IGMC 2017 and The What-Iffers in: Final Fancy
Shellfie from Splatoon
Hi all. This has been a very busy month for me due to a certain event: RPG Maker Web's Indie Game Maker Contest 2017. I decided to toss my hat in since I didn't have a job to keep me from committing the dev time. That's why this post is almost a week late.
I offered myself on the RPG Maker Web forum to participate in a team project, but I only got a couple of nibbles and only one of them was for the contest. So I decided to make my own game, with a reachable scope for a solo project done by a guy whose main strengths are programming and writing. I've been pondering for a while starting a series of games around the theme of role-players parodying popular games. This seemed like a good place to start. For what to parody, though, I had to keep strongly in mind my limited scoping, particularly in regard to graphical assets. I don't have the time or talent to be making my own, after all, so I had to use what was already available in the RPG Maker engines...which is primarily geared toward high fantasy. So my first game wound up being a Final Fantasy parody called The What-Iffers in: Final Fancy.
I call it a parody, but this one at least is rather light on references to the source material. It's mainly just poking fun at role-playing in general. It's also not mechanically very similar to the source it's parodying, which I expect to be the case for most if not all What-Iffers titles going forward. Final Fancy is an action-puzzle game about using the abilities of four different heroes to navigate a variety of stages. It's sort of a cross between Adventures of Lolo and The Lost Vikings, if you happen to be familiar with both of those.
Implementing the game mechanics took by far the bulk of my development time. Some of them were simple enough that I could do them in ordinary RPG Maker MV eventing, like boulders to push around for classic sliding-block puzzles. Other aspects, though, like projectiles and the effects they had, required combining that with a JavaScript plugin. This was actually my first serious attempt to use JavaScript. The language itself isn't too hard, but finding the right commands for manipulating the RMMV engine wasn't easy. I spent a lot of time poring over the base engine code to try and figure things out. Later I found a listing on the RPG Maker Web forum that gives a lot of the most useful function calls, although even it wasn't perfect.
The deadline for submission was midnight November 5th PST. I wound up working to finish off the last few stages and submit the game until an hour before that, 2 AM my time. Unfortunately, today I found out that a few sound files were not included in my deployment. X) Apparently if a media file is used by the plugin but not by anything in the RMMv game database, the deployment tool will miss it. Makes sense when you think about it, but not something obvious. This probably means my game will be disqualified from the contest. X) Not that I expected to win or anything. I can't update the game submission until after the contest, but I've put a link on the game page to a .zip file containing the missing sound files and instructions for fixing the game.
If you'd care to give The What-Iffers in: Final Fancy a try, here's the game page. I do intend to make some improvements to it though, including adding funny dialogue for each stage, so if you'd rather get the "full" experience, you might want to wait. It should only take about half an hour to replay the game, though.
On the Zelda RPG, there's been a lot of villainous activity lately. I introduced my new villain NPC, Dorjan the wizzrobe, by having his undead army assault Hyrule Castle Town at night. Just for fun, I had Dorjan humming a variant on This is Halloween to himself as things began...and then I ended up bringing his minions in on it as the scene progressed. X) They were just a diversion anyway so that Dorjan could go steal an artifact.
Time-bubbled to a bit after that scene, Ganondorf has made his move! The purplish-black ooze from Breath of the Wild called malice has come flooding out from the Termina portal into Castle Town. :o All the heroic characters have been busy trying to hold it back, evacuate townsfolk, shore up defenses at the castle proper, and speculate on what this stuff is and how it might be dealt with. This is exacerbated by the fact that our Ganondorf player has been very busy IRL with PAX Australia and has only been able to give us occasional updates on what effects the sludge is having. X)
NMR is OFFICIALLY SHUTTING DOWN! 8O The server owner posted on our admin board to note that keeping the lights on is costing him money every month and he wonders what the situation is. I replied with an apology, explaining that I thought NMR was just one of several MUs he was hosting, and if it's directly costing him money he should definitely pull the plug. He hasn't been back on to see that reply yet, but NMR's days are officially drawing to a close. I'm still hoping to start up something new, but it probably won't be NMR 3.0. Might not even be a MUSH.
