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Small Art Changes

I haven’t shared a lot of stuff about The Last Pirate Queen for a while now, so I figured I’d share some of the art evolutions of the portraits I’m using for the game. These are the fourth or fifth iterations of the portraits during the development process, and will likely undergo several changes themselves before I finish. (You can see the style evolution better in my previous blog entry, Character Design: Part 1)     Queen Elizabeth Greene was given a look akin to "resting bitch face" more than the pure neutral that she had before. She's a warrior at heart, and being a queen bores her somewhat. I also altered her jawline to make it a bit more different than the other characters.     Nerina Northwind, though a woman in power, is unsure of her future throughout the parts of the game where she is present. I tried to address this worry while retaining some semblance of neutrality (as a minor character she only gets 1-2 portraits). Her collar was also changed to better fit the style of the jacket and her sprite.     The Witch is a wily old woman with motives and plans all her own, even as she gives the main characters the keys to success. I wanted to make her look a bit more confident and less feeble. Her collar was cleaned up as well, and her makeup was made a bit more severe to accentuate the fact that she's holding on to her glory days as a young witch.     I have issues with extreme emotions and faces, so this one in particular was a challenge. The first iteration of the Earth Spirit, while creepy, didn't have much of the carnivorous plant vibe. Her features were made to push the uncanny valley with overlarge eyes, nose, and mouth.   With the “befores†I was trying for a better unity of style, as my style can change somewhat between sessions. So everything was formulaic, using the same eye base and face base and simply altering noses/mouths and identifying characteristics. Even though it isn't too obvious in this lineup, even with the superficial details the similarities grew into a sameface (and the eyes looked rather dead anyways). So I approached these with another half-year of experience and research under my belt and tried to keep the unity while giving each character more defining characteristics. Though it's still a work-in-progress -- and likely will remain one until the game in its entirety is finished -- I have a deeper appreciation for the individualities of each character and the pitfalls of following formulas too closely.
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Moving away from the JRPG in Gameplay

I'll be the first to admit that the combat in TLPQ is somewhat uninspired - it moves very little from default class skills and the skills that aren't part of the default set are usually just rehashes of existing ones with a different skin. Spells do the same damage regardless of their element, and few enemies have elemental strengths and weaknesses. Its only saving grace is the little-used combo system that isn't really introduced in game, and thus is only stumbled upon with luck.   Gameplay is important, though. Even if battles aren't a prime focus, if they're used even a little bit its best to make it interesting. There's many, many ways to do this, from crafting your own skills and effects to utilizing scripts to achieve effects outside of the bounds of the engine.   That's why in the upcoming re-release of Chapter 1 along with the release of Chapter 2 I've changed the flow and feel of combat. I'll break this list down further down the post, but just for the sake of being short, I've... Fleshed out skills and made them unique and build off of each other
Replaced skill learning by level with a skill tree
Added randomly built troops while retaining on-map enemies
Added the ability to autobattle
Got rid of the somewhat buggy PCTB system
    Explanations:   Skills in general suffered from Final Fantasy syndrome, having the same feel and formula that is used by every FF knockoff - Fire does X fire damage, Ice does X ice damage, etc. etc. To that end I gave skills unique flair to differentiate and give them different use in different situations. For example, Quick Shot has a high bonus to attack rate so most of the time the character casting it will attack first, allowing you to kill low-life enemies or finish them off quickly. Fire has a high element of randomness for it with a large damage range and a higher chance to critical strike. Certain healing spells will heal more as the number of states on a target increase. This also ties into the new skill tree system, allowing you to choose which skills may complement your play style the best.   The skill tree is probably one of the bigger undertakings I've taken on during this project, as it isn't using any of the commonly-used scripts for skill learning and has a custom look to fit with the graphical style of the game. You can see a video of it in action here:       I really wanted to have a way to randomly choose troops when you encountered an enemy, so it wasn't so "oh, 2 bats... oh, another 2 bats... oh, look, 2 bats and a hornet, how interesting!" It goes along with my desire for a bit more strategy to be used in battle, even with the little filler battles you'll be fighting throughout the dungeon. But, for those people who don't like that or having to deal with battles too much in general, there's a new feature for you with...   The ability to autobattle is a feature that I adored in Earthbound and other games. Obviously the AI has improved much since the SNES days, allowing more than just auto attack and heal when health goes critical, but I wanted to have the option there. Since I have made this a story-based game I do want the ability for people who are playing mostly for the story to have a way to not have to worry about battles too much. Also, sometimes you just don't feel like killing something for the tenth time or you don't want to mess with a boss that you've died to multiple times.       The PCTB system, as much as I loved the flow of it and the strategic part of it, had a few bugs - that may or may not have been my fault - that would cause crashes when the battle would end with the actors being uncontrollable in some way (such as confuse, stun, etc.) and sometimes for no reason at all. It was non-reproducible and frustrating when I would get reports and could do nothing to help.   I hope that you've found this in some way interesting, and I hope to post more updates in the next few weeks to let people know how it's going! If you have any questions/comments feel free to leave a comment or send me a message - I don't bite!
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Character Design: Part 1

There are multiple parts to creating interesting and effective characters, especially in video games. You want them to connect to the player on an emotional level - to make the player feel empathy when the character is suffering, for them to rejoice when the character overcomes a difficult hurdle. You also want them to be visually distinct, to stand out upon the swaths of NPCs that will populate the game as well as stand out among the many games that exist in the world. With tools like RM and other indie development tools, the number of characters in video games is steadily growing.   In this entry I'll be showcasing how the various main characters in The Last Pirate Queen have changed throughout development so far. Some have changed very little, while others don't look a thing like their original incarnation. Sometimes the change is good. Sometimes... I have mixed feelings.      
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