RPG Maker 2003: now even MORE legal!
The Word by Sara Groves
Hi all. Not a great deal to talk about in regular work-a-day life this month. The end of the summer semester and the start of the fall one are coming up. I look forward to a couple weeks when I should be able to get quite a lot done, but then things should get busier than they've been. Sayonara, natsumi.
I wound up spending most of what time I had for game dev this month on the DynBattleDisplay plugin again. When I tried to drop it into Forgotten Gates, it caused memory access errors. :P I suspected this was due to the fact that FG uses "transforming" monsters, and I was right, but not for quite the same reason I thought. It didn't help that when I tried using the simple demo RM2K3 project I made for DynBattleDisplay to test the plugin with monster transforming, it didn't cause any apparent problems. Even worse, when I added debug code to try and trace when the crash was happening in FG, the exact point of failure would change depending on how much debug code was present. X)
Eventually though, I noticed that even the demo project was getting some minor graphical glitches in response to monsters transforming, even if it wasn't crashing. It turns out that when a monster in RM2K3 transforms, it keeps its current HP and MP, even if they're more than the maximum for its new form. DynBattleDisplay was calculating the width of HP and MP bars to be more than 100%, and as a result was reaching into memory beyond what was allocated for the bar images. This was especially egregious in FG because the "initializer" monsters I use for setting up battles have the most HP and MP possible. X) So I fixed it such that the bars could only go to 100% at most...and then I added a couple other features, seeing as I needed to re-release the plugin anyway. X9 There's now an option to show the exact amount of HP/MP as a number, and to make the display show while the player is pointing at a particular battler.
Oh, something I should've thought to show off last month: Mituni on TF drew up a title screen pic for the game, and I added the title text to it along with a mock-up window of what a typical MUCK scene might look like (as much as I could show in such a small space). :) It's possible we'll tweak it a little further, but for the most part this should be the face of the game from now on.
Also, some encouraging news in the RPG Maker world: they've released an addendum to RPG Maker 2003's End User License Agreement, allowing the use of modifications to the program. :D This basically means that DynRPG and similar patches will be legal for use, even if you're selling the games made with them (although there's a registration process involved with that). Selling the patches themselves still isn't allowed, but I'm fine with that, it wouldn't be worth the potential hassle. A version of DynRPG to patch the official English RPG Maker 2003 has yet to be made, but I'm confident it eventually will be, particularly since the guy who made DynRPG spearheaded this deal.
TF has been down for a while. I finally got some heads-up on why, apparently the headwiz is looking for a new host because the current one was getting too expensive. I e-mailed her to suggest moving to a forum- or blog-based venue might not be a bad idea, but for now it's just a wait-and-see matter.
On NMR, a big plot called the Recluse War (or more accurately that's the final arc of it) has recently been wrapped up. It started out as the personal plot of one of the players, who later became a clan head, and eventually was given a GM bit, so more and more people got involved as time went on. The final part was pretty straightforward, as so often happens when you're trying to run a plot for lots of random people; it could be summed up as, "We finally found the main base of operations for the baddies thanks to hand-waved off-stage interrogation, let's go trash 'em." X) And there was much explosions and slashing and fireballs and all that fun stuff for those involved.
Meanwhile, another GM is making a concerted effort to run a plot for Iwagakure. It started with a scene about a group of mystery zealots attacking a village and trying to recruit new members from the surviving townsfolk, then spouting cryptic "You've already lost even if you kill us" stuff at the ninja who showed up to retaliate. Awkwardly, there were more "visiting" Konoha nin at the scene than Iwa nin. X) But we won't be likely to get more Iwa nin if there's no activity for Iwa, so...
Ratchet & Clank Future: The Quest for Booty:
This one might've been an experiment in episodic gaming. It's a download-only title (or at least, there was no disc release of it in the US) and pretty short, having little real bearing on the overall plot of the series. One of the later games in the series (specifically Into the Nexus) came packaged with a voucher code for Quest for Booty, so I got it for free. n.n
It's pretty standard Ratchet & Clank fare, and a little more basic than its near cousins, since it doesn't have the length to get complex. Most notably, there are no custom upgrades for weapons, and little in the way of gaining new ones. They start you off with "level 3" versions of some of the weapons from Tools of Destruction, which you can upgrade to "level 5" through usage.
