Hey everyone, Conash here! First, backers should expect the backer release this evening. While we’re working to limit the amount of things that are put off until the public release, we’ve still got to finish up a few things. That said, this release should be relatively bug light all things considered so look forward to it! With that out of the way time for me to talk about the scripting stuff I’ve been doing recently!
First, I should probably open with the CD player. While procrastination has left it so that I won’t have it ready for the backer release, I am looking to have it ready for the public release. The CD player is something that players will buy in a store and then put in the various music discs in the game inside it, from there you can interact with it to open a list of the CDs you’ve put in it and select which one to play. We’ll have it so that it will remember your selection and start up every time you enter the house, best part is that you’ll be able to select a different track for each of your houses for a bit more customization. I plan to also display some info about the music in the menu such as who composed it, how long it runs, maybe the dungeons/quests it’s used for… But I’ll be honest here I’m not entirely sure what sort of information you would want on this kind of thing. I’m not big into music so if any of you have some suggestions as to what information you’d want on the CDs in the CD player menu please let me know!
Next a few weeks ago I talked about combat updates. Well I’ve gotten that more or less sorted out though I might try to fit a bit more in before the public release, but I’d rather not risk bugging out the backer release by working on it further. So far, we’ve got it to display the element icon next to damage if there is one to display, so that you have a better indication what kind of damage you’re doing/taking. Instead of adding in a battle log with custom speed I found a script that just lets you open the battle log to go through it entirely which I imagine will be more useful and help prevent battle from slowing down a lot so that you can see that one thing you’d otherwise miss. I also sped up Elaiya’s attack animations since they were kind of laggy. Finally, I threw in some action shortcuts so that when you’re choosing an action you can hit ‘A’ for attack, ‘S‘ for skills (for characters like Felix, Therese, and Yamamaya who have two skill windows you can press it again to toggle between the two), and ‘D‘ for guard which should hopefully help speed up battles some. I did set up a shortcut for the item menu, but due to how RPG Maker is setup the only shortcut that I really use isn’t properly setup so I plan to include a little text file on the existing shortcuts, various menu shortcuts, and how to set up the item shortcut with the game going forward. That’s all that I’ve really gotten done in regard to combat updates so far, not sure when I’ll be able to finish up the last bits of it.
Beyond that, the only scripting stuff I’ve done has been some custom enemy behavior (some of which may result in future enemies drop random items instead of up to three kinds of items only) and various behind the scenes stuff to get the Awiiabu quest working in a way that wouldn’t become a nightmare worse than the Manor Invasion for NM. Nothing that I should take a lot of time talking about either due to it being a surprise or how it doesn’t impact you directly. Anyway, that about wraps up this blog post, hope you all have a great day and are looking forward to the upcoming backer and/or public releases!