Ellie Starling's Very Long Walk

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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
hellbound2

Difficulty Question:

hellbound2

Should HELLBOUND 2 be difficult, or relatively easy?

I see strong arguments on both sides of this question. I’m going to lay out the positives and negatives. I feel like Hellbound was pretty hard, while Super Maria RPG was very easy. Please reblog or leave a like if you’ve got an opinion on the difficulty of HELLBOUND 2. 

PRO-EASY ARGUMENTS:

  1. Easier to complete story
  2. Less intimidating to people who aren’t great at RPGs
  3. More accessible

PRO-DIFFICULT ARGUMENTS:

  1. Games like Cuphead, Darksouls, SMT are popular because they’re ridiculously difficult.
  2. Rewards the player for strategy / grinding
  3. Adds more hours to the play time

Tell me what you think about this.-

elliestarling

here’s my thoughts on hard games:

- there’s always games that are popular or notable for being harder than other games, but the actual audience for these games is less than other games. you market towards a specific player base at the expense of other more casual players.

- in order for that player base to enjoy your game it needs to be more than just hard - it needs to also be fair. you have to reward players who get it right, you have to justify all the time they spend memorizing boss patterns or developing the reflexes and skillsets they need to progress in the game. this makes it that much more challenging to balance.

- RPG maker games are already a fairly niche audience so you’re talking about a niche within a niche, who even then would only play your game if it’s both hard and fair.

- the vast majority of the games that are popular because they are hard are action games like cuphead, dark souls, bullet hell shooters, etc - where timing and reflex is what saves you. RPGs that are hard because of the numbers - because the enemies are much stronger than the players - are a much more rare find these days. whereas in the past this was the norm for console JRPG style games, that has changed a lot since the days where every rpg forced you to grind for hours. overpowering a boss with brute strength is not as satisfying to most players as nailing an incredibly tricky dodge or learning to parry attacks 100% of the time. you’ll be appealing to a very, very small, very masochistic crowd who still loves FF2j style mindless grinding. 

- 99% of the time when a JRPG is considered ‘hard’, it’s not because of a challenging strategy that must be executed perfectly, it’s because the numbers are stacked so high that victory is impossible without grinding levels. the challenge is the player’s patience for doing this. most gamers are not fans of this kind of thing.

- is it possible to make a hard RPG without resorting to this? definitely. is it extremely difficult? definitely. can you pull it off? i cannot answer that. but if it was me i’d think long and hard about what exactly would make my game hard, and whether or not it would also be FUN.

rpg maker

Where You At Dog

Hello friends, its time for a quick check in on the progress of the game. Im happy to say that the barest skeleton of the game has been completed - as in, all the maps are functional, if not attractive, and you can walk from the beginning of the game all the way to the end, and 99% of story dialogue is complete. The next step is going to be, stuffing the guts into the skeleton, and adding dungeon puzzles, systems for gaining XP and leveling up, skills, status effects, and bonus/hidden content, followed by finally starting work on the combat system, designing and implimenting enemies and bosses. For now I am pretty happy to have reached this milestone. The game is looking to clock in at probably 160-175 maps by the time all is said and done. 

ellie starling rpg maker video games gamedev
eulogyofaninsect

Spicing up the Formula: A Sorta Guide

eulogyofaninsect

image

This is definitely a technical post, but if you’re a creator using RM the info here may be of some use to you. Consider it a small guide, perhaps?

RM’s default attack damage formula works as such: a.atk * 4 - b.def * 2, meaning that the user’s attack stat would be multiplied by 4, and the target’s defense stat doubled, with the result being the difference between the two. But if that difference resulted in 0 or less, no damage would be done at all… a situation that can make some skills completely useless, not an uncommon and at times frustrating situation in perhaps many RM games that don’t tamper with the way damage is calculated.

However! For Eulogy of an Insect, skills have been changed to a different formula. For example, the attack damage is calculated like so: 100 * (a.atk.to_f/b.def). So the ratio of the user’s attack to the target’s defense would get multiplied by a factor of 100, ensuring some damage is always done. Furthermore, if a skill needed to have a limit to how much damage it could possibly deal, we could have a formula such as: [100 * (a.atk.to_f/b.def), 450].min. This slightly tweaked formula would function the same as the previous, but it would never result in a damage value greater than 450. This is much better and gives us precise control over how much damage any attack can dish out. The small downside was that all 91 preexisting skills in our database had to be adjusted for this. And of course, this is all subject to change as we continue to refine and balance the game’s combat.

