This has become far more common than I expected. Maybe I should be more disappointed with myself. Maybe I should just quit trying to do this and focus on one of my less challenging aptitudes…
Maybe I should… (Stop using ellipsis so often.)
In the mean time, anything that can get moved over from Prequel is being moved to Grinder. A much less ambitious project that I have allowed to stew for the last few weeks, since my life calmed down again.
It would seem that I have yet to find a way to keep myself reliably motivated, and focused, when working all out on a solo project. The lack of structure to my day, seems to trigger some form of procrastination I either didn’t notice, or found it easy to ignore, until I no longer had sufficient excuse to continue.
As a consequence I think I will be making some rather drastic changes (compared to recent events, not my life over all) in order to impose that necessary structure.
I don’t expect that I will enjoy it as much. But then, I think that’s the point. 🙂
It never ceases to amaze me how something appearing at first frustrating and disruptive can so often turn out a blessing in disguise.
The holidays started frustrating. Six weeks of almost constant productivity was broken by vanishing plugin authors and personal obligation.
The resulting frustration lead to the mistake of trying to find ‘productive time‘. Which only resulted in splitting my focus between disappointments and what mostly ended up being broken features held together with spit and glue.
Most have been scrapped.
However, I think the misadventure resulted in revelations and may have just saved me from more frustration than they’ve already caused. As a consequence, I’ve begun re-designing the narrative, the class and skills system, the leveling system, and the crafting system.
All greatly simplified, and streamlined. (IMO)
I’ve also decided that Alpha updates will be smaller and focused only on features that are plugin ready. No more, partial implementation in lieu of delivered promises. The attention and effort needed to constantly work around the GUESSED result has been anxiety inducing, to put it mildly.
From now on, nothing gets planned, let alone changed, until I have a fully functional and 100% ready to use plugin.
One of the intro scenes I’ve felt is ready enough to share…
Try to ignore the spelling errors. I would blame my dyslexia but then it was me that didn’t take the time to cut/paste the lines in a spell check before hand, so…
Something that has already gone through two iterations, is what I am making sure I do my best to keep consistent. Which is the ability to talk to (at least, abstractly) every single person that you encounter in the game. They may not all have full on conversations. They may not all have rumors to tell, or plot points to spill. Some might even have things to sell strangers, or just friends. But everything with a personality, will (should) be able to be interacted with at some level. All the way up to murder, and possibly theft. (Though that part may come at a much later time)
With some creative use of a few of Hime Works Plugins, (for dialogs/shops) part of some plots will require the active investigation of the player in order to progress. Such as, gathering rumors or asking opinions. Possibly even earning trust (faction) with groups or individuals in order to gain access to information.
One thing I may have forgotten to mention… The entire demo will be released un-deployed. So anyone will be able to see how each part was done and use as an example for their own work.
The city of Wordgarden. Continued…
(The south western corner to be more specific)
As the story develops so to does the map fill in.
More to come…
If you are familiar with VXAce’s mapping tool then your initial impressions of MV’s tool may rub you the wrong way a bit. Especially when it comes to the common technique of SHIFT+Click placement of tiles. It is a means of side stepping auto-tile processing for a single placement and only works on a base tile basis.
Initially I thought that MV was not accurately mimicking this functionality and had somehow broken the auto-tile process. However, after a little more time I realized that this small change may actually be a deliberate means of fixing a flawed SHIFT+Click tiling.
Whatever the reason (mistake, bug, or intent) it is now possible to group select tiles with the pencil and SHIFT+Click apply the entire selection (as is) without reverting the copied tiles to their non-auto base form.
Here is an example:
(Here you can clearly see where VXAce SHIFT+Click functionality only paints the BASE tile.)
(You can see that the gutter is missing and the dirt is flat)
(Here you can see that, in MV, both the original AND the SHIFT+Click painted tiles are totally identical.)
Essentially, what this allows is for much more dynamic and multi-leveled tiling without the need for custom tiles for each elevation.
(Anyone that has attempted to make something like this in VXAce will know the pain.)
So… I am not ashamed to admit, that my initial misgivings regarding MV’s tile mapping where completely misplaced.
