Kayzee

Watching that video made me wanna fluff the dancing cat...lolz

Hehe, that's about the reaction I expected. :3

Yeah, well here's another blast from the past...lol

Probably the one I remember most is Crash Bandicoot...

Yeah. 'WHOA!' indeed...

I never really played Crash Bandicoot that much... not sure if I even had it. I never quite got into the perspective. I know my siblings played a lot of Spyro and Ape Escape, but I think I kinda thought they were too simple at the time.

Ape Escape was the first true Dual Analog game where the whole game was controlled with only the analog sticks...
I wouldn't call that simple, but hey, rose-tinted glasses and all that (actually that's another game I've never gotten to play and same goes for Spyro), lol

Anyway, decided to hold off on the current project, for now. I took a deeper dive into RM2003, the first time I've ever really had a long look into it, and despite its' flaws (not being able to use states to prevent other states for one), I think I can use it to get a finished side project...

I don't think of eight-directional movement as a must in most games, but it's definitely a must in roguelikes. It just opens up a lot more tactical options and makes chases much more interesting. Though I still actually only use four directional sprites because as much as full 8-directional sprites would be neat, making diagonal sprites for everything would be a pain in the ass. Maybe if I ever get a dedicated sprite artist or something.

I know of one asset pack that has diagonal sprites. One.
We've talked about it before, and I know it wouldn't work with your game...

It's a pity, but I don't think it looks too bad as is anyway.

Around here, they've been popping them off for weeks now, lolz

(someone actually took a large one and tossed it into the drainage pipe xD)

People in my area shoot them for like a week early up to a week or two after, but the town's official fireworks display was held on the 6th. x3

Anyway, got any screenshots of your Mario Maker stuffs?
Or, is it really hard to get those...

I have no idea honestly. I have spent most of my time playing the story mode anyway and havn't really done that much stage making. I have done a bit, but mostly just playing around.

Well, if ya get to doing that, and if it is possible to get screenshots, I think we'd all love to see them...

It was...okay.
Earlier this morning, a line of storms with radar-indicated rotation rolled through, causing the warning sirens to be sounded off. At the speed the storm was moving, if there had been any viable threat, that would of been too late...

I'm just glad I wasn't asleep...

Oh dear... *cuddles*

I iNtEnD tO iMpLeMeNt A dIfFiCuLtY sEtTiNg In My OwN gAmE, tOo.

lolz

But seriously, yep. It won't be overly complicated and will mainly affect combat.

Still not sure how I would want to do it exactly though... I kinda want to let the player select the difficulty of the current 'run' rather then choose it at the start of the game, though that would probobly involve making a copy of the actor. I kinda want to let the player start a run at level 1 whenever they want while still remembering their real stats and giving them a good reason to do so.

I did that by having all levels have static stats, and using a stat distribution script to handle increases.

That way, a New Game + would allow one to keep their stats but start a new game at L 1.

I'm going to have difficulty be based on a single variable. It'll only affect combat and EXP Points.

lolz

if $guitar_skill <= $Slash
  print "Go play Bass instead."
else
  print "Slash Unlocked, See Store."
  set $switch_Slash to 2
end #lmfao

Of course, that's all junk; none of that would work unless pre-defined, but there's some old game jokes in there. 

Just to be clear I don't want to do an if else because that only has one thing or the other happen and I want both to be able to happen.

The AVGN has reviewed both of them, lol

Ya know Kilo, they say to try tongue but hole to become grossly incandescent in that game

Tee-hee, i'm not that far into the game, but I hear there is a spot where people like to say that there is an amazing chest ahead later. :3

Glad you are feeling a bit better!

It was kinda weird, no idea why I was sick. Might have caught a cold in Singapore.

Oh believe me, I'm well aware of what you mean; I just simplified it is all, lol

I have two friends from singapore now, I don't know whereabout exactly but now I'm curious xD Everyone from singapore I've met have been incredible creators, and so very friendly >w<

People were very friendly to be sure! I had some trouble understanding some of  them though, hope I didn't annoy people!

Wine is bitter?

