Managed to get a simple shooting mechanic implemented:
Currently there is no collision between the bullets and walls, the bullets only fire in one direction regardless of which directional input is selected and I haven’t quite figured out how to kill my idle animation when pressing the shoot button while not moving and swap to a different sprite that just shows the gun raised.
But progress is progress! I have some ideas about how to go about solving the issue of directional shooting and they all involve nesting a bunch of if statements within different functions I just need to sit down and map out which ones will go where and then start testing. Probably going to start making backup copies to test on now because my code is getting longer and more complex.
Yeah I’m pretty scared to program without source control (both for losing work if my computer dies, and for breaking something and not knowing what I changed). But it can be a bit esoteric and intimidating when you’re starting out and I don’t know a good beginner’s guide for it. Maybe someone else here has some good advice on it.
aww thank you! i’m not sure how much i like it yet but it was fun to make. the little character is a bunch of images of shalom harlow i cut from different videos and photos, i think i’ll have to go back and work on her more but i’m not worrying about it for now. the weird room is a photo of the paris opera house from wikipedia i spent a long time messing with, the curtains are just stock photos of red curtains i adjusted a bit and painted the watermarks out of lol. i’m using rpgmaker 2003 so i have to shrink everything down really tiny and save it in 8-bit color depth, so i can be lazy about some stuff and it ends up reading fine once it’s in the engine.
the only programs i’m using are paint dot net and rpgmaker, i’m not sure what i’m doing for sound yet. i’m using lots of photos from wikipedia and the internet archive and i’m also going through some art museum collections, it’s all going to be like photomontage/digital collage like this
it took me a while to finish just this one screen but i took lots of detours trying different ideas and kind of figuring out how i should be working at it. i could put a lot more work into it still but i just have to stop myself and move on to the next screen, i think the more i work on it the smoother it’ll go until i have to start like writing and doing game logic and stuff.
it is just a static background, some of the tiles are drawn on top as sprites so i can do collision easily and so shalom goes behind the rail though. rpgmaker has a parallax background thing that you can set per map, and since this room is just one screen that doesn’t scroll it all stays still. i think i’m going to do most of the rooms like this as single screens since it was so easy to implement but i might have like a couple big open areas that lead to the different rooms
Ah, I see! I tried playing around with the parallax feature a bit before and it never behaved like this, it always moved instead of acting like a background. I guess the parallax image was too big…
And yeah, I also recommend moving on quickly once you feel you got something done on one map. I think it’s better to keep coming back again and again and iterating instead of trying to perfect one map and getting stuck on it.
oh that might’ve been it! in 2003 the screen resolution is 320x240, so if your background matches those dimensions and the map is the default 20x15 it won’t move at all. or at least, that’s how it’s working for me, i only have the slightest idea what i’m doing
Pretty subtle effect, but I gave the particles a bit of the player’s movement so they sort of follow the player. Makes the motion look a little less chaotic and makes it less distracting/more natural to my eyes since they now “resolve” to the player.
Despite consisting entirely of text, my game does need one image: a 960x960 PNG depicting my game’s cover art. Most of the game consists of your friend asking you questions while reading a quiz out of Oubliette, which is just Dragon magazine with the serial numbers filed off, so I was thinking of mocking up a fake magazine cover, or maybe going for more of an abstract depiction the magazine and a D20 + a pencil. Something like that, anyway. It’s almost tempting to try to make something using Animal Crossing custom patterns because I hate all the images I make anyway, but at least that’s a format I’m comfortable working in.
As for the game itself, I took a break from creating content to work on polishing mechanics. I set it up to loop automatically, I customized the banner text in a way that should preserve the goofy trick I want to pull while not messing too much with the library card data that indexing sites will use, I finally enabled the scoring system the game uses to track which endings you’ve seen, I’m starting to add testing commands, and I’m trying to eliminate all the ugly little display and formatting glitches that I usually tolerate while I’m trying to get the game working but which have no place in a released product. I’ve got a lot more text to get through, though, so I should stop distracting myself with this stuff.
I don’t think it will cause any confusion, but there was actually an old school d&d fanzine called Oubliette, which had a run of 8 issues between 2010 and 2012, and a 9th in 2015.
