#fallingstargames

(can you believe this used to be overgrown with blackberry bushes?)

Back at the main garden, everything is taking off and I have no idea how to harvest most of these plants so the cilantro already bolted+flowered and I still have a few yellowed spinach leaves in my back pocket.

(I have a feeling I probably planted the radishes wrong but shrug)

The dill however has turned out excellent, to the point that my employers are slightly jealous. I gave them one stalk so far and my boss showed me how to make a really nice sardine open face sandwich with dill in return:

- one can of boneless sardines - fresh dill to taste - fresh lemon juice to counteract the fishiness - half a cup of chopped onion - vinegar to taste - probably some other things I forgot about too - and obviously some good bread (I like the big kind that has wheat and seeds in it. Regular wheat is too flavorless for my tastes and don’t even get me STARTED on the blandness of basic-ass white bread.) mix all ingredients as you would a mix for tuna sandwich. Slap your mix onto a nice piece of bread and enjoy!

I got one to eat and it was so freaking good. And because this time I didn’t rush ahead and try to eat an entire can of sardines, I didn’t get overstuffed!

There’s something very satisfying about growing and eating your own herbs. Being able to improve the quality of your own food in a very personal way. I’m absolutely considering figuring out how to add herb farming to the game later on, though thankfully Pane’s stand can just make plants grow underfoot, making wait times unnecessary to plan out.

So now for the main course. Writing has been slow, but fortunately it has progressed past Ironways and has been transcribed by Dice up to the escape scene so far. The basic custom menu system has finally been put together! (thank you Orochii)

(what will you do, Frie? what will you do??)

Thankfully, he made it very easy to use. I prettied it up a bit with a nice looking cursor.

Next thing I need to do is figure out how to dynamically set the options, which I can tell is theoretically possible (will involve some concat usage on the string variable probably), but it will take some dedicated work to figure out where to pull the elements together from.

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

As far as eventing/scenario, I've been stuck on the setting introduction scene for a very long time and have only just recently reached the point where I can see the end of it. The memo interleaving bit had to be figured out on a concept level before it could be implemented, but I think it's set up pretty well now. I also got sidetracked while exploring other options that maniac patch had added to the most recent version. Did you know that you can make messages way way longer if you choose to do so now? Did you know that there are advanced options for animated facesets? Did you know you can change the freaking resolution???

Did you know I'm (probably) not using those for regular gameplay?

Yeah, I had to remind myself of that too. gotta keep the scope as tight as possible on a scope creep nightmare like this game. it's already grown to the point that I worry it's going to take longer than Narcodis had taken on developing The Looming Spire, which appears to have similar gameplay to what this game might one day have.

But yeah, stress and lack of free time heavily impacted development in May.

(rip in pythen)

However, most of the work was actually done on planning out the custom battle system, which is looking to be something particularly elaborate, if I can wrap my mind around how to structure the back-end of it in a sufficiently extendable manner. As it appears now, there will be two rows with three slots each, a front row for direct attackers and tanks, and a back row for long distance casters and support units. ideally, party member placement will be important for party synergy, according to party member bonds (which can potentially be one sided!)

(big owie is a state many have entered across all time)

Also, there will not be traditional level-ups, but rather the skills used will level up with repeated use, giving access to variants in that particular category, depending on how much you used a skill type.

There will also be a context-sensitive "tactics" menu, for actions and maneuvers that will only be options for that particular battle. most likely they will require use of a "strategize" skill in order to unlock during battle, which will be most useful for back-row party members (since they won't get interrupted by attacks quite as much) Ideally, a party member with a high enough bond with another can strategize and act as a tactician for another, allowing one party member to unlock tactics for another, which would be really really cool.

Another interesting thing is how the hp system will operate. Zero percent HP or lower means that a combatant has fainted and under normal circumstances cannot fight actively. Crucially, hp will be able to go as low as negative 100 percent, and as high as 200 percent. If any combatant goes outside of that bounds, they Die Forever. If it's a party member, that's an instant game over. However, ideally you won't need to worry too much about that. Just make sure you keep your party above the fainting threshold (0%) and keep Pane from overhealing himself to death. If all party members are fainted, then you lose the battle, but there may be softer redo mechanics in that case. You don't need any fancy revives to go back from the fainting threshold, though a cured fainting might be upgraded to asleep if the party member isn't woken up by something in the process of being healed above 0 percent.