It's probably alcohol in general I find bitter... not sure, I don't really drink. Maybe more sour? But yeah, every bit of wine I have had always tasted like vinegar to me. Maybe I just never tried the really good stuff, I donno.

PROPERLY FERMENTED, wine is far less bitter than sweet or tart, depending on the nature of the grape, or other fruit.

A properly fermented red wine is very sweet, for instance. Strawberry wine is even sweeter (improper fermentation of strawberries leads to high levels of toxicity worse than arsenic but far less lethal-leads to a very harsh hangover after the effects wear off lol).

I went to Red Lobster a little while back; I got a glass of red wine and it was not that great, but I've had far worse. It wasn't fermented well, nor for very long. It tasted cheap but not so much toxic.

Like, properly fermented wine is a very long process, though how long depends on a number of factors including climate, elevation (very high elevations take a LOT LONGER BY A GREAT DEAL), the quality of the fruit, the method of pressing, the steps taken to begin the process, and so many more.

Back home, for example, the wooden barrels used to ferment wine grapes in, are washed and scraped regularly because otherwise, the toxins from previous fermentations will seep into the next batch. They always have a set of barrels ready for the next batches, and when the barrels have reached their limits, the wood is burned (and damn it smells fantastic).

Scraped? They scrape out two or three layers of wood out of the inside of each barrel as needed. A typical barrel of theirs lasts up to sixty-four fermentations. The grapes sit in the barrels fermenting for a whole season.

Slicing someone's head off is probobly a lot harder then you might think, but that's what makes guns kinda lame and swords awesome. I mean some people are really good with guns and are still impressive, but most of the time guns just seem boring to me.

Being suitably dramatic can help magic for sure, but it can be fickle sometimes and you can't just pull a huge explosion out of your ass when ever you need it. Like I said, it needs to be balanced carefully. It's like making a game really. You can make magic do whatever you want but if you just make yourself OP your gonna get yourself nerfed one way or another. So there needs to be some type of limit or flaw. That's why magic always tends to cost something. Some kind of MP, time, reagents, HP, sometimes more extreme things. The whole 'MP' thing tends to be the easiest to deal with I think. Really I think that game-like stats are a pretty good abstraction for things sometimes, even if it can get a little bit silly.

Of course, magic isn't really completely 'real'. It's mostly or maybe entirely 'unreal'. That means you can pretty much make up any kind of rules you want. But you need some kind of way for you to limit it, some kind of rules, for it to really work.

When I actually translate what most consider to be magic from my native tongue to English, it really translates as 'sorcery'.

Sorcery is the art of using the aether to do something that most others would not necessarily be able to, such as cast something/someone aflame, freezing them solid, encapsulating them in stone, concealing something in a cloak of invisibility, healing sickness in an instant or very quickly, among many other things.

Things like disappearing acts, card tricks, illusions and such are not sorcery, they're mind tricks.

Mind you, one can use sorcery to do a lot of the mind tricks you see on TV, but most of the magicians know how to manipulate what their audience sees, not manipulating/using aether specifically.

Of course, pyrotechnics involving machines that are broken/fried by EMP, that cause detonations of rockets in an enclosed area (video above), that's neither mind tricks nor sorcery; it's internal combustion and technology. lol

Hehe, I don't think 'mind tricks' and 'sorcery' are as different as you might think. You could say the fairy idea of magic is more like pulling a 'mind trick' on reality it's self, or remembering that what seems to be 'reality' is mostly a mind trick it's self. Using 'aether' is one way of doing that, but not the only way. After all, regardless if 'aether' is real or unreal, that's not where the magic is. The magic is in the manipulation not the thing being manipulated. :3

Naw, Daggerfall has tons and tons of lore actually. Mostly in the form of books and quest text and stuff. About the only thing lore-wise Morrowind really did ever so slightly better was NPC interaction. In Daggerfall most NPCs were static sprites that didn't do much more then give you random quests or show a generic conversation screen you can ask about stuff in, or were randomly generated people who randomly walked around town with purely generic dialog. Morrowind had more dynamic NPCs and from what I remember has a bit more NPC specific dialog, though a lot of it was still generic.