And courtesy of the green mystery skulls from our world, a relevant but ultimately useless bit of trivia: Shin Megami Tensei II handled damage formulas similarly to RPG Maker’s defaults, which would lead to stat-multiplying skills being able to completely break the game.

elliestarling

reblogging for future reference

luminousluna

Can Someone Explain

starryberri

On how to make sidecrolling rpg games like Dreaming Mary and 1bitheart in VX Ace?

Dreaming Mary posted an explanation a long time ago but it doesn’t make sense. I need to know how to set the background and how to make the character walk in side view only.

elliestarling

I don’t claim to know exactly how these games did this but in general sidescrolling maps in RPG Maker are done by making only a small part of the map passable by the characters. 

image

As you probably know the X tiles are not passable, and the O tiles are. So if you make a map that is made entirely of X tiles, but with a small ‘path’ of O tiles, you will create, visually, a side-scrolling map. This looks something like this:

image

This guy can’t move up or down, only left and right. But he can face up or down, and it still really looks more like he’s walking along a narrow bridge over a top-down floor, right? To really get the side scrolling look you are going to have to make some custom graphics. I’m pretty sure Dreaming Mary uses parallax mapping, which is essentially a full-screen image with invisible collision boxes that tell the engine where a player can and cannot walk, kinda like a pre-rendered background in an old PS1 game. You use a blank tileset to set up the X and Os without graphics to cover up your parallax background. So if you’re talking about a pre-drawn screen, you can just draw whatever: 

image

I drew the grass a little too low. He’s hovering above it. But you get the idea. This guy isn’t going to walk up into the sky, or down into the dirt. He’s gonna walk along that grass line. You can make this image as complicated or as simple as you want, it’s all just for the sake of visually presenting a side-scrolling world. As far as the engine knows, this is the same exact map as the last screenshot. For best results you would want a custom sprite for the player, too, since this guy does still turn his back to the screen if you press the “Up” button, even though he doesn’t walk. Most sidescrollers will only show the right and left facing sprites. You’d do this by replacing the up-facing and down-facing sprites with copies of the side-view sprites. The engine is still switching to the up and down-facing sprites but visually, the player doesn’t see a change because those sprites are the same as the right and left-facing sprites. 

Basically, what you’ve created here is the town scenes from Zelda II. If you want to get into platforming, jumps, ducking, real-time combat…I can’t help you with that, lol. People have done it, it is possible, but I don’t even begin to know how well enough to advise someone else. 


Hope that helps. I have never personally done a side-scroller type game but I work exclusively in parallax maps so accomplishing this kind of thing is very obvious to me.

rpg maker
pinkuboa

Anonymous asked:

How often do you think a game dev should post about their progress? It seems like there's a fine line between annoying spamming and being forgotten by everyone...

pinkuboa answered:

Spam: more than five times a day (but you probably won’t have THAt much to update without spoiling anything)

Being forgotten: updating every 3 weeks or more.  Updating twice a month/every two weeks works.  There’s nothing wrong with updating every month, it’s just easier for people to forget about your game that way.  

That’s it you’re good.

elliestarling

pinkuboa don’t @ me

rpg maker dont post never post keep the mystery alive

The Old Site Is Going Away

As of right now you can still read the old Ellie comics from 2011-2013 at elliestarling.com. At the beginning of June the old site is going bye-bye and elliestarling.com will redirect to this tumblr again. In addition the email address travis@travistye.com will also be ceasing to exist. I am really not using the hosting at all anymore and the cost has gotten to the point I can’t really justify paying for hosting every month just for email redirects. 

What does this mean? if you want to read the comics, get on it now, cause they’re going away soon. Im sure I will eventually put them back online somewhere but for the forseeable future they will be Gone. 

ellie starling announcement rpg maker comics
animmania
animeshowfan

anyone with any rpgmaker knowldedge useing the victor engine know which each of these lines of animtions are for?

image
elliestarling

1. Idle pose

2. Guard pose

3. Idle pose (low HP)

4. Take damage pose

5. Physical attack pose

6. Use item pose 

7. Use skill pose (no type)

8. Cast magic pose

9. Advance pose (used when moving to an enemy to attack)

10. Retreat pose (used to move back to position after attack)

11. Escape pose (used when running from battle)

12. Intro pose (plays at the beginning of battle)

13. Victory pose

14. Dead pose

It’s worth mentioning that you can have more rows of animations on a spritesheet than these default 14, and you can change which row a specific command will draw animations from in the config of the script. You can put custom animations for every skill or spell if you wanted. There are also poses in the script that by default don’t have animations, like ‘Ready’ (when it is a character’s turn to act), Item and Magic Cast poses (if you wanted a FF6-style ‘chanting’ animation while your character preps a spell, for example), and a few others. These scripts are incredibly versatile and I would encourage everyone to take the time to learn how to make good use of them.

rpg maker