There's also been a new scene on the Pokemon Retreat forum between Sandra and a new character called Anna. Of course, Sandra-player is the only person I know of who reads this LJ, so that's hardly news. ;)
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild:
Ohhhh man, where to start. X) As you've probably heard, Breath of the Wild is a bit different from other Zelda titles. Whereas most Zelda games give you a new piece of equipment in each dungeon (and a few in between) that are flat-out required to overcome certain obstacles, BotW gives you the basic tools you'll need in the first tutorial-esque section of the game. The rest is a matter of building up enough optional advantages -- armor, heart containers, weaponry, etc. -- to make taking down Ganon feasible. It would theoretically be possible to crash Hyrule Castle right after the tutorial chapter and win straight away, and I'm tempted to do it as a challenge sometime. Take out the Guardian robots with well-timed shield deflections, dodge the monsters until I can grab some decent weapons inside, battle my way up to the sanctuary, and take on Ganon...all without taking a single hit that could wipe out my feeble three hearts with no armor to speak of. X)
Anyway, while BotW doesn't regress all the way back to the original LoZ, turning you loose in an open world with no direction besides what you might read in the manual, it does hold your hand a lot less than any other title since A Link to the Past. The world is a dangerous place, especially early on in your run, and you should expect to die A LOT. Fortunately death is usually not a huge setback, as the game auto-saves fairly often. It is possible to lose some subtle things, though, like if you take a picture of a boss to put it in your compendium, lose to said boss, and then forget to take the picture over again (pro tip: manually save after taking the picture).
There are only four main dungeons in the game, and they all have very little in the way of combat, relying mainly on puzzles to challenge the player. However, there are over 100 mini-dungeons called shrines scattered around the sprawling overworld. Beating four shrines will earn you an extension to your life or your stamina, your choice. Personally, I focused heavily on stamina early on, and it's hard to say whether it was a wise choice. On the one hand, there are hazards in the game that can easily knock TEN hearts off you, especially before you've managed to upgrade your armor a bit, so more hearts doesn't help that much until you've got a LOT more hearts. More stamina, on the other hand, makes climbing quicker and easier, and you'll do a LOT of climbing in this game. Still, I did die an awful lot early on, some of which might have been mitigated by a little extra health. Also, you're not allowed to draw the Master Sword from its pedestal until you have a certain number of hearts.
While you do have all you technically need to go (almost!) anywhere right after the tutorial chapter, the game does soft-gate certain areas by making the environment hazardous without certain armor. Death Mountain is too burning, Gerudo Desert is too hot (which is different somehow), and mountainous areas are too cold. You can get around this by cooking up meals and elixirs that give you temporary resistance to these conditions, or shoot, just carry around enough healing meals to combat the gradual health loss. But unless you're doing some sort of sequence-breaker run, it's less hassle to get the armor.
One other random thing I wanted to talk about: I HATE RAIN in this game. XP Rain's primary effect is to make climbing almost impossible. Link will slip back after a semi-random amount of climbing, losing almost as much ground as he gains on average. There is a little trick for overcoming this: after climbing about four handholds, do a jump toward your destination. You'll definitely slip after the jump, but it "locks in" the progress you made before. This method eats up a ton of stamina, though, so you can only use it for relatively short climbs. Anyway, rain pretty much just serves as a random occurrence to make getting around harder or perhaps impossible until it goes away on its own. There are a few other little effects, such as lightning weapons being more effective during rain and certain critters coming out during it (which is to say they don't come out when it's not raining, making for another restriction you can't control). On the whole, I'd call it a case of taking the survival realism a bit too far, stifling the more important aspect of gameplay.
To wrap up, here are a few tips I wish I'd known from the beginning:
If there's a tutorial for learning how to cook, I must have missed it. You have to go into your inventory, "hold" the items you want to cook up, then exit the inventory and drop them into a cooking pan. For the most part, the cooking system is pretty simple: you choose one ingredient for its special property, like attack boost, cold resistance, etc., then add on as many as four non-special ingredients to increase the dish's health restoration and special property duration. Trying to mix two different special properties will give you something that just plain restores health. There are some special recipes for fun, mainly used in side quests. Late in the game, when you've got lots of hearts, the main thing you'll want to cook are "hearty" ingredients one at a time, because they fully restore your health and give you a little extra overcharge. Who really cares about the overcharge when you're getting topped off, though?
Catching things (bugs, lizards, etc.) doesn't require any special equipment, and in most cases you don't have to go around to their blind side or anything. Just go into a crouch, scuffle up to them, and press A when the name of the critter appears. Importantly, THIS INCLUDES FAIRIES. It's counter-intuitive that you have to crouch to catch them when they're floating above your head, and all previous Zelda games have taught us that fairies are instantly used if you touch them without some sort of net or bottle, but not in this game.
When you encounter something that adds a 'shrine quest' to your list of pending quests, it's worth looking into whether you can go find that shrine immediately. Occasionally these shrines have especially useful rewards, like pieces of armor that make climbing quicker and easier. :o
Bottom line? It's difficult, time-consuming, and a bit light on story and the other things we've come to expect from a Zelda title, but very rewarding once you build up some steam. If you have any appreciation for challenge in games, definitely get Breath of the Wild.
