quick updatey thing for those of you still following us:

Conquest isn’t dead lol, but it’s ok if you’ve come to that conclusion if you’ve followed for a while and are wondering where we disappeared to. Long story short: this is my last semester of uni so focus has been elsewhere for a little bit, but we’ll pick the game back up again when we can.

In the meantime if you like platformers we’ve got another game we’re developing right now for a uni project called Birdened - you can find some of the development progress here if you want to check it out. Otherwise cheers for all the encouraging words and note and follows so far, it’s been really rad.

Small update today. My final assignments are all due in the next week, so I’m looking forward to getting back into development properly. In the meantime I decided to break my coding drought with this small fix this evening. The above screenshot is a bug caught in the process.

Last week we decided the message system was a little annoying. On one hand, the regular speed was too slow. UMS provides a skip option called “WRITE_ALL” which will display the entire message, but this makes it easy for players to miss dialogue when trying to make things go a little faster.

All I wanted was a way to write dialogue a little faster. To do so I quickly found that you can’t just multiply or add to the current text_speed - text speed in RPG Maker denotes the amount of frames between writing each character. Since you can’t just bump up the framerate, the solution is to output multiple characters for each frame -- as long as you check the next character is not nil. Else you’ll get weird formatting errors like the screenshot above.

Decided we needed a breath of fresh air from working on trains every day, so knocked out the bulk of this map over the last day in between assignments. Kudos to Carly for whipping most of these sprites up in the last two days.

Maps are a very iterative process, but the gif above is basically how I work. I start with the function of the map, with careful thought put into where I want players to move and the kind of journey they’ll take to get there. 

Made a few small changes over the last couple of days in between assignments. Here’s a shot of one of the train’s hallways. There’s still a few things that will get fixed up later, but for now managed to

fix up the sprite sheet so that the halls look a little less monotonous. 

added animated sliding doors for each cabin

added sound effects for the doors and some other interact-able items.

Slowly been iterating the train station -- here’s the train Carly sprited a while ago in amongst the rest of the scenery. 

Managed to meet up yesterday and sort out a few things in the game for the first time in a couple of weeks. We’ll update more on the other stuff over the next few days/weeks, but for now here’s a lossy gif of some turnstiles we finally implemented for the train station.

Uni assignments continue to be shit and an almost complete timesink, but it’s okay because Carly continues to be rad with new game assets. She whipped these trees up the other day which I’m pretty dang happy with, just a matter of throwing them in the engine now.

It’s come to my attention that we haven’t really posted many of these so... hey, here’s a sketch dump of some of the rough NPC concept art Carly’s worked on. Some from the past week, some from a fair while back.

So our last post was exactly a month ago today. Oops!

I’ve been pretty busy with university work still, and to be honest we both took a bit of time off for uh, “inspiration” by working on costumes for a couple of conventions. But we’ve settled down a bit now, and are slowly getting back into the gamedev routine. Working on the game is a lot cheaper than buying physical materials, at the very least.

Here’s a new train sprite Carly made yesterday. The next step is fitting it into the station and overlaying some door tiles. The challenge will be in creating a sprite we can move during transitions, but that the player can also interact with properly while moving around on the platform. Probably not the hardest thing we’ve tackled yet, but I’m still wary of the problems this might present later on.

I’ve got a couple of assignments due in the next two weeks, but we’re going to endeavor to get back to daily updates as soon as we can, promise. :)