Another important thing is that food items do not direct heal HP, it instead impact fullness and morale, which augment natural healing methods to HP and SP (spoons). Pane will usually be the only one who can directly heal HP, which will probably make him very busy, but crucially, his power does not impact any other stats other than HP. Just like in Snowball's Chance, this game will have the cast from HP conversion in case you run out of HP. But you will not be able to actively cast anything or eat anything in faint state. (however, there's always indirect methods...) Something important toolwise, is that I figured out a good way to use flash 8 for setting up and debugging picture movement sequences!

I will however cover that in a different post, because it's pretty involved. Regardless, it helped a LOT with a particularly complex move picture sequence and it will certainly come to great use later on as well.

So regarding what to do this month, I want to put together a bare bones prototype of the battle system. one that can be upgraded as time goes on. Another thing I want to do is get the Town Map area working enough to work with, and set up a basic pause menu. I also want to assemble the "mage's quest" cutscene.

in case anyone's been wondering, my garden is now planted and thriving! it took a while, especially since I also had a LOT of blackberry bushes to fight for that ground soil. granted, the local soil is kinda clay/silt flavored, but I think it'll work fine with the rest of the different types of dirt. If I need some sand, there's two bags of paving sand available, but I don't think I need that. The important part is that I now have all the fresh cilantro I could ever ask for.

I love cilantro. That is all there is to say on the matter.

With gardening stuff out of the way, let's get to gamedev. trying to make a follower system was a trainwreck. the main reason being that there doesn't seem to be an effective method to detect a tile with a collision, or at least if there is, I haven't found it yet. I struggled for like, 2 or 3 weeks before I finally just put that away for later to focus on other things.

as for the menu stuff, Orochii has yet to deliver, as it appears he's become enthralled with an entirely different personal project that is in 3D. (I think this is the one?) I don't expect results from him, considering this is all voluntary work, but if he finds the inspiration and drive, the task is still on the docket.

hashtag dy'lan poasting again (except you can't put apostrophes in hashtags because they're delineated by single quotes in the first place rip)

In regards to actual progress, I made the most headway on less technical things such as assets and mapping, though the work of one person will always be slow when there's a dayjob involved, even if it was a month with more days off than usual.

The garden got most of that, plus having to contend with my sense of focus and drive being very selective. Also home distractions, due to my brother and my mom and my stepdad being awake and active and loud in ways that make it difficult for me to focus on anything. There were multiple times when all I could say is "I hate my brother" because I was getting overstimulated by his music choices and also stressed out by the fact that he was using my headphones and laptop and he always freaking loses or breaks my things if I don't watch him like a fucking hawk. Fortunately, my equipment survived and I got my nerves back from a long walk.

Thing I actually typed in a commit during this time: "coda stop trying to walk into the wall blair witch project looking ass"

But yeah, a lot of npc's bumping into chairs and really sucking at pathfinding because I really such at logic and math. The emote animations were much much easier to implement, having already made them before and whatnot. Just a solid night or two of busywork. Those were added pretty quickly.

transportalizers :b

I also managed to add a working transportalizer pad 2 part disappearence animation! It's so freaking cool! I used the alterniabound sprites and recolored them green. Not sure why they were in silver in that walkaround, especially when green makes them more apparent and reflects that they're powered via sburban uranium (as opposed to actual elemental uranium).

fun fact: idraw3 is very useful for checking if a walk cycle actually looks good in motion! I highly recommend it... if you're using indexed colors.

There was a lot of work on charsets! I finally got Kale's walking sprites finished, as well as making some single frame standing sprites for Dy'lan and Gray. I also added some more voice bips, using Dy'lan's bips from hycheld and fabricating Gray's from samples taken from the raw recording of the elevator argument. Dice did the voicework for that and I gotta say, they have a nice voice.

Eventually, after hardcoding the npc movement (aough), I finally managed to finish the Land of Skyscrapers and Darkness section! After that, I needed to think a lot about how to structure the next part, and honestly I'm still sorta working it out. The most that's been confirmed is that it involves a picture-based cutscene. The dialogue, of course, has already been written and imported, it just needs to be put to pictures.

Soon I'll be able to finally add Ett's artwork! I added a number of details to this particular pic manually.

Also, it turns out that the latest freshest version of maniac patch vastly upgrades the message box input! it has a freaking monospace letter count ruler! It has text in a big enough size to see on an average sized screen (in 2026 standards rather than 2006 standards)! it has click to add tags, just like that really cool message formatting website, and it has an option to add instant-appearance tags to the first line! Granted I see no need to do that even though I am using first line for name, but it's cool that's an available option!

