@mother4game / blog.mother4game.com
Hey everyone! It's been a while since we've posted - sorry about that. Shortly after we announced we'd be ceasing the scheduled updates we started to receive a lot more questions than usual, so tonight we'll be answering some of them, and sneaking in some relevant images.
Without further ado, here's our answers!
What happened? It's fine. It looks good.
Work continues on animating and piecing scenes together. Max and Pik are doing a real bang up job on pushing these efforts forward! The team's even been keeping in touch during connection blackouts so feedback and work can happen simultaneously no matter what.
Tonight, we're working on some assets for saving.
Belring is a bit unique, it has a post office where you can learn about how to save. When you save, you use a postcard. It shows up on the file select, so it's easy to tell where you are at a glance. Post cards are being designed by WaHoL, whose illustrations have been in previous updates, and Pastel. First, WaHoL paints them, and then Pastel makes a sprite. It goes like this:
Hey everyone! Something different but not entirely different today.
So, we were gonna put out a small Father's Day update about Leo since he's in his thirties and is probably the only dad-aged member of the team, but wound up stumbling into more scheduling problems. This kind of got us thinking and talking about the nature of our updates.
Since the intention of this update process is both to provide content for you and accountability for us, pushing late updates isn't the best way to achieve either of those goals. Earlier we announced the nature of them to be what we're working on right now, but we wound up pushing for more and more content in each update, and fell back into the previous style again.
Over the following weeks we'll be changing gears back to a smaller, more frequent, not quite scheduled update format because whatever reasons may come up it's never a good scene when you folks are left waiting for the show to start.
Leo in the same situation might be another story. That might look nice.
Expect this shift of gears to begin before the month is up!
Hey everyone! We're booked with stuff outside the game, so we're going to have to move our usual blog post to next week. We know you all look forward to these posts, so we apologize for having to move it back. Thanks for your understanding.
Hey again! It's time to show what we've been working on. A big thing we're happy about is that now we can do things like this:
That's not a thing Zack would actually say though.
Hey everyone! Tonight is a bit of a polish update, with some work from a few of the guys. The word 'editing' comes up a lot when thinking of this week's theme.
Evening, everyone! This update is about an effect that we had a lot of thinking about that we finally hashed out over the weekend.
Happy belated Earth Day! Spring is in the air if you're in the northern hemisphere, so we have some nature enemies to show you. These are enemies that have all been created and drafted today for the same general area.
Hey all, Pik here with a very little bit on mapping!
...But we talked about that in the past, right? Tonight I've been working on a little exception to our usual rules of mapping. While most of our interiors can be made with our generalized room tilesets, unique rooms also pop up that need an extra attention to detail. The process for this is a little different from our norm.
Howdy folks, Dave here.
I've been working on details lately. I haven't got much time to write this up, so I'll spare you the details on these details and just show them to you. Take a gander at these gifs:
Hey everyone! It's been two weeks, and we're hard at work. Today, I'll be talking a bit about what I've been up to. Just in case you missed last week's closing line, today your update's coming from me, Pastel. As I discussed earlier, part of what I do is writing, and that's what I've still been doing a lot of - other than PSI animations.
Hello everyone. It's time for another little update, this time coming from our sound department. We had planned to let Shane handle this one, but his internet left us at a bad time. Regrettably we'll have to manage without him... You might already have noticed, but he's been working on mastering our whole soundtrack. A temporary soundcloud has already been updated with mastered tracks!
Happy Vaneltine's Day, we hope your holiday season went well and has been winding down comfortably! It's been a while since we've been in touch.
To change that, we're planning on starting up these blog posts to come every other Sunday with a more focused look on the things we're working on in the moment, rather than the general descriptions of how what we're working on is done. For example, tonight we'll be showing off some scripting tests taking place in Pennyburg.
Today's update is about one of the things that players will be spending the most time with: Enemies
Part of what makes Mother special is the sheer number of unique enemies in the game. Discovering the enemies when you enter a new place is half the fun, and something we focus a lot of time on getting right. (We wrote about how we create enemies a couple months ago.)
If you look back at previous mother games, we can see how the number of enemies has grown and how the style has changed:
"We'll see you next week on Wednesday," right?
You might notice we're a bit late. We ran into an issue with palette swapping between day and night, which was unexpected. It wasn't a huge issue in Belring, but somewhere along the line junk colors accumulated in La Folia's tileset. While it has around 64 actual colors, when we were processing it Spriteman would return around nearly two hundred. We spent all night trying to figure it out and figure out why the color orders were changing and why we had so many extras, but in the morning we managed a solution thanks to Dave.... though it did require some time and work to implement.
This kind of thing happens.
Evening, folks - we're trying something new, so bear with us.
Today we're working on a hotel - or is it a motel? Hotel or motel aside, it's a place you can sleep and talk to people.
Here's an example of what backgrounds are made of - some tilesets are fairly simple when compared to their assembled forms.