Bottom line? A brief romp that's certainly worth the play, but of course the best way to get it is to pick up a copy of Into the Nexus and make sure it includes the voucher code. ;)
Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time:
This one is a full game of the series, and one that I enjoyed quite a bit. :) Ironically, though, the part I enjoyed the most was the side-stages. Between the primary plot-driven stages, you can cruise around a space sector in your ship and stop at small moons. It's a bit like Super Mario Galaxy in that these moons are small enough to walk completely around, although not so small that you can jump off and practically orbit them -- in practical terms, they're still flat areas, just with wrap-around exploration. Some of them have a set number of enemies to defeat, some of them have platforming obstacle courses. All of them provide one or two collectibles -- a golden bolt, a Zoni who can help upgrade your ship, a mod for a certain weapon, etc. Interestingly enough, what really seemed to make this aspect of the game so wonderfully relaxing for me was the fact that there were radio stations available from the ship, and it would continue playing uninterrupted as I wandered about the sector and stopped at different moons. It tied together what otherwise would have been separate mini-challenges, and it produced a sense of unhurried progress, especially when I was tuned in to the smooth jazz station. X)
Another aspect of the game that felt pretty good was the weaponry this time around. The biggest improvement, ironically, is that there were less weapons than in the previous (main) game, filling up two circles of eight slots rather than three circles. This meant that there were fewer redundancies in the styles of weapons and thus less weapons that were essentially more powerful versions of earlier-earned ones. It also meant that there were less weapons to spread experience points amongst and thus they were easier to upgrade. That may have been largely influenced by the fact that I decided to play this installment on hard difficulty, though. More enemies means more experience points, and also more currency -- I never had to save up to buy weapons after they became available.
Finally, I would be remiss if I didn't mention that Ratchet and Clank spend the majority of this game separated from each other, and Clank has occasional stages with a largely puzzle-oriented nature. Most importantly, there are rooms with time-manipulation pads which allow you to record up to a minute's worth of actions, then do something else from another pad while the first pad sends a ghost-you to repeat what you did before. The puzzles using this get pretty cerebral for this series, requiring some forethought and memory. Oh, and Clank gets a time scepter with which he can whack broken things to restore them to their pristine state. An interesting inversion of the smash everything mentality to which so many games, including the Ratchet & Clank series in general, subscribes.
Bottom line? An entry in the rarely-disappointing Ratchet & Clank franchise, and one of the best ones IMHO. Grab it if you can.
Phoenix Wright, Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies:
I tried to save this game mostly for occasions when I knew I'd need my 3DS to last as long as possible between charges, or times when other games would be similarly inconvenient. Eventually I wound up playing a little bit of it at the end of most days while winding down for sleep, though. X)
For the most part, this is just yet another entry in the Ace Attorney series. It's significantly more hand-hold-y than most of its predecessors, though. Much of the time, especially early on, you aren't even given the option of deciding where to go next; the game will take you from one scene to another without asking for permission. Also, instead of making "Examine" an option in every scene, it's reserved for very specific scenes, which means you'll spend a lot less time poking at this-might-be-something-important-or-at-least-entertaining spots on the screen. It's somewhat justified in that most of the scenes you can Examine are 3D spaces which you can view from several different angles, so obviously setting up every scene to be that way would've been a lot of work. The game also tells you when you've found all the plot-important bits in a given scene. They even added a "Consult" option that gives you a hint narrowing down your choices if you make several mistakes in a row during court scenes.
The big new game mechanic is the special ability of the Wright Agency's newest lawyer, Athena Cykes. During certain courtroom testimonies, she'll bring up a system displaying the emotional reactions (happy, sad/scared, angry, or surprised) of the witness during different parts of the testimony. Your task is to figure out when a particular emotion (or lack thereof) doesn't match up with the words of the testimony. It's an interesting occasional diversion, though usually fairly obvious.
Oh, and they avoided fanservice in this one too...except in the paid-DLC bonus episode. That features a punk rock-esque defendant who wears a midriff-baring T-shirt and short-shorts, with a bit of her underwear showing. e.e On the whole it's not as bad as some of the other outfits in the series, but it's a step backwards from Apollo Justice.
