HELMUT

Helmut1

Journey to a world in its last breath
Find yourself in the role of savior
Emerge from beyond the wilderness
To prepare a desperate people
For the next life they have to live
Be the ruler this dying world needs.

I have decided to make an RPG. I will post the slow updates here. Most of the fun is going to be
A) trying RPGmaker for the first time
B) Writing the scenario

I hope this game is at least half as grimy looking as Faxanadu
(PS this doesn’t affect Gognio Dungeon in any way, as we’re pretty much finished with the graphics and writing parts)

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SHIFT NOTES -

i desperately searched all over for a way to easily lay out notes for this project in a way i could easily transfer notes between my work computer (which is locked down by my jobs IT company and i cannot get software on it easily) and was also easy to use and organize.

i started using Twine to do a notecard layout of the project, which is working great. an easy stumbling block for me is my millions of ideas that go unwritten down or don’t really connect in tangible ways. twine makes it easy for me to [[connect]] two passages together in a way that makes sense as a linear thought. it has been a really good development tool to get the ball rolling.

i’ve decided to take a crack at making this in RPG Maker VX Ace which was given to me by the most handsome boy on the internet, “the hot developer of hot games for hot people”

I’ll be trying my hand at jumping all the way in: i’m gonna start with as much placeholder stuff as I can to get the ball rolling with what I need.

should i stick with a 3 frame walk cycle or do more what do yall think

there is a NON-HELMET version of the protagonist too. in the design doc so far, the player is wearing the helmet anytime they are outside of town and in combat.

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Youse are all making me want to dick round i nRPG Maker and draw cute little RPG people :- 0

(I’ve been using FreeMind for keeping track of my big mess of projects and it’s working well. Dunno if that’d suit your case, but there ya go. You can convert from org-mode’s nice syntax too, which maybe would help you RE portability?)

edit: there’re also browser-based project management things like Trello.

But yeah, I can see how Twine would be kinda handy for this!

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don’t make the mistake i did to stick with MV’s non-PO2 tile size because now i cannot escape

or i mean i guess if you size everything up 3x you can get the look you want and not have to futz with the editor so that’s good. that is a nice walk cycle, very castlevania

helmuttutesturight

our sideways walk buddy still neds work but he’s getting there

v. Belmont

helmuttutestuleftohelmuttutestuhelmuttutesturight

Looking good! I’d consider adding some more movement to the torsion the down anim., and less backshoulder / a pixel more chest height in the left+right ones?

Thanks! I’ve definitely got some time tomorrow at work that I’m going to take to work on this a little more.
@haley I’m using RPG Maker XV right now, and you’re using MV I think? I can’t really afford the upgrade but I hear MV might let me change tile sizes and animation speeds where XV wont?

By default from cocking around last night, XV’s default animation speed is too fast for the chopiness this animation requires to really work super well, but the default is for 3 frames. I wonder if I can change that too.

I remember using events for some animation in 2000 (idle animations mostly i think). This lets you control the speed and lets you easily-enough use four frames!

You should be able to just give your player an empty graphic and plop an event on top, but it’s been a while…I think I actually did it with a global event (i can’t remember what they’re called… common events?)

…VX???

i mean neither of those features are built into MV nor are they unique to it, there are a lot of community scripts out there for every version past 2k3

the blueberry hill’s advice is the best you could do in 2k3 but bad for anything after that

anyway i pirated MV because i mean, why not

yeah, what I’ve discovered poking around too is A) there’s a bunch of community plugins that do a lot and VX is sort of built around them being non-interfering with each other. I also discovered there are several ways built into how the game parses filenames of graphics that allow you to fudge with the tile dimensions.

What I need to do next is to get my 32 x 18 character to display properly on a 16x16 tile which I hear shouldn’t be hard.

I’ve been pouring through loads and loads of NES tiles while I make my tileset and do palette adjustments of the like. Digging through game sprites used to be a huge hobby and it’s amazing to see how Square went from Final Fantasy 1 and kind of misunderstanding what the hardware did best, onto later games they would do on the console.

My placeholder graphics are going to serve the base for what I want the game to not look like so I’m taking a lot of care in studying how RPG’s looked at the time.

My base inspiration for graphics is Faxanadu, and then kind of going with Thaddeus’ CV2 remake that was abandoned. I’ve familiarized myself with the graphics over the last few days and I’m more than confident I can get all of that working.

my twine document is getting pretty big. I’ve got most of the games core philosophy laid out now and all of the NPC names and area’s and locations mapped out. Now I guess I’m gonna plan the theology of the world which should take me about a day tops to make something that feels worth it.

tumblr_inline_o1xrpkJpGP1smmrvr_500

whoa, there’s a deep cut. that is some of my all-time favorite pixel art; if you want all of the assets that were made i posted them here three years ago, though maybe you’ve already seen that thread

this has been true for as long as rpg maker has had custom scripts, though compatibility between scripts has gotten better with each release. VX is…okay about it. the real advantages are that it’s been around longer and is not built on javascript, but Ace came out in between those and is practically an objective upgrade

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It’s really funny you posted that because I was just reading that thread today. I’ve been bored and remembered that just a year ago I saw Thaddeus posting on another forum under a different name

holy shit, what

really

i’ve never seen anyone drop out of a scene as hard as he did so this is really startling

i was trying to find and document his work before i even joined sb. this is surreal for me

I saw his sprites somewhere attached to another game that was an 8-Bit RPG and I knew it had to be him just cuz of the style he used and that he used the same fuckin’ palette.

It’s an easy style to do! I went over it with a few friends last night that gave me some pointers. I’m looking forward to trying to emulate and see what else I can learn.

I kinda wanna talk abut the writing in this but not sure if I should yet!

moreman

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I bet this guy is a real sicko

wild ass question here but what makes good RPG UI design?