Click to viewHi all. This has been a very busy month for me due to a certain event: RPG Maker Web's Indie Game Maker Contest 2017. I decided to toss my hat in since I didn't have a job to keep me from committing the dev time. That's why this post is almost a week late.
I offered myself on the RPG Maker Web forum to participate in a team project, but I only got a couple of nibbles and only one of them was for the contest. So I decided to make my own game, with a reachable scope for a solo project done by a guy whose main strengths are programming and writing. I've been pondering for a while starting a series of games around the theme of role-players parodying popular games. This seemed like a good place to start. For what to parody, though, I had to keep strongly in mind my limited scoping, particularly in regard to graphical assets. I don't have the time or talent to be making my own, after all, so I had to use what was already available in the RPG Maker engines...which is primarily geared toward high fantasy. So my first game wound up being a Final Fantasy parody called The What-Iffers in: Final Fancy.
I call it a parody, but this one at least is rather light on references to the source material. It's mainly just poking fun at role-playing in general. It's also not mechanically very similar to the source it's parodying, which I expect to be the case for most if not all What-Iffers titles going forward. Final Fancy is an action-puzzle game about using the abilities of four different heroes to navigate a variety of stages. It's sort of a cross between Adventures of Lolo and The Lost Vikings, if you happen to be familiar with both of those.
Implementing the game mechanics took by far the bulk of my development time. Some of them were simple enough that I could do them in ordinary RPG Maker MV eventing, like boulders to push around for classic sliding-block puzzles. Other aspects, though, like projectiles and the effects they had, required combining that with a JavaScript plugin. This was actually my first serious attempt to use JavaScript. The language itself isn't too hard, but finding the right commands for manipulating the RMMV engine wasn't easy. I spent a lot of time poring over the base engine code to try and figure things out. Later I found a listing on the RPG Maker Web forum that gives a lot of the most useful function calls, although even it wasn't perfect.
The deadline for submission was midnight November 5th PST. I wound up working to finish off the last few stages and submit the game until an hour before that, 2 AM my time. Unfortunately, today I found out that a few sound files were not included in my deployment. X) Apparently if a media file is used by the plugin but not by anything in the RMMv game database, the deployment tool will miss it. Makes sense when you think about it, but not something obvious. This probably means my game will be disqualified from the contest. X) Not that I expected to win or anything. I can't update the game submission until after the contest, but I've put a link on the game page to a .zip file containing the missing sound files and instructions for fixing the game.
If you'd care to give The What-Iffers in: Final Fancy a try, here's the game page. I do intend to make some improvements to it though, including adding funny dialogue for each stage, so if you'd rather get the "full" experience, you might want to wait. It should only take about half an hour to replay the game, though.
On the Zelda RPG, there's been a lot of villainous activity lately. I introduced my new villain NPC, Dorjan the wizzrobe, by having his undead army assault Hyrule Castle Town at night. Just for fun, I had Dorjan humming a variant on This is Halloween to himself as things began...and then I ended up bringing his minions in on it as the scene progressed. X) They were just a diversion anyway so that Dorjan could go steal an artifact.
Time-bubbled to a bit after that scene, Ganondorf has made his move! The purplish-black ooze from Breath of the Wild called malice has come flooding out from the Termina portal into Castle Town. :o All the heroic characters have been busy trying to hold it back, evacuate townsfolk, shore up defenses at the castle proper, and speculate on what this stuff is and how it might be dealt with. This is exacerbated by the fact that our Ganondorf player has been very busy IRL with PAX Australia and has only been able to give us occasional updates on what effects the sludge is having. X)
NMR is OFFICIALLY SHUTTING DOWN! 8O The server owner posted on our admin board to note that keeping the lights on is costing him money every month and he wonders what the situation is. I replied with an apology, explaining that I thought NMR was just one of several MUs he was hosting, and if it's directly costing him money he should definitely pull the plug. He hasn't been back on to see that reply yet, but NMR's days are officially drawing to a close. I'm still hoping to start up something new, but it probably won't be NMR 3.0. Might not even be a MUSH.
