Onto this week's progress!
Done this week:
- Finished Andras and Ahden world maps, and it was no easy feat! They're both pretty massive continents with a lot of locations. By comparison, Maia and Geldion are pretty tiny and shouldn't take more than a day to finish.
- Mapped one of the resting/waiting areas of the arena.
- Unsuccessfully attempted to add another puzzle to chapter 2, then scrapped the idea altogether.
- Fiddled with audio and switched some MP3s to an .ogg format so they'll take a lot less space.
- Figured out what makes the download size of the project so huge.
To do next week:
- Maia and Geldion maps.
- Start eventing cutscenes for Chapter 3 (yes, I'm that far behind).
- Finish up database.
Changes:
- After a very long look at the size of the project, I've figured out where some of the size is coming from. Parallax maps take a bit of space, sure, and I've got 410 battlers for the 410 database enemies. But the biggest bulk of the size is from the animations folder. I haven't finished the database for skills yet, but the custom animations I've included so far have bloated the size of the project by 90mb. It's not that I have a whole lot of them, but it seems that quite a few of them are 5-8mb in size. So, as much as I like custom animations, a lot of them are going to have to go. I'll save a little room for the super special effects, but the rest of it will be using smaller and simpler animations.
- I'd been balancing skills and battles via arbitrary numbers, but it's tough to guess how much players will level, especially since I'm opening up areas where they can grind. So, I've taken another look at the battle system and changed some skills to work via percentages instead. The other advantage of this is that it will make each battle just as challenging as the next and give me more room to script interesting bosses.
- I'm leaning in favor of releasing a partial chapter to get some feedback. It's going in a slightly different direction than the rest of the game has been so far. There's more complexity, so I'm very interested in seeing what everyone thinks.
Choices and pictures! That sounds familiar! :D OMG it is so cute! I love it instantly. Has a lot of flavor and you know the distance of places and it's just fantastic. :)
ReplyDeleteI never knew that animations would take up so much room--is it because they are really cool looking? And as for not knowing when people grind and what to do about it--what you COULD do if nothing else is know on average what people are at before grinding stage, figure out where they will be if they don't grind and then after that, up the difficulty a teeny bit. Those who don't grind have a bit of a challenge while those who do will be more on the same level as the next area or whatever.
Anyway, if you do release a partial chapter, I'd really like to play it! :D
Looking at the old map, it made so little sense in terms of proportion! Almost all of the maps so far have been smaller and cozier, but they looked absolutely gigantic on the world map (I couldn't really make them any smaller due to VX mapping). So, I started messing around a bit with parallaxing a world map and it kind of grew from there. SSP was definitely an inspiration! I really loved that idea of just showing pictures with choices and it makes it much easier to event.
ReplyDeleteThe animations were *really* cool and colorful particle animations and some of them took 60 frames to display! It's awesome, but at the same time they got up to 5mb per file. It starts to add up after a while. I'm still keeping the most awesome ones, but I think I'm just going to leave them for the super powerful attacks instead of regular skills.
I got an add-on for the battle system that pretty much levels the monsters as the characters level. And the damage characters do is multiplied by their level. So, at level 2, they do twice as much damage as they did at lv 1 and so on. The monster leveling affects their health, stats and consequently the attack damage. But it didn't level the enemy skills, which meant I had to guess what level the player would be, so you didn't end up with an enemy that attacks for 6x more than their flashy special skill. Thankfully, one of the damage formulas is to do a % of hp/mp. I can use that instead as a base for skill damage. It's especially exciting for boss fights, where I can do insane attacks that hit the party for 50%. Muahahahaha!
Anyway ... The pirate portion is pretty lengthy, so I think I will release it as a partial.
Thank you for commenting! *hugs*
Wow, that world map style rocks. Clever usage of simple structures; very pleasant-looking!
ReplyDelete