - that's the role they played in the alpha test - but I noticed a lot of similarities between them and Collie. In the intro, she acquires her first monster summon, and up until today that was a Monstrife; now it's this Pawnight.



I previously had two versions: the lighter 'Pawnite' which I made first, and dark 'Pawnights' which The Beast summons as minions which you can use to get used to the taming system; black and white chess pieces. Now they're both just called 'Pawnight', and Collie's is a unique 'shiny' variant, which will be explored in more detail as part of the story.

It's the sort of thing that's satisfying and a relief for me to have made a big decision about, but hard to really communicate all the details to others because it'd be too spoilery!

I'll need to make a new monster type to fill the slot the old "Pawnite" did in the Sprouting Isle area; I'm thinking Rabbish, a design that appeared in Taming Dreams. So I'll need to make that next week.

I also need to do some general cleanup and refining - lots of visual and sound effects are missing, and I don't have music for the world map or the battle against The Beast yet - before I can do another alpha test. I can't estimate how far off that is - I'd say 'two weeks', though I thought the whole intro would take that long - but we're almost there now!!!1



I'm writing this as I wait for a phone call from the doctor about my scan results... while wracked with anxious anticipation, I can't sit still... Even though every time in the past the results have been that the cancer's still stable, they wouldn't keep running the tests if there wasn't a chance of it coming back, so of course being a hypochondriac who's literally been through the long and awful treatment for brain cancer, I find it hard to remain calm with the uncertainty. Especially since the bad news would basically mean my life is over.

It used to be that I'd go to the hospital, get scanned, then wait around an hour in the hospital before the doctor saw me... but then that doctor retired, and I was assigned to some other one who for whatever reason feels the need to leave this obnoxious gap (around 3 weeks this time!) between doing the scan and giving me the results... I think if they had found something concerning, they would have called me already, but knowing that isn't enough to calm the anxious, lower parts of my brain... ugh.

...

THERE. Good! I just had the call from the doctor's lackey (or whoever), and the scan showed the cancer's not revived or spread! A huge wave of relief washed over me... I suspect my various mental health spikes these past couple of weeks were due to subconscious dread about this, so hopefully those will start clearing up now too.

Looks like I'll be getting scans every six months for a long time though... At least it's better than not knowing? Oh, and apparently they don't do same-day results for anyone, it wasn't just that change of doctor, so that explains that, I suppose. Yes. Good.



I wrote ∞ a couple ∞ ∞ of posts ∞ this week about a possible remake of Alora Fane: Creation, a Flash game I worked on but didn't finish several years ago. I'm planning to play around with a prototype for that starting this weekend, which I'm excited about!

I'll also need to make some time to FINALLY decide on which PC to buy!!