Bottom line? Not the greatest Ace Attorney game of all time, but far from the worst, and even the worst is worth playing. Grab it, especially if you see it go on sale.
Finding Teddy:
I put this and its sequel on my birthday wish list because the second one looked like an homage to Adventure of Link, a game which I thoroughly enjoyed aspects of despite its obvious flaws. I neglected to double-check the first game, and it's actually a completely different style -- point-and-click adventure. X) That's okay though.
Finding Teddy has some of the usual find-X-and-use-on-Y mechanics, but it uses a musical note system almost as much for puzzles. It's hard to describe how it works without a huge "spoiler", but that spoiler sort of makes the game unplayable and frustrating until you figure it out anyway, so I'm going to drop it here. On the off-chance you want to play this little indie offering without hints of any kind, stop reading now.
...Still here?
The notes correspond to letters of the English alphabet. Once you realize that, you can even recognize the squiggly runes you see on walls and such as English letters. Barely. c.c You learn words and phrases from the game world, then use them to solve certain puzzles. Badda-bing, badda-boom. It's not a very long game, unless you get hopelessly stuck. I essentially completed it in one sitting, with occasional Internet help.
The primary appeal of the game is its charm...which is of a rather dubious nature. -.-a It's an old-school pixel-art graphic adventure with a minimalist style even for pixel-art, although the animation is pretty smooth. The protagonist is a cute (in a slightly ghostly sort of way) little girl searching for her teddy in a fantasy world reached through her wardrobe. The dubious part is...there are a few places where this little girl can die. It's not a huge setback, it'll just fade out and then put you back at the point just before the death, but they put a fair bit of effort into animating her demises...and most of the game's achievements are awarded for steering her into these dooms. -.-; For reference, the most disturbing death animation involves her being impaled through the middle by the stinger of a giant wasp. It's not very "graphic" in the sense that there's no blood shown or anything, but still...poor little girl, getting stabbed, swallowed, smashed, etc. so that gamers can get achievements. c.c;
Bottom line? It's mostly an "art" piece, not especially challenging or engaging, although the unique mechanic is a little interesting. Get it if you want to blow a few bucks and hours on something bemusing.
Click to viewHi all. Not a great deal to talk about in regular work-a-day life this month. The end of the summer semester and the start of the fall one are coming up. I look forward to a couple weeks when I should be able to get quite a lot done, but then things should get busier than they've been. Sayonara, natsumi.
I wound up spending most of what time I had for game dev this month on the DynBattleDisplay plugin again. When I tried to drop it into Forgotten Gates, it caused memory access errors. :P I suspected this was due to the fact that FG uses "transforming" monsters, and I was right, but not for quite the same reason I thought. It didn't help that when I tried using the simple demo RM2K3 project I made for DynBattleDisplay to test the plugin with monster transforming, it didn't cause any apparent problems. Even worse, when I added debug code to try and trace when the crash was happening in FG, the exact point of failure would change depending on how much debug code was present. X)
Eventually though, I noticed that even the demo project was getting some minor graphical glitches in response to monsters transforming, even if it wasn't crashing. It turns out that when a monster in RM2K3 transforms, it keeps its current HP and MP, even if they're more than the maximum for its new form. DynBattleDisplay was calculating the width of HP and MP bars to be more than 100%, and as a result was reaching into memory beyond what was allocated for the bar images. This was especially egregious in FG because the "initializer" monsters I use for setting up battles have the most HP and MP possible. X) So I fixed it such that the bars could only go to 100% at most...and then I added a couple other features, seeing as I needed to re-release the plugin anyway. X9 There's now an option to show the exact amount of HP/MP as a number, and to make the display show while the player is pointing at a particular battler.
Oh, something I should've thought to show off last month: Mituni on TF drew up a title screen pic for the game, and I added the title text to it along with a mock-up window of what a typical MUCK scene might look like (as much as I could show in such a small space). :) It's possible we'll tweak it a little further, but for the most part this should be the face of the game from now on.
