yui

she found herself in a sticky situation

well, there's gonna be plenty more today

youtube suggested this to me out of the blue, and i'll do the same to you

While she had initially intended to help the rest of the crew deal with the last invader, Abby soon found herself instead sitting by and watching the action unfold. Seeing everyone else do these flips and spells and all helped her become more comfortable with the fact that she had done the same not long ago. It made it seem more real, somehow. Which did of course mean that her rather grisly execution was also quite real, a fact that most people would become immediately uncomfortable with, but if this was real, it was either her or it. She still had her own best interests to look out for, and being alive seemed foremost among those. With various other Exalted all working together as a team, the leader of these unruly raiders was put down in fairly little time for a leader, punctuated by that weird water drop sound. Abby sure had heard a lot of unusual things lately.

The group was afterward brought back to Luca's house, where the group was free to ask Luca and Rumian any questions they had about the strange new world they'd found thrust upon them. There was the matter of kings, landmarks, and of course, the economy. What Abby wound up taking away from these questions and their answers was that the matter of food might be a bit of a problem moving forward, but in exchange they had been given a couple pointers on places to look into visiting. And so it was that Abby voiced her own main concern.

"We did do pretty good as heroes I'd say, but no offense, I doubt we were brought here just to protect one village from some angry beastmen. Is there someone or something we should be trying to like... defeat?"

Rumian raised a curious eyebrow only for Luca to speak up excitedly. “Oh wells that an easy one. You guys are the Exalted so you have to beat the Accursed!”

"The Accursed, huh? And what's their deal?"

“Oh, well they’re really evil people that did really bad stuff a looong time ago and now they curse our lands.”

Rumian looked at Luca then back to Abby. “That’s a bit of a simple way to put it, but not inaccurate. Specifically the one here, Beryn, is the one who presides over the Great Curse of Aerstroff.” Once more thunder had sounded off, as it had been their entire time in this land so far. “That.”

So that was why that was the way it was. Well, that worked out perfectly for Abby at least, for a few reasons. It gave her a clear, tangible goal to work toward, a source of potentially more info since it felt safe to assume these Accursed were in league with one another, and it let her put this stupid weather to an end. Abby didn't mind thunder and lightning, but she did mind when that was all it was. It was annoying and mildly tense for no reason, like one of those cursed remixes where the song never actually starts or the drop never happens.

"Last one, this one's trivial. I don't suppose either of you know of some sort of magic spell to like... mend fabrics or whatever? Something like that just sounds really useful."

The both of them shook their heads. "I can only make small bits of lightning," Luca stated.

Well, that was unfortunate. Looking down to where the rip in her clothes had been made, Abby found... that the rip was conspicuously gone!? How mysterious! And convenient! "Don't worry about it, then."

So far, the shopping trip was most definitely and undeniably a shopping trip. Various pieces of produce, one noteworthy inconvinience with one of the bag dispensers, and eventually the deli section. Morgan elected to leave that to someone else. In her past experience, the walking dead strolling up to a deli requesting meat had a tendency to put others on edge, and that was like, the polar opposite of what Morgan was supposed to be doing in this world. As the group proceeded through the different sections of the store, Morgan took note of anything that looked familiar to her, picking up a few odds and ends here and there as suited her fancy. Eventually, the team found themselves in the frozen food section.

“Oh, they have ice cream here! Should we put it in the cart or should we see if there are ice cream shops nearby and get some there?”

"We  should  look  for  an  ice  cream  shop  nearby," Morgan suggested. Then her eyes locked upon another apparent universal constant. That most sacred of meals. Melted golden decadence resting atop a disc of the finest wheat, with an irresistable layer of sauce trapped in the middle, as if begging for somebody to feast upon it. It could only be pizza! As much as she would have loved to get some frozen pizzas, it seemed unfair to do that instead of looking for a pizza place immediately after suggesting that approach for ice cream, but that didn't stop her from pausing to strongly consider it anyway. Plus, there were more important things to deal with here. Like the countless forms of frozen, oven-ready potatoes. Wedges, fries, tots, more fries, hash brown, fries in even more shapes, and more! Weren't wedges just fat fries, come to think of it?

Whatever the case, Morgan perused the various forms of frozen potato on display. "Any  preferences  on  potatoes,  folks?"

"If the Shoe Fits..." - Some Ideas I Borrowed from Other Games (and regional diversity)

It's been a highly unproductive week over here. I was having some mapping troubles (I fixed it earlier today by taking the option I didn't want to take, but wound up having to in order to avoid burning out), so after several days of just not wanting to work on the game, one conversation where I sparked to life the flames of inspiration in fellow RPG Maker user @Saikazo who I think it would be very cool if he also made a thread like this, and a bit of time finally spent setting the problems in my own game straight so I can continue work, production is back on track, and the infrastructure for the second of our three starter quests should be ready soon-ish. In the meantime, I wanted to do a post here, so let's talk about other games for a moment. Games that I think are pretty neat for one reason or another, and I've borrowed a page or two from their playbooks to use in my own.

