The Musings Of The Consensus

Been getting great feedback from my beta testers on the closed beta of Dragon Quest 1 Remake, and I just discovered my oft unstable Equipment you can use as Items script broke AGAIN. Good news is that I already figured out a way around this issue. The weapons that were supposed to double as items that could cast spells and skills will instead be modified to provide certain bonuses and resistances, so equipping a Wizard's Staff will provide a resistance to fire attacks. As for casting spells from items, I plan to partially adapt an idea from Dragon Quest Heroes, but with my own twist: Instead of reducing armor to generic orbs that provide the same bonuses, my version will be "spell orbs" you can buy from shops that allow anyone to use them to cast a free spell (a Blaze Orb lets any character cast Blaze for no MP). The catch is that non magic users will do so much less effectively, like Sarah, but the items can never be consumed, so it balances out. It fits the Geom...

The beta test is progressing fine yet slowly, discovered all sorts of little goofs I'm having to clean up. I've fixed the UI/combat log issues mentioned in the last post, but at a cost: The Enemy HP bar feature had to axed. I COULD have kept them, but they were causing the UI issues in part, and even with edits they made parts of the battle log hard to read, and I decided I'd go with what was more ergonomically feasible. I've also undummied out some areas and will likely do more before closed beta release, but the story will likely not be finished much further than last build since the changes have been so extensive I want further feedback on the rebalancing before I do that. In the meantime, while everyone waits, here's a picture of the improved art of Ralph Lowenhertz, Sarah's father: I  I got this from a Japanese blog site (which one is specified in the credits), and it's very similar to my old art, except it's not something I doll...

The test of the latest beta is underway, and I have the Small Medal shop and shop portrait bug issues behind me. However, my major issue now is UI screwups and combat log issues. The UI screwups and combat log issues are interrelated, with the Combat Log window not showing all the information it needs to, such whether a steal attempt is successful or not, who is attacking (it just says an attack is happening), and the combat log review option does not display properly. This is mostly visual crap, which is harmless in the short term, but could pose issues down the road if it causes further display errors, so I'm going to fix that before further playtesting. The rebalancing seems to be working out slightly better, and now, regular slimes won't kill you unless you are totally naked, but it's now possible to get your ass beat by Red Slimes and higher at Level 1, so on Normal and higher difficulty, do some level grinding. I nerfed quite a few bonuses from equipment, turn...

The beta test of the latest build of Dragon Quest 1 Remake has begun, and it's already loaded with a ton of bugs. Thankfully, most have been easy to fix, but I've got three annoying ones that will require some work: 1. Small Medals are still buggy. Even though they "work" with my new variable driven shop interface, it occasionally drops the ball and forgets to count how many are left, leading to exploits where you can buy items even if you have less Small Medals than required. I'm considering just converting the Small Medal shops into standard shops (and jacking the prices up to prevent game breaking equipment very early on without grinding), and since the achievement system works just fine with Small Medals, reworking it so collecting them counts towards the achievements and you get cool swag the more you collect for the achievements. 2. Some shop menus still need fixed to work around the portrait display bug. Easily fixable, but tedious work. 3. Still ne...

I'm writing this post due to recent retardation in which I noticed a notorious ban evader on Wikia evading his ban once again, and I did the responsible thing and reported it. The ban evader in question, Gabe "Moleman9000" Navarro, is some guy I'm convinced is autistic (I am too, and I'm pretty good at sensing my own), because he has an utterly one track mind about what he is and isn't entitled to do, and that seems to revolve around bossing people around and shitting his pants over trolls and cyberbullies. I was aware of him long before our paths crossed thanks to browsing Encyclopedia Dramatica (and later the Kiwi Farms), and our paths crossed directly first on Wikia, then Orain/Miraheze, where I was content to leave him be so long as he caused no trouble and just quietly worked on his articles on his own works. For the longest time, there were no issues, until he got into an argument with some people, including someone named Willow Giovanni and a few ...

This post has good news and even better news. Good news: Almost ready for a beta test run. Need to make a considerable amount of UI changes for optimal readability of text and numbers in all situations, and modify a few windows to show all information they need to while having correct opacity settings, but so far I have no game breaking issues to report. Even Better News: FINALLY IMPLEMENTED A STEALING SKILL THAT DOESN'T CRASH THE GAME ENGINE! I'm using Tsukihime's Effect Manager addon that allows for theft of item drops, or items you'd get after the battle. This is similar to how it worked in Dragon Quest, and sidesteps the former issue I had with my "use equipment as items" script by NOT opening an item window (thus avoiding the buggy behavior), and merely attempt to remove an item from a discrete list that would already have a chance of handing it to you anyway at the end of the battle, so it works almost exactly like the DQ engine did. I have tweak...

I've been busting my tail fixing up all remaining graphical facesets and converting to portraits, only a few left, and I've finally figured out a patch for my shop window dialogue issue (still an ugly fix, but I'm going with it anyway) Now, I'll have to work on game balance, and that's the part that's gonna get tedious. RPG Maker VX Ace is configured, by default, to be more along the lines of a Final Fantasy game stats and formulas wise than geared for a Dragon Quest game, and the formulas used to calculate damage variables are grossly different, so much so I've had to uber lowball a lot of numbers when coming up with player stat advancement and enemy statistics, and while I've gotten a fair amount of things right, some aspects of the engine are still in need of fine tuning. However, I've got a decent idea what needs to be worked on, so hopefully it won;t take half as long as the graphics overhauling did. And speaking of that, some more scree...

Just when I thought my coding problems were over, I get a massive problem with my portrait script. As in, will screw up every shop window scene I ever put into my game on every level. And the earlier fix I was using doesn't seem to work anymore. Due to this, progress is effectively frozen on my game until I get it examined by someone with more scripting knowledge than myself.

Now that I got any remaining scripting issues fixed (for now), I'm working on the remaining graphics and optimizing the file size because, yes, I DO plan on including all the RTP assets with the game so that need not be downloaded. This will bloat the file size of the next beta by quite a bit, so I'm trying very hard to optimize all the PNG and music files and strip out all files that are not being used by the game (thanks to Tsukihime for the Resource Checker script, it's been invaluable for cleaning my project). I'm also working on sprucing up a bunch of maps and adding more content since some areas like the Great Bazaar were VERY barren of life and activity. I'm also working on integrating some of the new features I added into the game and beta testing them. I still can't give an ETA for when it will be out, but I plan on posting more pictures soon of my progress.

Instead of a scripted shop, I'm going with a variable driven parallel processed common event combined with an event based shop. So far it works absolutely fine. The old script is getting completely retired, and next I'll be working on adding area of effect to spells so Mara and Lora aren't "I win buttons" anymore.