That's really Morrowind's problem in a nutshell: I respect the decision to focus on fleshing out a smaller area more, but it does it in a really half-assed way and still manages to be pretty generic regardless. I mean, I already mentioned Ultima 6 and 7. In those games everything feels crafted and filled with personality, even most of the dungeons and other side areas. Nearly every NPC feels unique and have their own schedules and tasks, even the shopkeepers and other townsfolk.

Or to put it another way: Daggerfall's world was kinda shallow, and it seems to me that's because it was frigging huge and mostly procedurally generated (not at runtime, every game of Daggerfall has the exact same world, but the world was mostly built using procedural generation you can tell). Morrowind's world was kinda shallow, and it seems to me like it's purely because it's lazily designed and poorly written. I guess you could say that even though Morrowind is trying hard not to be like Daggerfall, it still feels like Daggerfall in all of the worst ways while all of the interesting stuff that made Daggerfall great was stripped out.

I even sort of have a soft spot for the first game in the series: Arena. Arena's combat is pretty shit, it's RPG Mechanics are boring, and it seems even more generic in lots of ways then even Daggerfall (and it's not that detailed graphicly), but man is it fun to randomly go out and explore in that game. In Daggerfall there are a lot of set areas on the map with something in them, but between them is basically lots of random featureless terrain. There is little to no reason to actually walk around randomly in the wilderness instead of fast travailing everywhere. In Arena their are less set areas on the map, but the random wilderness outside them is a lot more interesting.

Arena also takes place across the whole of Tamriel rather then a particular region like the other games. It's kind of interesting seeing the basic blueprint of the whole continent (one they have mostly stuck to), being able to both go to places that would be fleshed out in more detail later and going to places that are still only mentioned in the later games like Black Marsh and Elsweyr.

True, very true.

With each new entry, there's more and more lore added. Some of it makes sense, some, not so much. As far as combat goes, TES has crap combat, I won't lie. It is some of the worst combat I've ever come across, even worse than the likes of Unreal.

Yeah, procedurally generated landscape and world. It was clever at the time but hasn't aged well. It works better for other games and game genres like shooters.

I mean, I like procedural generation. I think it would be much more interesting if Daggerfall procedurally generated more stuff on the fly like Arena rather then basically just using it as a development tool to make a static world, and the dungeons should have been waaaay smaller (Daggerfall Unity does have a hidden smaller dungeons option though which makes most dungeon quests less tedious) and/or less confusing (mostly a problem with how the dungeons were built in 3D and how the automap worked, I would have rather seen them use a much more distinct flat 2D structure with multiple distinct floors and a more readable 2D automap). Other then that, as aged as the game may look in places it can also be pretty dang amazing. Mostly I like the scale of it's cities. It's probobly one of the few games I know of where going into a city actually feels like going into a city and not a small town with at most 10 to 20 people living there. Heck, if anything the major cities could have been even bigger! Kinda wish you could auto travel to individual buildings/landmarks though.

Yeah, it seems pretty neato! Don't really have a camera, but I am not going alone so maybe I can share some pics? No promises. Hehe...

Damn! Sounds fantastic, love.

If ya do get some pics, be sure and share, especially those with you in them (even if just with me privately lol)

I'm just poking fun. Seriously, hope you have a blast. Actually, you might even be better off not returning until after the government is eliminated from the equation but that's neither here nor there...

Maybe after you're all rested up from your break, you'll finally get back into gamedev.

Yeah, I guess I have been a bit lazy with my game lately... And we will see about pics. If I am in them I would have to be in my ugly human disguise though. :3

You know me, I always like big Ds.

And V's, lolz

And both at once!

I think Epic Rap Battles would be a better idea

Well the thing you have to remember is, and I admit the video I linked is not a example of this, there is absolutely no reason why they would calmly take turns. Instead it would be more like melodies and counter melodies as they both reacted to each other's song, focusing on directing the over all feeling of the piece as a whole, tripping up each other with complex rhythmic patterns, and so on. Rap is just not anywhere near complex enough. Heck at that level using meaningful words at all is basically impossible. You have to just let the music flow chaotically while doing your best to shape it in a general direction. Doing stuff like that is basically what jazz is all about. I mean music based magic typically isn't used in direct combat exactly because it can be easy to disrupt, counter, or cause to go wild. But it sounds hella fun to watch/listen to a battle like that!