Also the extra commands are a nice way to access some things that were previously only available via TPC. Especially considering that TPC is very cryptic looking without comments. I'm used to code that's more readable and less shorthand, like rgss1. I do wish that the new stuff could be rearranged in the command list like everything else, but shrug, maybe something for a later version.

As for how to get the most recent version, you'll need to join the manipa discord server to download it. While it's mainly in japanese, there is a growing group of english speaking users who show up there. Also the patch does come in both english and japanese versions, so no worries on that end.

Snacks: Let's make a snack! Meals: Let's get cooking! Chemicals: We need to cook.

While slowly tackling scene writing with Dice (who has been dutifully converting the logs to usable form all this time, thank you for that), I think I've managed to figure out some schema stuff in regards to gameplay structure. It will involve very abstracted location overview maps, indicators for which party members are in which locations, ability to follow particular unlocked characters, and a mix of walkable up-close places and cutscenes. The overview map stuff is necessary because while I want to show these places off, I don't want to have to go full detail with them, or make them seem a lot smaller than they ought to be. I am only going to have the locations that are relevant by some measure being explored deeper, while offering a lot of room for the player's imagination to run wild without feeling trapped by the tangible limits of where they can run around.

Recently picked up the new tomodachi life game to watch my blorbos interact. It brings me joy. I really like the drawing editor in this game.

I feel like feeding the player's mind in this way is important, as it gives the setting more room to grow beyond the current gameplay scenario that's being explored, without overscoping the work too much.

As for what comes next, I'll need to assemble that scene, see what else needs to be drawn. Then finish the map of unity village, at half size, since full size is larger than it needs to be. After that, work on some music in the few moments I get with enough quiet and calm to focus on musical composition. and then maybe try again with a menu thing, and probably cramming a pre-made caterpillar system, since those at least work properly. Funny thing is, I was so damn adamant about getting a more casual looking squad walking system put together until I saw first-hand what being too headstrong about implementing a thing can do to somebody. I saw another dev calling upon the programmers in the rmn server for help over and over while not making much progress on understanding what's going on and often throwing his hands up and "giving up" dramatically, only to resume the next day trying for his exact vision in the same manner. It's reminded me that sometimes you just need to know when to settle for less and work with what you can, rather than go for the exact shape of your dreams.

an old wip pic from a snowball's chance, showcasing an early version of the cooking system.

Since last time, I've managed to get the transition pack working with mkxp-z! I had asked orochii for help, but his implementation was far too customized for Drekirokr to work with my more basic and default-y setup. It wasn't until my other programming friend coelocanth gave me a good tip on putting Graphics.freeze in the right places that I finally had the breakthrough I needed. They're so freaking cool.

So with that handled, I felt that I could finally go ahead and merge the mkxp-z stuff into the main branch. I can officially call that experiment a success. It will certainly improve the longevity and performance (and possibly even portability?) of the game from here on out.

After that, developments have slowed down a little. Started vaguely implementing the restorative actions, as well as focusing on optional skills here and there. Apparently I added a skill called "chillberry", but it's been so long since I've checked the game files that I forget what it was supposed to do. I also added a snackmaking hotkey to fierce cookery, which will need to be set to check if coda has the requirements for snackmaking (must be in at least level 2 or later! also must have the "can cook" switch activated).

I did manage to improve the introductory scene to actually feature a freaking establishing shot of the mountain. I also replaced the fmod splash image with something for mkxp-z, though I did have to edit the image more, since I had accidentally grabbed the logo for the older version of mkxp. Unfortunately, the logo for mkxp-z is literally just a pokeball, as it was designed for use with pokemon essentials. So I had to get a little creative. I wound up giving it a healthy helping of plausible deniability that I think I can be proud of. Snowball's Chance may have some inspiration from pokemon games (particularly the exploring and looking around for random items in natural areas), but it is not a pokemon game. I don't want nintendo lawyers busting down any more doors anyhow.

After that, I got an idea from somebody to add a new character to level 4: Burian Ivanov! I even dragged out the character names book to get a good set of russian sounding first and last names. of course though, russia in this setting is referred to as Molnya (fun fact: Molnya means village), so technically he's of molnyan descent. 2nd generation, never having seen the place his parents came from, aside from in rose tinted propeganda media. As a result, Burian is a prepper type that just sorta lives in a tent on the mountain. Apparently he was once friends with Ranger back in the day, as a result of being the closest thing you can get to a neighbor out here in the backwoods. Gotta stick together! Also, Burian loves durians. He has one that he keeps chilled near his tent. It's basically been his best friend out here since Ranger went missing 10 years ago. It… probably needs to be replaced at this point. Overall, I think he's gonna be a fun addition to this previously empty feeling first half of level 4. Like sure, there is an optional cabin that you can only get to with a certain optional skill, but that's practically at the end of the section!

