That One NPC

Hell. Yes. This is why I love Loose Leaf sprites.
 

 

 
 
I was worried about Loose Leaf hair parts not being enough to sprite generated faces, but a lot of chibi bangs can be used. They aren't perfect, but they work. 

I'm not in the proper state of mind to be a contributing member of a board right now. Before I take my leave from the community, I just want to apologize to anyone I may have upset or offended. I'm not one for excuses, but given my recent temperament, you need to know I'm not usually an abrasive dickhead. 2019 has done everything in its power to destroy me. From losing my job when the company I worked for shut down facing a management scandal, to my dad's lungs failing him slowly, to my mom being diagnosed with not one, but two forms of cancer, it has just been riding my case. Like an old Chevy, I'm beaten up and worn down, but all I can do is keep going. My mother is the strongest woman on the planet, always has been. Met my father serving in the Canadian Armed Forces. G.I. Jo (Joanna). Seeing her so skinny and weak she can barely leave her bed to use the washroom, well, it just takes the wind out of my sails.

Anyway. I'm out. Sorry for being a dick. I'm old enough to know better, just stopped caring for a while there.

I'm not in the proper state of mind to be a contributing member of a board right now. Before I take my leave from the community, I just want to apologize to anyone I may have upset or offended. I'm not one for excuses, but given my recent temperament, you need to know I'm not usually an abrasive dickhead. 2019 has done everything in its power to destroy me. From losing my job when the company I worked for shut down facing a management scandal, to my dad's lungs failing him slowly, to my mom being diagnosed with not one, but two forms of cancer, it has just been riding my case. Like an old Chevy, I'm beaten up and worn down, but all I can do is keep going. My mother is the strongest woman on the planet, always has been. Met my father serving in the Canadian Armed Forces. G.I. Jo (Joanna). Seeing her so skinny and weak she can barely leave her bed to use the washroom, well, it just takes the wind out of my sails.

Anyway. I'm out. Sorry for being a dick. I'm old enough to know better, just stopped caring for a while there.

Many of you probably noticed that I did a bit of re-branding over the weekend. Loco Choco Games was going to be the name I released everything under. I never intended to give myself any form of credit, at any point, for anything. It was just going to be, L.C.G., those involved, and credits for materials used.
 
I came to the harsh, soul crushing realization that I'm not ready to put out any form of game yet. I may have been messing with RM titles since '95 for the Playstation, but messing, flirting,  toying around with, are the key words. Most of my story ideas ended up in RP format, where you can flesh everything out that much more from moment to moment. The structure changes in game format almost completely. It's totally different context compared to literature.
 
Despite all my romancing with these programs, I never completed a game...nowhere even remotely close, lol. I never had enough time as a youngster, even a young adult. I actually have less going on at 33 than I did at 23.
 
That being said, I figured I'd just get something done, because how hard can it be, right? The editor does roughly 70% of the actual work, outside of mapping, so how hard, can it really be?
 
When you care about quality and integrity as much as I do, it's practically impossible with my skillset. I could make a game with a great story line and great characters, but it's for shit if the game is fundamentally imbalanced, or buggy. It's difficult for me to keep up with today's hyper-informed experts on everything technical, who will rip a game to pieces based on specs alone, not even based on game play or story line.
 
So I've decided to toss such notions aside. I never thought I would be that super star who does everything by themselves, that's just not how game development of any kind works. We can look at the pros and realize this pretty quickly. Those who take 5-10 years to develop a game alone, were still foolish to have done so, they just got lucky. But now I'm faced with the reality that, everyone is doing their own thing, hoping to be that next self-made, independent super star developer. All you keep hearing is, "Group projects are a total mess." Well no, actually. Logic tells us group projects are the best, because that's how professional games are made. You have an expert do a single job, because they specialize in it... They just do it better than you. So it must be the RM user, on average, who is a total mess. As someone looking to make serious, serious games that do more than say I did, because I could, this is very disheartening.
 
For now I will figure out what to do, if anything. My fate may be a simple story writer, who writes stories for other people. Only time will tell, I suppose.
 
 
 
 

Since you have been making me think of SaGa Frontier, it reminded me of a old idea I had for a SaGa Frontier-like game myself, one that was harder scifi then SaGa Frontier was. I kinda thought it would be neat to do a game involving actual space travel, but at a more realistic scale then a lot of scifi does. So the basic idea I came up with basically can be summed up as: "What if there was a solar system much like ours, only instead of just one planet where life evolved it was two?" Maybe one slightly further away from the sun as Venus causing it to be more tropical, and one slightly closer to the sun then Mars, causing it to be more frigid.
 
I think it would be interesting to think about how things might be different...
What if people from both planets spent most of their history looking up at each other and wondering?
What if they excitedly observed each other for hundreds of years, maybe one day established basic radio contact near the dawn of both planet's industrial revolution?
What if the technological development of space technology was pushed forward on both sides out of a dream of one day making contact?
What if that dream one day happens?
Then what if one day space travel becomes common place, and space stations and outposts are built near or on many nearby planets or moons?
And maybe... What if both races inexplicably look a lot a like in many ways?
What if they both have ruins depicting similar dragon-like creatures?
What if both races can use something like 'magic', but it's slightly different?
And those who live in space can't use magic at all (because 'mana' is produced by the planets), but may develop a form of 'phionics' instead?
 
Hehe, I had all sorts of wacky ideas... I didn't end up doing anything with it though.

Not RPG related necessarily, but I know I can't be the only retro gaming junkie here.
If you're ever in the west side of the Denver Metro Area and are in the hunt for a new-old game...
There's a place called Game Fortress.





 
 

I did it! I finally got my silhouette things to look like I want it too!
 

 
Phew, I just hope it's fast enough to be practical. I basically coded a method to return a list of rects covering a tile's transparent areas which I can be used to trim away parts of the shadow not covering the tile.

Phew, I just made something that I am sure 99% of people would find completely useless: A script that lets me set font sizes in VX Ace based on the size of a font's 'M' character.
 
Why bother? Well first of all it seemed to me like different fonts with the same size can look radically different and this way it's a bit more uniform, and also mkxp has some buggy font rendering code (Or VX Ace does, one of the two) and this way I can make my game's fonts about the same look about the same size in mkxp.

...
I think that someday...
I'll have a better grasp on all this...
Until then...
...That wall is begging me to bang my head against it...

Made some 'older' Ness sprites with Loose Leaf parts.
 


 
I thought the batting glove was a nice touch.

Free Music Archive has been a treasure trove of non-commercial attribution music. The radio for Legacy Frontier is going to be so addictive I might have to add an mp3 player type item, as the car isn't easy to actually obtain.
 
 

I really love when script authors leave out important details on how the scripts, script calls and notetags work. It's so much fun as a novice trying to figure things out when what you're really needing to do is actually move forward in your game development instead of trying for a long ass time to figure out how one little thing works...

I finally got a laptop! But...of course...it can't run any of the RPG Makers. Sigh.