Yay! Plugin's done!

So you may or may not have known, I recently requested someone I know to write a plugin to make animating the text windows easier. It's pretty much done now. Right now it's just to keep an eye out for any bugs and still needing to add a missing function. I'm working on converting the old common events to the plugin's commands. This is going to make eventing SO much cleaner. So here's a big thanks to YSlayer! And check out his game: A land of Flowers (A VX Ace game). It's basically yuri ecchi (and the game may or may not have my illustrations in the future), so if you're interested in that, check that out.

And that's it for today! I'll work on converting the old stuff to the new one. And once that's done, I'll work on the maps and hopefully have an update with new content/story by the end of November? See you next post!

Guess what time it is?

No, not update time unfortunately. I just wanna make the title of this post relevant to its content. But worry not! I am slowly chucking away at it. In fact, I've just rewritten the time system entirely from the ground up with pure eventing. I know I'm an narcissistic asshole who likes self-deprecating humor (if you haven't figure that out by now), but I'm honestly REALLY impressed with myself this time. Technical stuff below, but other than that, I'm also brainstorming a way to keep track of NPC locations so if you say, enter a building, the NPCs outside will "keep moving," and when you go outside again, the NPCs will remember how long it has passed since you entered a building and be properly adjusted to a distance based on that info. Yeah, once again, complicated. Because NPCs in RPG Makers aren't built to be kept track of like NPCs in Harvest Moons, Rune Factories and Stardew Valley. (An excuse for me to mention Stardew Valley. The characters isn't as fun as Harvest Moons' or Rune Factory's, but still a great game. Give it a try if you like Harvest Moon or Rune Factory.)

So, on to the technical stuff. The time system I previously used is a 3rd party plugin by Moghunter/Atelier Rgss. It has several problems with it and since I can't program, I can't make edits myself. So I looked into another plugin, and this one's from Hudell. But just like Moghunter's, it has its own share of problems. Namely, Moghunter's hour hand in the clock HUD doesn't move. Yes. It bothers me (that being said, I've decided to not include an analog clock HUD anyway). It also doesn't properly fix overflowing values, but I haven't checked Hudell's to see if it does the same. And Hudell's is also written in a way that keeps the clock running despite tabbing out of the game. Which as you might guess, is kind of a problem. So, it's obvious that some sort of change is needed (insert political joke here). And the result is me completely rewriting the system that's fully tailored to the game's needs. Okay, it's a time system. There's not much features you can add to a time system. But the idea is that it runs independently from the other systems, and if some other event make changes to the time, the time system itself will make the proper adjustments if something went wrong. Like auto correcting overflowing values! If say, I'm doing something stupid like adding 323 minutes instead of 5 hours and 23 minutes, the system will be smart enough to do the calculations to determine 323 minutes = 5 hours and 23 minutes, and adds the values properly. With a system like this, I don't have to add a conditional branch to fix overflowing values every time I manipulate some other time value. Generally speaking, it just makes events cleaner for me to manage and write.

The system sounds like it's very complicated, but truthfully, it's a very elegantly written solution. I've optimized it to all hell and made sure it doesn't do unnecessary calculations and waste computing power. If only I could say the same for the other existing systems in place... The animated text windows is made up of 8 fucking common events and choice boxes is made up of 4 fucking ones. Like, what the hell? So yeah, that's about it for today I guess. See you guys later!

What's going on?

Hi guys. Apologies for the huge lack of any sort of progress update for the past 2 weeks or so. I've been really busy with part time work and all. Y'know when I took a part time job, I expected to have time in between shifts to work on the game, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Now a little background on my financial situation so you'd have an idea of what I'm up to. I'm not in a tight need for money or in some sort of debt. In fact, I still live with my family (I'm 20, what you'd expect?). That being said, I still have to pay for my own bills and food. Mostly because I'm insistent on refusing to go to college. I have that to thank for not having to pay off student loans for the next 10 to 20 years out of college. It's funny to think about how education was made more affordable than ever (relative to other times in history) but the entire system is designed to capitalize as much as possible off the students. But I digress, I apologize for the lack of updates, follow me on twitter, and yaddi yaddi yadda. See you next time!

Quick progress update (and crossbows?)

Eh, yep. Going slowly. I've been working on the maps for a bit, but I've got nothing to show yet. I'll post a teaser or something when I've got something pretty to show. I've been spending what little free time I've had on anime and shit. (Technically I've also been watching animes during my part time work, but that's beside the point.) I've written the class descriptions for Priest and Shinobi, so check that out I guess. The picture doesn't reflect this yet, but I've added Operator as an advancement class to Sniper. So now we have Sniper for long range, Enforcer for short range, and Operator for mid range. And now I have no idea what to do with crossbows. Most classes already filled a unique role of some kind, and I don't really want redundancy with the classes (e.g two classes that are basically the same in terms of functionality). So I don't know, I may just remove crossbows entirely. I literally do not see a reason to have it in the game if rifles does the same thing. Lemme know what you guys think.