After that however, I began work on a side-project. It is called A Snowball's Quest. I'll write up a proper separate entry for that after this, but it takes place in a timeline split that occurs right after the end of level 4 part 1. I managed to write some dialogue and draw some images that should prove to be useful for the main game in the prologue scene.

In the process of getting that side project set up, I managed to kidnap (er, recruit) two additional new team members, Orochii (my main programmer friend) and et3rnitii (a really good artist!). I have no idea how long they'll be sticking around, but it's nice to have some company in the fallingstar server, not to mention easier access to bothering orochii whenever I get stuck on programming stuffs.

As for what the future holds in this month? that's hard to tell. Snowball's Quest is certainly going to be developed beyond the event it was started for, but Snowball's Chance is also waiting for me. I suppose I'll be focusing on quest while I wait for Renn to deliver on the gantlet challenge written draft for chance. Though I could also dig around on the to-do list for something to mess around with.

Granted, I also have to work with my motivation levels, which can sometimes be hard to get calibrated, especially considering I'm not as young and spry as I used to be. Not to mention my family tends to distract me a LOT. Dice seems to be pretty good at keeping me enough on the ball when I'm working on call though. I can't thank them enough for that, not to mention being such a good friend.

So, during this month of work, I managed to finish the cutscene, style the rails (after finally downloading gimp 3.0 and having to get used to all the tiny changes between that version and 2.10 which I had been using for sprite editing), and most importantly, I SUCCESSFULLY ported snowball to mkxp-z. Do you know what this means? It means this game is that much more future-proofed and potentially compatible with more platforms in the future!

However, to pull this off, I did have to fix and remove a few things. Screenshotting and special transitions have been temporarily removed, due to previously requiring screenshot.dll. mkxp does not use screenshot.dll and instead uses its own screenshotting method, which I still need to figure out how to use in order to re-implement those features. I plan on digging through one of my newer versioned pokemon essentials based projects to see if any of those scripts ever used the mkxp screenshot method. For now though, it's of low priority.

The feature that was at high priority however, was getting the tile change script working. Now, this one was a doozy, due to not only containing waaaaay too many nested for loops with inscrutable variable names (one of the reasons I hate for loops, by the way), but also, it turns out the reason it was erroring was because it was returning a nil at the end and mkxp was having none of that, while standard rmxp just sorta went for it. It took having to consult the maple shrine and getting help from Actual MKXP Devs That Actually Know Ruby to get an answer to that one. So while it now works again, I still feel like I should try and optimize that code eventually, but I'm a noob when it comes to refactoring. Honestly, my specialty is breaking things and working through trial and error.

Another thing is that while mkxp-z technically has impulse tracker support, it always adds an annoying gap between loops, so I will need to shift formats for much of the soundtrack (or endure the suffering of compiling the thing myself just to get loops working again). While the ones with larger samples have been swapped to ogg format, I plan on adding the midis of tracks with relatively standardized samples and then adding those samples to a comprehensive soundfont, which mkxp can use on those midis during playback! However, this is an intensive operation which will need very firm concentration. Not to mention various additions to the IT files will need to be backported to the midis they came from originally (I almost always compose in midi and then edit in IT format via openMPT.)

Another thing is that I had to swap the controls back to a more standardized form instead of the duct-taped form I had before, but now the end-user can customize their controls endlessly! But this presents a problem, in that now I don't have all of the keyboard to mess with, and now I need to figure out how to make best use of two potentially assignable buttons for anything that the player might need, while still reserving the A key, Q key, and W key for various defined things. However, this will also require some major redesigns to some menus to accommodate, which will also take time and effort.

Meanwhile, my partner in crime Renn has been helping me with designing some things, taking charge of planning the challenges leading up to the bear. I'm looking forwards to the puzzles she's coming up with! Also, my dear friend Dice has been giving me various cool ideas here and there, which may lead to a new spoon related mechanic that hopefully will lead to a more resonant experience for the player.

As for other things I need to do, I still need to add sokoban rock puzzles to level 4, as well as distribute snacks and maybe write up an extra optional scene for the player to stumble upon. Also of course writing other important scenes down the line.