Legend of Zelda. I've talked about it already a couple posts ago, but I took some degree of inspiration from Legend of Zelda and to a lesser extent Pokémon with how to approach dungeons. Most dungeons have some sort of small gimmick relevant to a number of puzzles you need to clear in order to get through, and in Legend of Zelda fashion, there's generally a miniboss of some sort you'll have to defeat. The use of keys and the Boss Key in particular (even if I did split it into two pieces) was especially inspired by Legend of Zelda here.

Final Fantasy. 14 in particular, but there's also a bit in common with 7 by accident. The idea of Tove's class changing over the course of the game was directly inspired by Final Fantasy XIV's job system, where each of the starting classes in the game are able to get a related job stone at level 30, unlocking an array of new abilities to take with them as they level up through the rest of the game. Not intentional was some shared similarities with 7, namely in the battle system. For the unfamiliar, Final Fantasy VII uses a pseudo-turn-based system where each character in a battle has a gauge that fills up before they can take an action, with the speed of the gauge filling up being based on the character's own speed. This game uses the same type of system, but it isn't because of Final Fantasy VII; rather, it's something I happened to notice later on. You could argue that the augments are similar to materia as well, but I'm not counting that because...

Monster Hunter. Monster Hunter has two features that I realized were similar to what I was doing before choosing to embrace it fully rather than shy away and try to do something unique. Main story progression and decorations. Putting the latter first for pacing's sake, decorations are similar to materia in Final Fantasy; you put them in slots in your armor and get new skills. Unlike Final Fantasy, however, different types of slots exist (admittedly, these are just for decorations of different sizes usually), and also unlike Final Fantasy, decorations give you passive abilities instead of the stats provided by materia. This one was just a coincidence and still is, but I'd handily say what I'm doing is more akin to decorations than materia.

What isn't a coincidence is how I'm progressing the main story. In Monster Hunter - at least in the beginning of it, anyway - you progress the main story by completing a certain number of quests from the board, then clearing a special quest that unlocks after you hit your quota. Clear that, and the next tier of quests unlocks, which you have to repeat the cycle through. Setting up main story progression like this happens to be very convenient for me as someone with zero knowledge of javascript (the language RPG Maker MV and its games run on), since I can give the player a set of quests all at once, then have them get the next major quest only after clearing all of them. For example, the three starter quests I've alluded to in a few posts are the first tier of quests, and once you complete all of them, you can get the first special quest that progresses the game further. Whenever I release a 0.1 version of the game, it will have all four of these quests. I quite like this system.

On another note since I don't like the length of this post with just talk about ideas, here's another thing that's been on my dev mind lately. Differentiating different regions in the world.

Upon this map I have hastily scrawled some borders. These differentiate not just nations, but entire regions of the world. For example, the western area is split into two kingdoms (you can tell where one ends and the other begins by the big wall surrounding the northern one). Saying your world has different region is all well and good, but if the only difference is the tiles you use, are they really that different? Luckily, RPG Maker has a feature for precisely this! You can tag certain areas of the map as different regions, and from there, you can also make it so that different troops of enemies only spawn in certain regions. For example, there's a change in the icy isles up north that you might face off with a yeti, but you won't find them anywhere else. That's not good enough for me either.

Different regions need different philosophies behind their town designs, if not different tilesets entirely in some regions. That's an easy and very visual way to help make different parts of the world really feel like you're going somewhere new. For an easy example I can provide with the resources currently available to me, let's look at the shop areas in the still-very-uncreatively-named Holy City, and the equally-uncreatively-named Castle Town, which is in a different part of the world.

Even if I were to "defrost" the Holy City, these would be two places that feel distinctly different from each other, even though the buildings in both towns are just glorified rectangles for the most part. That's how I feel looking at them, anyway. I need to do this a few more times over the course of creating an entire world (the MV Trinity resource pack should be massively helpful for this!). There's a lot more to consider when making different parts of a game world feel different from each other, but we'd be here all day if I were to go into detail on all of it, and I'd like to go to bed sometime tonight, so I'll wrap up the post here.

To close off my ramblings of the night, here's a fun bonus screencap that has nothing to do with any of what I just said. There's a plugin on itch.io called MV3D, which causes the game to be rendered in a 2.5-dimensional style. There's also a free demo version of the plugin available, so I decided to give it a try. It... didn't go quite as I'd hoped.

I will not be using MV3D in this project.