Thursday, August 24, 2017

DQ1 Remake Beta 2.30 in progress

I'm writing this post to give a progress report on Beta 2.30 of DQ1 Remake.

Thankfully, this build won't force me to add too much more content, but it has presented a new problem that forced me to take my time.

The main new area I have to complete is Charlock Castle, and while I generally made my own versions of DQ1 locations out of whole cloth while maybe taking some minor inspiration from the level design of the originals at best, I wanted to do a nigh perfect homage to the original level design of Charlock Castle since I plan to reuse this in any possible sequels, but I had an issue.

The level design of this Castle between DQ 1, 2, and 3 was VERY inconsistent.

DQ1 was the worst offender. On top of being oddly small and cramped, the bottom floor had a tileset that looked like it belonged on the surface, so I decided not to use that one.

DQ2 was simply a slightly expanded version of the DQ1 version, and it wasn't much better.

DQ3 had the best and most logical floor plan and a tileset design that made actual sense from top to bottom, so I'm going with that.

However, even though I'm trying to mimic the original floor plans as well as I can within the VX Ace engine limits, that means I'm having to make some design alterations, mostly to account for having better tiles and tiling methods at my disposal. I'm also having to make a custom tileset for this area, but thankfully I have all the pieces I need, I just need to put them all together in GIMP.

As for custom character graphics, good news is that I'm completely covered on this front, and I commissioned some special art from Fumirei awhile back for the Dragonlord that looks just like the original artwork while not running into any copyright issues (though the original design is still based off that by Enix and it's artists and will be credited appropriately).

As for events and scripting, again, this won't be an issue.

I do plan to alter how the sequence of events plays out in the next build, so the dialogue tree for when the Dragonlord is encountered will be subject to change by next build.

Progress is mostly done on the maps for now, more as I continue development.

Gamergate 2 is on, and I want no part of it

 This will not be a long post, but I just want to make clear, as someone who was involved in the first go-round of Gamergate, I want no part...