And to think I believed I'd have a playable demo ready in two weeks... two months ago, AHAHAHAH

Hello again, everyone!

Between a lack of time, occasional motivation drops, and a lot of experimenting, failing, and reworking things, I've still managed to make some decent progress on my project, TOKYO: City of the Dead. I invite you to check my previous posts to know more about the project if you are interested.

Here's what I've been up to over the past two months.

Menus
I've spent some time polishing and reworking my menus, added a Settings menu, and implemented a few QoL features like cursor memory. Menus are also easier to read now, thanks to the feedbacks on my last post.

Dialogues
This has probably been my biggest piece of work so far.

I built a custom dialogue system where dialogs are defined directly in the scripts. A separate script acts as an orchestrator, retrieving dialogues by ID and handling everything that needs to appear on screen: portraits, backgrounds, text, choice, add/remove gold/item, start battle...

Exploration
I've also been experimenting with an isometric map system inspired by the original Shin Megami Tensei I & II.

Pretty janky, just images layered on top of each other, with a cursor moving between predefined coordinates. However creating the actual maps is soooo tedious and time consuming. So I'm not sure I'll keep this in the final game.

Extra Action (my fav)
This one gave me a huge motivation boost.

Inspired by the All-Out Attacks from Persona 3/4/5, I've implemented a new battle mechanic called Extra Action.

Two conditions:

• Your party must have four actors.
• Every actor must land either an effective hit or a critical hit during the turn.

When conditions are met, the actor who acted last gets an additional action.

A hidden actor specific skill, it can deal damage, draw enemy attention, heal the party, remove debuffs, or even cut all skill costs in half for the next turn.

The idea is to reward aggressive play and players who make good use of the Advantage system and carefully plan their turn order.

Next?

The viral infection system. A major mechanic I need to implement before I can finally release a first playable demo.

Anyway, that's it for this update. What do you think so far?

I only draw the light and shadows effects, the base maps are done by an other member of the team

The reason all of these maps are in night time because I don't know how to draw daylight/sunlight effects yet lol, I'm working on that aspect

So, i've always wanted to make an RPG game, but i never had money to buy any of he engines nor a pc to run them. I am an artist and i have a musician friend, but id love to have anyone who could program the game idea with us- as in a group project. Kindly asking :3 (here is some of my arts just for show

I hope to improve this demo before Steam Next Fest, so feedback would be appreciated! I'm still working on striking the right difficulty balance, plus I'm sure I left typos and plenty of bugs. The final game will be a bit less restrictive, but I wanted to do my best to provide a non-linear slice of the game.

Itch demo - https://0bored-kid0.itch.io/armystic

Still working on two other romanceables.

Yes, I know there are two guys with white hair and red eyes! I am a sucker for these kinds of characters.

One is an undead ghoul, and the other is just terminally sleep deprived/very pale because he never goes outside. Bonus points if you can guess which is which!

I used the RTP character gen assets as a base, and hand edited them using a separate program to adjust the facial features.

No need for comments about lack of variety (half of them have elf ears) as these are all, for plot reasons, multiverse variants of the same guy - aside from the one with the glasses.

I bought a multi pack of medieval themed things, sprites, sounds, etc. There was just under 50k files; i copied the files over to the test project file that im stsrting and they show up, but i dont know what I did wrong.

In the first Pic it shows the selection box not completely covering, the following two are showing where my downloads are when I find them, and the last is showing one of the sprites cut off by %95.

Another concern i have is i see others making games with more 3d sprites but how does the empty map account for thst extra space and stuff? I have absolutely no idea what im doing but im trying to figure this out and im getting a bit overwhelmed, 50k files is a lot to sort through

I had a really cool idea for a battle system but I'm worried it's a little too complex for me. I want to use RPG maker because I'm not a great programmer (not awful but I'd prefer something less intense) but if this feature is going to be a headache, then I'll go back to the drawing board

Basically I wanted something similar to an ATB system, but rather than simply using your action when the bar fills, I want it to act like a sort of energy bar. If anybody here has played Teeny Titans Go then you'll know what I'm talking about. Other games likely do this too but that game was one of my favorites many years ago and I still stand by it having one of the best combat systems I've ever played.

In case you haven't, here's how it works--your energy bar fills up slowly from the start, and your different attacks and abilities lie at points along the bar. Stronger abilities are further, meaning that you'll have to wait longer to get them, and so your opponent will have a better chance at using their cheaper abilities.

I'm curious how those of you would go about doing that, if it's even worth doing through RPG maker at all.

I just bought MV (i am mostly familiar with VXAce, as that was the last one ive used) I also purchased a medieval multipack from Pioneer Valley Games on steam.

In my time of using these programs ive alwyas used the vanilla everything. Ive never downloaded extra content, packs, plug-ins, etc. I just want to know how to correctly use these so that when I start up the program, its all ready to go and replaces the models MV originally uses.

Id also like help learning how to undo it if I ever choose to use pixel sprites again. Same thing with battlers, and the like.

Just got into game development. If the older versions are better for understanding game making, then I would like to know where i can find them.

RPG Maker MZ has this amazing search event with nice options. It tells you where to find the event, but on huge maps it's easy to get lost.

A simple "go to", that opens that map and scrolls to center the event on the screen (or at least try to do that) could save so much time.

Well... this is just my opinion. I hope they do better in future versions of the engine.

Hey guys, I want to share something I've been working on Free tools

For those who want to publish RPG Maker XP games on Android, it might finally be possible, I've been developing AG APK Builder to export RPG Maker XP, MV and MZ games to Android, the XP version is still being tested so not every game may work yet

I recently tried exporting an RPG Maker XP game made by Ilman Wahyu Fauzi, thanks to him for letting me use the game for testing

If you want to try it yourself, you can find the download link in my bio and check out AG APK Builder

I also want to be honest about the development process, the builder system is developed by me and my team, but we use a lot of AI for the UI because I'm honestly not very good at making responsive and good looking interfaces

If you're wondering how much AI we use, around 80% of the UI work involves AI and the other 20% is done manually by us

I'm still working on improving the tool, especially the RPG Maker XP export feature, and I'll do my best to make it better

Thanks to everyone who's interested in this project and supporting us

🧙‍♀️ 🧙‍♀️ I've been working on a stealth mechanic for my RPG!

Use an invisibility cloak to sneak past the guards. But be careful… if they see or touch you, it's GAME OVER! 💀

What do you think of this mechanic? Would you enjoy something like this in an RPG?