There's also been a new scene on the Pokemon Retreat forum between Sandra and a new character called Anna. Of course, Sandra-player is the only person I know of who reads this LJ, so that's hardly news. ;)
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild:
Ohhhh man, where to start. X) As you've probably heard, Breath of the Wild is a bit different from other Zelda titles. Whereas most Zelda games give you a new piece of equipment in each dungeon (and a few in between) that are flat-out required to overcome certain obstacles, BotW gives you the basic tools you'll need in the first tutorial-esque section of the game. The rest is a matter of building up enough optional advantages -- armor, heart containers, weaponry, etc. -- to make taking down Ganon feasible. It would theoretically be possible to crash Hyrule Castle right after the tutorial chapter and win straight away, and I'm tempted to do it as a challenge sometime. Take out the Guardian robots with well-timed shield deflections, dodge the monsters until I can grab some decent weapons inside, battle my way up to the sanctuary, and take on Ganon...all without taking a single hit that could wipe out my feeble three hearts with no armor to speak of. X)
Anyway, while BotW doesn't regress all the way back to the original LoZ, turning you loose in an open world with no direction besides what you might read in the manual, it does hold your hand a lot less than any other title since A Link to the Past. The world is a dangerous place, especially early on in your run, and you should expect to die A LOT. Fortunately death is usually not a huge setback, as the game auto-saves fairly often. It is possible to lose some subtle things, though, like if you take a picture of a boss to put it in your compendium, lose to said boss, and then forget to take the picture over again (pro tip: manually save after taking the picture).
There are only four main dungeons in the game, and they all have very little in the way of combat, relying mainly on puzzles to challenge the player. However, there are over 100 mini-dungeons called shrines scattered around the sprawling overworld. Beating four shrines will earn you an extension to your life or your stamina, your choice. Personally, I focused heavily on stamina early on, and it's hard to say whether it was a wise choice. On the one hand, there are hazards in the game that can easily knock TEN hearts off you, especially before you've managed to upgrade your armor a bit, so more hearts doesn't help that much until you've got a LOT more hearts. More stamina, on the other hand, makes climbing quicker and easier, and you'll do a LOT of climbing in this game. Still, I did die an awful lot early on, some of which might have been mitigated by a little extra health. Also, you're not allowed to draw the Master Sword from its pedestal until you have a certain number of hearts.
While you do have all you technically need to go (almost!) anywhere right after the tutorial chapter, the game does soft-gate certain areas by making the environment hazardous without certain armor. Death Mountain is too burning, Gerudo Desert is too hot (which is different somehow), and mountainous areas are too cold. You can get around this by cooking up meals and elixirs that give you temporary resistance to these conditions, or shoot, just carry around enough healing meals to combat the gradual health loss. But unless you're doing some sort of sequence-breaker run, it's less hassle to get the armor.
One other random thing I wanted to talk about: I HATE RAIN in this game. XP Rain's primary effect is to make climbing almost impossible. Link will slip back after a semi-random amount of climbing, losing almost as much ground as he gains on average. There is a little trick for overcoming this: after climbing about four handholds, do a jump toward your destination. You'll definitely slip after the jump, but it "locks in" the progress you made before. This method eats up a ton of stamina, though, so you can only use it for relatively short climbs. Anyway, rain pretty much just serves as a random occurrence to make getting around harder or perhaps impossible until it goes away on its own. There are a few other little effects, such as lightning weapons being more effective during rain and certain critters coming out during it (which is to say they don't come out when it's not raining, making for another restriction you can't control). On the whole, I'd call it a case of taking the survival realism a bit too far, stifling the more important aspect of gameplay.
To wrap up, here are a few tips I wish I'd known from the beginning:
If there's a tutorial for learning how to cook, I must have missed it. You have to go into your inventory, "hold" the items you want to cook up, then exit the inventory and drop them into a cooking pan. For the most part, the cooking system is pretty simple: you choose one ingredient for its special property, like attack boost, cold resistance, etc., then add on as many as four non-special ingredients to increase the dish's health restoration and special property duration. Trying to mix two different special properties will give you something that just plain restores health. There are some special recipes for fun, mainly used in side quests. Late in the game, when you've got lots of hearts, the main thing you'll want to cook are "hearty" ingredients one at a time, because they fully restore your health and give you a little extra overcharge. Who really cares about the overcharge when you're getting topped off, though?
Catching things (bugs, lizards, etc.) doesn't require any special equipment, and in most cases you don't have to go around to their blind side or anything. Just go into a crouch, scuffle up to them, and press A when the name of the critter appears. Importantly, THIS INCLUDES FAIRIES. It's counter-intuitive that you have to crouch to catch them when they're floating above your head, and all previous Zelda games have taught us that fairies are instantly used if you touch them without some sort of net or bottle, but not in this game.
When you encounter something that adds a 'shrine quest' to your list of pending quests, it's worth looking into whether you can go find that shrine immediately. Occasionally these shrines have especially useful rewards, like pieces of armor that make climbing quicker and easier. :o
Bottom line? It's difficult, time-consuming, and a bit light on story and the other things we've come to expect from a Zelda title, but very rewarding once you build up some steam. If you have any appreciation for challenge in games, definitely get Breath of the Wild.