Also, some encouraging news in the RPG Maker world: they've released an addendum to RPG Maker 2003's End User License Agreement, allowing the use of modifications to the program. :D This basically means that DynRPG and similar patches will be legal for use, even if you're selling the games made with them (although there's a registration process involved with that). Selling the patches themselves still isn't allowed, but I'm fine with that, it wouldn't be worth the potential hassle. A version of DynRPG to patch the official English RPG Maker 2003 has yet to be made, but I'm confident it eventually will be, particularly since the guy who made DynRPG spearheaded this deal.
TF has been down for a while. I finally got some heads-up on why, apparently the headwiz is looking for a new host because the current one was getting too expensive. I e-mailed her to suggest moving to a forum- or blog-based venue might not be a bad idea, but for now it's just a wait-and-see matter.
On NMR, a big plot called the Recluse War (or more accurately that's the final arc of it) has recently been wrapped up. It started out as the personal plot of one of the players, who later became a clan head, and eventually was given a GM bit, so more and more people got involved as time went on. The final part was pretty straightforward, as so often happens when you're trying to run a plot for lots of random people; it could be summed up as, "We finally found the main base of operations for the baddies thanks to hand-waved off-stage interrogation, let's go trash 'em." X) And there was much explosions and slashing and fireballs and all that fun stuff for those involved.
Meanwhile, another GM is making a concerted effort to run a plot for Iwagakure. It started with a scene about a group of mystery zealots attacking a village and trying to recruit new members from the surviving townsfolk, then spouting cryptic "You've already lost even if you kill us" stuff at the ninja who showed up to retaliate. Awkwardly, there were more "visiting" Konoha nin at the scene than Iwa nin. X) But we won't be likely to get more Iwa nin if there's no activity for Iwa, so...
Ratchet & Clank Future: The Quest for Booty:
This one might've been an experiment in episodic gaming. It's a download-only title (or at least, there was no disc release of it in the US) and pretty short, having little real bearing on the overall plot of the series. One of the later games in the series (specifically Into the Nexus) came packaged with a voucher code for Quest for Booty, so I got it for free. n.n
It's pretty standard Ratchet & Clank fare, and a little more basic than its near cousins, since it doesn't have the length to get complex. Most notably, there are no custom upgrades for weapons, and little in the way of gaining new ones. They start you off with "level 3" versions of some of the weapons from Tools of Destruction, which you can upgrade to "level 5" through usage.
Bottom line? A brief romp that's certainly worth the play, but of course the best way to get it is to pick up a copy of Into the Nexus and make sure it includes the voucher code. ;)
Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time:
This one is a full game of the series, and one that I enjoyed quite a bit. :) Ironically, though, the part I enjoyed the most was the side-stages. Between the primary plot-driven stages, you can cruise around a space sector in your ship and stop at small moons. It's a bit like Super Mario Galaxy in that these moons are small enough to walk completely around, although not so small that you can jump off and practically orbit them -- in practical terms, they're still flat areas, just with wrap-around exploration. Some of them have a set number of enemies to defeat, some of them have platforming obstacle courses. All of them provide one or two collectibles -- a golden bolt, a Zoni who can help upgrade your ship, a mod for a certain weapon, etc. Interestingly enough, what really seemed to make this aspect of the game so wonderfully relaxing for me was the fact that there were radio stations available from the ship, and it would continue playing uninterrupted as I wandered about the sector and stopped at different moons. It tied together what otherwise would have been separate mini-challenges, and it produced a sense of unhurried progress, especially when I was tuned in to the smooth jazz station. X)
Another aspect of the game that felt pretty good was the weaponry this time around. The biggest improvement, ironically, is that there were less weapons than in the previous (main) game, filling up two circles of eight slots rather than three circles. This meant that there were fewer redundancies in the styles of weapons and thus less weapons that were essentially more powerful versions of earlier-earned ones. It also meant that there were less weapons to spread experience points amongst and thus they were easier to upgrade. That may have been largely influenced by the fact that I decided to play this installment on hard difficulty, though. More enemies means more experience points, and also more currency -- I never had to save up to buy weapons after they became available.
Finally, I would be remiss if I didn't mention that Ratchet and Clank spend the majority of this game separated from each other, and Clank has occasional stages with a largely puzzle-oriented nature. Most importantly, there are rooms with time-manipulation pads which allow you to record up to a minute's worth of actions, then do something else from another pad while the first pad sends a ghost-you to repeat what you did before. The puzzles using this get pretty cerebral for this series, requiring some forethought and memory. Oh, and Clank gets a time scepter with which he can whack broken things to restore them to their pristine state. An interesting inversion of the smash everything mentality to which so many games, including the Ratchet & Clank series in general, subscribes.
