i just wrote rudimentary flocking behavior into rpg maker just to generate pretty patterns for birds to fly in. i am so bad at finishing games 
buddy, they wonāt even let me fuck it
i think the majority of the maps for the first half of the game are done at this point. iām thinking iāll try to make that first half feature complete, learn what i can from that, and design the second half around what i learn from it (since my ideas for that are much hazier and i want to make sure my ideas work before i design too far ahead of them).
the combo of the battle system i want to use still being under active development and getting up for school around 7 or 8 every weekday and coming home at 6 PM at the earliest means this has pretty much been a weekend project and even though this takes up most of my free time progress has been slow
doing my best not to get discouraged
one of my favorite gags in barkley: shut up and jam was the side road in the post-apocalyptic city that led directly to a crystal mine full of fantasy creatures with no explanation or visual transition, and here i am struggling not to obsess over visually consistent stairways and billions of other tiny details that mostly just get in the way of me actually Making a Thing. iām perpetually unsatisfied with my own ideas so all this technical polish is starting to feel like spending hours adjusting fonts and page sizes in a word doc as a way to put off actually writing something.
i have to get up in six hours but iāve been staying up trying to think of something thatāll make me feel like my work isnāt garbage. i hate my creative process and am infinitely jealous of stuff like cool games inc or drawfeeās worst jrpg series or whatever where folks are talented enough to throw out the dumbest jokiest ideas they can think of and i end up liking them more than anything i came up with on my own. maybe i need to be getting input or bouncing stuff off friends more regularly? that would help but iām also insecure enough to be scared of that? god idk iām a mess, canāt wait to implode over the course of a four-day work-week
i am still working hard on this but havenāt done anything that makes for good screenshot material
i spent the last hour mapping out the possible relationships between the recruitable characters who can talk??
uhh
well anyway i will be a lot more productive once i have a laptop and can actually do stuff other than notes during the week. i mean, iāve solved a decent number of design problems just by scribbling in my journal or daydreaming to music or whatever but man, i really need to be doing stuff, this game is a lot of whatās been keeping me from being the depressive sack of shit i usually am and i want to feel like im making decent progress with it
Circles: they can kiss
Stars: they can kiss a lot
yr post made me realize that i borrowed a bunch of fire emblem and dating sim mechanics but didnāt write a single romantic relationship lol
obviously i need to fix this immediately, i donāt know how iāll compete in this economy if you canāt date a skeleton
okay i shoehorned in a lesbian love triangle, game is ready to ship
today was maybe the most productive iāve ever been Actual Programming-wise
iām doing all this shit i never could have as a kid and in minutes, iām going into the engineās source code and writing in new functionality, i donāt really have a cool screenshot to show off for this stuff but man i feel Powerful
i realize that no one playing this is going to be able to tell built-in features apart from the work iām doing or anything like that but the fact that i donāt have to compromise so much with the tools iām using will be reflected in the game regardless
I love towers (especially in films and videogames) and I love fuckery, so this will be great. Good luck!
implemented a whole lot of backend stuff this weekend, including height maps, projectiles, animated parallaxes, fixing obscure bugs cropping up in other peopleās code and adding new functionality, etc. iāve been in a rut with other design problems but iām making an effort not to get discouraged. working on this game gives me a sense of fulfillment that not much else does.
Really diggign these maps. What does āheight mapā mean in an RPG Maker context? Using events to keep track of different levels within the screen?