Well, I can think of six non-jazz songs that accomplish this well...

But they're all from one game series so...

They're all Guitar Battles, three from Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock, one from GH Aerosmith and the other two from Guitar Hero World Tour (though those are in-game functionally different)

Guitar Battle vs. Tom Morello
Guitar Battle vs. Saul Hudson aka Slash

Guitar Battle vs. Lou (Metal cover of The Devil Went Down To Georgia as performed by Stephen Ouimette)

Guitar Battle vs. Joe Perry

Guitar Duel vs. Zakk Wylde

Guitar Duel vs. Ted Nugent

There was supposed to be a Bass Duel vs. Sting, but that was cut (Guitar Hero World Tour).
(the video this links to is the song you play along with Sting - he's in the vocalist's placement while playing bass and it is the original version of Demolition Man before studio fading and rendering)

Don't know if I ever will though... I would want to at least finish my current project and who knows how long that will take!

Can't do everything alone. Well you can, but it's usually not the most efficient way. Would take me years to complete any of my serious projects. Legacy Frontier suffered the same fate as Overworld. It outgrew my core skill level. I can no longer make that game on my own without ruining it, or taking so long it won't even matter by the time it's done.

It's not easy but I'm looking for a little project to give myself some experience now.

Though teams have their own problems. Probably the best way is having a large community around a project that can help out from time to time, but that's hard to do. Anyway as much as it would be nice if I had someone to help out on my project in some ways, it's probobly not going to happen any time soon. So I will do what I can on my own and not worry so much about what I can't do for now.

Well, progress of any kind is always good.

I'll be getting back to mine soon. Not sure about today but...

I think the best I can do is keeping to plug away at it when I feel like it. Not like I am in a rush, it's not exactly a game in high demand. :3

That's what I am trying to do. I will make it through, but obstacles are everywhere and I keep running into them...

Yes yes! I use a ridiculously heavily modified version of this, and even have a really old version on my widdle blog somewhere... Though it's only for VX Ace so if you were hoping for a MV plugin I can't help you there. Really everything I do is for VX Ace and I don't think I will ever really get into MV. I have been tempted before to sorta ditch RPG Maker altogether and use Java and/or JRuby to make my own engine thingy, but it's rather hard to make a new engine and I already got so much done with VX Ace...

Anyway, the game I am working on is basically a fully fledged Mystery Dungeon style roguelike at this point, though there are still lotsa features I need to work on. There are a few things I definitely want to do differently (like shops for example, I always thought the 'on map shop' thing was more trouble then it's worth and rather just use a good old fashioned menu), but the basic template of my game is based on the Mystery Dungeon games, especially resembling the original SNES Shiren the Wanderer game. A lot of modern Mystery Dungeon games are faaaar too soft sometimes I think! Am I the only one that actually likes having to identify items? It's a fairly important core feature of the genre and so many modern roguelikes just don't seem to want to do it or don't get the point.

I want random dungeon crawls for 2 game concepts.

I want a dungeon in Legacy Frontier that does random floors to keep the player on their toes, and provide an area for grinding akin to the Bio Research Lab, that also produces random chests on a semi-consistent basis as well.

I also want to do random bunker raids for a apocalypse game I have in mind.

I am on Ace as well. MV doesn't have as many resource options or plugins. And the non-commercial tiles can be easily resized for Ace.

Sounds neat! The way dungeons work in my little game can be quite complicated and involves a lot of scripts that can be way too interdependent sometimes, so it might not be that suitable for a lot of people to though.

Ah, I see, lol

Thing is, one could recreate some games that have that kind of mechanic with that kind of coding.

Like, for one example, Casper (PSX/SS).

Hehe, well, the basic idea is that all characters/events have a 'map_passable?' method that can be aliased and stuff. The $game_player object even uses it to change what tiles you can pass through when you are in a vehicle. I just made one that let me choose different conditions and checks.

Neat.

It would be cool to have a game where one could turn invisible and as a result, be able to phase through solid objects...