After redrawing Garrett’s portrait, pixeling a boss, and putting together the moveset and behaviors for it and all the other little trash mobs, the Albium Forest dungeon is finally done. And then I decided to have a little bit of fun and have the dialogue kind of comment on it, in a way.
An underground game room and bar.
This was originally a quick warmup to experiment with multicolored lighting and making shadows with script calls instead of picture overlays, but now I kind of want to keep it in the final game :)
A WIP test screenshot of what I've been up to lately with Catharsis--recoloring tiles in order to make the upcoming tundra and snowy areas. For areas that don’t have a lot of snow like the one pictured here, I tried to create a “cold” feeling by recoloring stuff blue-ish without resorting to blindingly bright snow tiles until later on.
I’ve been working on these on and off for the past few weeks or so, but they’re pretty much done now, passabilities and all! :)
How's the game coming along? :)
Whenever I get the time to work on it, I’ve been doing mostly non-visual stuff like writing scenes, rewriting them, and adding more enemies from my notes to the database. There’s not much that really warrants a blog post, I think... :/
Fallen leaves in the town of Infinium. Since it’s the first day of fall where I live, I just thought I’d post something fitting for it.
what if we're just all wasting our time here and the hours i put into keeping up my blog prove to be fruitless? i feel like i got into this because I'm incompetent at comics and don't have the patience to do animation, but does what i produce with this engine matter in the long run? is rpg maker a crutch or a tool? somedays, I feel like nothing I produce is worth sharing.
A small excerpt from a later cutscene in Catharsis, in which Moshi confesses her true feelings for Leiko.
After finally finishing a couple of dungeons that were absolute hell to create and test, writing this scene was like a little treat to myself, and also--hopefully--to anyone else out there who wants to see more f/f pairings in games too. :)
This progress post is pretty heavy on the technical side!
After transferring just over 300 sets of notetags from my notes to the game itself, I've finally completed adding all the crafting recipes and special effects for the weapons, armors, and items that needed them.
Although some items like poisons, bombs, and devices can be created, I wanted to make Catharsis’ crafting lean toward an upgrade system of sorts. Most characters get 4 unique weapons and armors, which can be upgraded up to 3 times after getting the Schematic with the same name. Each upgrade gradually unlocks a set of secondary effects for it. For example, this is the progression of "Rosethorne", one of Leiko's guns:
Level 1
Level 2
Level 3 (final)
Most weapon and armor upgrades require an item called the Ascendant Star. The Stars will be sort of rare and an attempt to give the player meaningful choices, while also slowing them down from overleveling their stuff too early.
Other than that, I've also been trying to work around or fix some script incompatibilities that I didn't know how to before releasing the current demo. I also found that the "Persistent Data" script that kept system settings the same for all save files was somehow causing severe lag in battles, so it'll be removed in future releases.
Pet peeve: the fact that horror RPG Maker games are the only RPG Maker games that people ever care about.
Remi looks further into Sebastian’s memories, trying to figure out what has been haunting the poor boy for some time...
This is from the “Dream Factory” dungeon, which is finally nearing completion (excluding bug testing). I love the new horror tileset on the RMW store; its clutter tiles were perfect for the dingy industrial tone I’ve been trying to go for!
Hey, a bit of a script/technical question here. Played your new demo and saw you implemented Luna Engine too. How did you manage to get Galv's New Item indicator to work? I haven't been able to get it to work with any of the Luna sample engine set-ups, nor my own. Did you edit something?
I had to move Galv’s script above all the Luna Engine scripts to make it function. From what I’ve seen while testing, other menu-editing scripts might need to be above Luna to work at all, but it depends on the script.
Sorry for taking way too long to answer this! Tumblr didn’t give me notifications for anything; I think I somehow got logged out of the site for a while without realizing it. :(
A small progress update. I’ve been making slow but steady progress on the “Dream Factory” dungeon. After overthinking it for too long, I’m just like “screw it” and implementing the maps and dialogue in now. I’m also attempting to draw in the painted RTP style to make some custom stuff for it too.
Breaking the work down into little to-do tasks helped increase my productivity!
Catharsis has been updated to version 0.20!
Info about the game, as well as the new demo download, can be found at http://rpgmaker.net/g/catharsis.
This update includes:
This is mainly a technical update since the previous demo from a couple of years ago contained an old menu & battle UI, as well as other stuff that’s since been removed. For those who have played the game before, please note that the plot in this version still ends at that same place.
The demo’s length is about an hour long. Thanks for noticing, hope you like it! :)
A quick testing screenshot of the new battle UI. It’s black and gold like the menu screens now!
I’m also planning on releasing an update to Catharsis’ demo because it’s very outdated. It should be done by or before the end of the month if nothing bad comes up!
Productive procrastination: when you end up finishing all the walksprites for all the major characters because you really don’t want to work on that one dungeon you've been putting off
Here are some more screenshots of Catharsis’ redesigned menus, because I FINALLY FINISHED ALL OF THEM, YAY
Most of it is made with Luna Engine as well as my own small script edits to modify the menus and windows that Luna doesn’t affect. Next I’m going to work on finishing the battle interface, and then try to get myself back on track.
Some walking sprites. I've also been learning how to use PyxelEdit and I think I already like it better than GraphicsGale, despite some quirks.