Bottom line? An entry in the rarely-disappointing Ratchet & Clank franchise, and one of the best ones IMHO. Grab it if you can.
Phoenix Wright, Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies:
I tried to save this game mostly for occasions when I knew I'd need my 3DS to last as long as possible between charges, or times when other games would be similarly inconvenient. Eventually I wound up playing a little bit of it at the end of most days while winding down for sleep, though. X)
For the most part, this is just yet another entry in the Ace Attorney series. It's significantly more hand-hold-y than most of its predecessors, though. Much of the time, especially early on, you aren't even given the option of deciding where to go next; the game will take you from one scene to another without asking for permission. Also, instead of making "Examine" an option in every scene, it's reserved for very specific scenes, which means you'll spend a lot less time poking at this-might-be-something-important-or-at-least-entertaining spots on the screen. It's somewhat justified in that most of the scenes you can Examine are 3D spaces which you can view from several different angles, so obviously setting up every scene to be that way would've been a lot of work. The game also tells you when you've found all the plot-important bits in a given scene. They even added a "Consult" option that gives you a hint narrowing down your choices if you make several mistakes in a row during court scenes.
The big new game mechanic is the special ability of the Wright Agency's newest lawyer, Athena Cykes. During certain courtroom testimonies, she'll bring up a system displaying the emotional reactions (happy, sad/scared, angry, or surprised) of the witness during different parts of the testimony. Your task is to figure out when a particular emotion (or lack thereof) doesn't match up with the words of the testimony. It's an interesting occasional diversion, though usually fairly obvious.
Oh, and they avoided fanservice in this one too...except in the paid-DLC bonus episode. That features a punk rock-esque defendant who wears a midriff-baring T-shirt and short-shorts, with a bit of her underwear showing. e.e On the whole it's not as bad as some of the other outfits in the series, but it's a step backwards from Apollo Justice.
Bottom line? Not the greatest Ace Attorney game of all time, but far from the worst, and even the worst is worth playing. Grab it, especially if you see it go on sale.
Finding Teddy:
I put this and its sequel on my birthday wish list because the second one looked like an homage to Adventure of Link, a game which I thoroughly enjoyed aspects of despite its obvious flaws. I neglected to double-check the first game, and it's actually a completely different style -- point-and-click adventure. X) That's okay though.
Finding Teddy has some of the usual find-X-and-use-on-Y mechanics, but it uses a musical note system almost as much for puzzles. It's hard to describe how it works without a huge "spoiler", but that spoiler sort of makes the game unplayable and frustrating until you figure it out anyway, so I'm going to drop it here. On the off-chance you want to play this little indie offering without hints of any kind, stop reading now.
...Still here?
The notes correspond to letters of the English alphabet. Once you realize that, you can even recognize the squiggly runes you see on walls and such as English letters. Barely. c.c You learn words and phrases from the game world, then use them to solve certain puzzles. Badda-bing, badda-boom. It's not a very long game, unless you get hopelessly stuck. I essentially completed it in one sitting, with occasional Internet help.
The primary appeal of the game is its charm...which is of a rather dubious nature. -.-a It's an old-school pixel-art graphic adventure with a minimalist style even for pixel-art, although the animation is pretty smooth. The protagonist is a cute (in a slightly ghostly sort of way) little girl searching for her teddy in a fantasy world reached through her wardrobe. The dubious part is...there are a few places where this little girl can die. It's not a huge setback, it'll just fade out and then put you back at the point just before the death, but they put a fair bit of effort into animating her demises...and most of the game's achievements are awarded for steering her into these dooms. -.-; For reference, the most disturbing death animation involves her being impaled through the middle by the stinger of a giant wasp. It's not very "graphic" in the sense that there's no blood shown or anything, but still...poor little girl, getting stabbed, swallowed, smashed, etc. so that gamers can get achievements. c.c;
Bottom line? It's mostly an "art" piece, not especially challenging or engaging, although the unique mechanic is a little interesting. Get it if you want to blow a few bucks and hours on something bemusing.