Dev Update #8: The Prologue(s) (yes, AGAIN), A Better World Map, and Some Thoughts on Levels All I've got for pics this time is the world map, since everything else is super WIP. So let's leave that for last and return to the tradition of posting PeriTune music at the start of these for now. We are officially back on our bullshit! After a bit of a rocky phase getting back into the swing of things, I've done enough work and had enough thoughts that I'm comfortable doing up a post for it. The changes I've made at present are few in number, but pretty significant in both scale and impact. Over the last couple of weeks, I've... Redone the world map by using one of MV's premade world maps as a base (we'll get back to that later). Rewritten some behind-the-scenes lore, both to account for the new world and also because some lore stuff just... didn't work? Tidied up the database a bit, though I expect it'll be a mess again before long. Completely redid Carol's intro from the top down, with the rest to follow, in order to keep the database just a little bit neater. Set down some grounds (literally) for stuff to do at endgame levels besides the final floors of the Clock Tower. Hopefully I can take this solo dev thing far enough to utilize those spaces. Made one itty-bitty change in regards to how I want to handle start-of-game levels & kits, which I think is definitely for the better. So, let's take it one thing worth talking about at a time... The new intros & level changes... New world map means new world lore to accommodate the changed geography (this makes sense, I swear), which in turn means I had to redo everyone's intro texts since every relevant location was either moved, removed, or some other minor hiccup. This also lets me conveniently change how levels work at the very start of the game, while I'm rehashing everything anyway. At present, the plan is that every intro features... Some backstory on the character, including their motive for getting the Hourglass A brief and usually dungeon-like area, which features... A couple battles to get you used to the combat system, raising the character to level 2 right before a small boss fight Some useful items (different characters get different items) after the boss in an optional treasure chest, and Sort of a narrative hook to help explain how your chosen protagonist secured the means to get to the Clock Tower, given it's on a floating island As for the changes to the level setup. The plan with skills in this game has always been as follows. Each character starts with three skills, unlocks a fourth at level 2, then after that, every multiple of 5 is another new skill. This will be the case all the way up to level 95, the highest multiple of 5 RPG Maker MV allows by default. However, with Yanfly's Core Engine added to the mix, we can take it one further to 100. I'd like level 100 to be locked behind finishing a character's questline; once they hit 99 and you've done the rest of their questline, you can do the final quest, which will level them up to 100 and unlock one final, ultimate skill. But level 100 is, in every conceivable way, far off over the horizon, so let's come back to now for a bit. Right now, the idea of giving characters a fourth skill right before their intro bosses lets me get away with a few things. I can give everyone a fourth move that rounds out or finishes their early-game kit and helps against the boss in some way, for example. And, I can give the bosses new moves that account for the characters' new skills they just unlocked. Having tested this idea out with Carol, I think it's a lot more fun to hit level 2 immediately before the intro boss than it is to get the level-up after, so I'll be sticking with this idea for the other seven intros. You also get a nice chunk of EXP for beating the boss. I plan to keep the EXP totals consistent across all 8 characters, but Pupa has, among other things, 50% more EXP gains. I looked at the numbers, and Pupa will almost be level 3 by the time it steps out into the overworld for the first time. That's pretty neat, actually! And that also brings me to... The new world map... I've learned over the course of this RPG dev experience that I'm really bad at making world maps. Like, I'm just absolute dogshit at it. Ferdinand Magellan would shoot me on sight if he saw my world maps. So, rather than continue to try and iterate on something I'm awful at, I decided I'll do the wiser thing. RPG Maker MV comes installed with half a truckload's worth of pre-made maps, so I opted to take the smallest one of the five world maps, and turn it from a barren rocky wasteland to the map you see below. There may be some small tweaks here and there, but this is the general idea for the final look of it. As it stands, the map is split into ten distinct regions; one for each playable character, then two for exploration stuff later in the game. Each of the former has only a few settlements, averaging out somewhere in the 4-6 range, which is intentional because less towns means less work for the same percentage of progress. The latter... I'm not worried about yet. The things I'll do with the rest of the map are as of yet undetermined. I'd like dungeons other than the Clock Tower to mostly be quest-related, one-time things, for one. All of the details here are future me's problem, though. Right now, I'm focused on the intros again. Also, I've noticed that because Discord is a fuck that can't leave well enough alone, all the images here are broken. I'll get around to fixing all of them at some point, though right now I'm hoping the one just above isn't broken. In fact, the world map is the only image here partly as a sort of test for that.

Sabrina was relieved to see that the beast had run off. Perhaps it was a bad idea to let it go and yet she couldn't possibly have brought herself to attack the creature when it had stopped fighting. To Abby she said, "Surely our auras were too great for the beast! Even something like that knows not to, uh, mess with us!" “Glad we found you when we did,” Sabrina turned around to see that the other two had joined them. Marshal said something about their strategy having overcome a fight of their own to which Sabrina responded. "Y-yes we too bested our foes with a sound strategy." The strategy in question being 'hit them hard and fast' which of course was the best strategy of all. When Marshall made mention of patrols it brought to Sabrina's mind what she had seen up on the tower. "Oh, yeah, there's a lot of them in the courtyard too...I think that's where the big bad might be hiding. There was a big building with those...rod things in it. I thought about jumping down to take him on but....er...I thought it would be rude to not let you have the glory too!" "But, what if this stronghold and compound happen to be like...of a higher level than we are? A-Again, in an open world style game, while the player is free to choose wherever they want to go, it's sometimes in the player's best interest to start small and then work up to the big things. They could skip ahead...but sometimes the results are disastrous." Sabrina frowned at that. It felt off to her somehow. It took her a moment of thinking before she realized why. It wasn't the first time that they've decided to avoid a fight because it might be too strong. And if that kept up.... "...I-I know we're already here...a-and probably talking you guys out of this is out the window at the present...but I-I wanted to try and l-let you know this so we can properly figure out a plan of attack. So...that being said...d-do we have a plan of attack available...?" At the gate something similar had happened. Sabrina had wanted to attack but the others seemed to want to try another way. Her fear of annoying them all had kept her from insisting then. And now that they had gone the other way once again this guy was torn about what to do. If things kept up this way they'd never get anything done would they? What was the point of heroes if they hesitated at every challenge? With this thought in mind bolstering her confidence Sabrina spoke up. "The plan is the same as it ever was. We find the leader and take him down. If anything tries to stop us we take them down too!" She looked around at the other three. Inwardly her heart was pounding and she could feel her hands getting sweaty but she knew she had to keep going. If she didn't then her heroic second life would amount to nothing. She couldn't let that happen again. She looked directly at Gene then. "If you guys got a plan then say it, otherwise I plan to go find my way to the person we're here to fight and fight him. And win!"

well that was interesting, I felt like I was being told a story even though idk what story it was 8/10