The Diary is a short experimental game. You can unlock the true ending in about ten minutes, probably less, and you have a good chance of doing it without doing anything special. Just approach the game as a curious person who wants to know what happened. But just because it’s short doesn’t mean it’s meaningless. In The Diary, you are a student who finds an abandoned apartment building and in it, an apartment that’s not completely empty. It seems the last tenant left some things behind: books, documents, a fully-charged laptop that clearly was meant to be found. Look—and listen—to […]
A week or so ago on As the Pixie Turns, my demo for She Who Fights Monsters was delayed for a couple of days due to a technical mishap. What happened is since there’s no “Save As” feature in RPG Maker, I copy-and-pasted my game project files into another project directory, and I planned to edit THAT project to make the demo.
For reasons that I now forget (probably wanting to tweak the map data in the master project and use the improved versions in the demo), I decided to delete the maps in the demo project. Which, in case you missed it, was a completely separate entity from the project I copied it from. So I did the deletions, saved the project, closed it and opened the master project… only to find that all the maps were suddenly gone from there, too.
Now, if you haven’t used RPG Maker, maps are where the program stores ALL your layout data: where things are positioned, what events/scripts are triggered and where, what areas look like, etc. Basically, if a map is deleted, the area is gone forever. If all your maps are gone and they’re not supposed to be, well…. That’s a freak out-worthy event. And somehow, messing with a completely separate project did this to the main one. My best guess is it happened because the master project and the would-be demo were stored in the same directory at the same level, even though they were in different folders. Don’t try to make sense of it. It’s just what the program does.
How to Copy and Backup RGP Maker Files Safely
First off, a usage note. If you delete a map from your RPG Maker VX Ace Project, you can’t undo it. The menu’s Undo option will be greyed out. So when the dialogue box asks you if you’re sure you want to delete it, it’s being completely serious.
Now on to the copy and backup stuff. Here’s the safest way to copy a project: (more…)
After a harrowing misadventure that involved technical mishaps, piecing together my game data from old files pulled up with Shadow Explorer, and doing a fair amount of re-coding to get back to where I was, the new OFFICIAL demo for She Who Fights Monsters is here! No more alpha stuff.
She Who Fights Monsters is part RPG, part horror, and part daily life. Help little Jennifer survive seven days with her alcoholic father, navigating worlds created by her imagination; gather the young girl’s memories and see who she becomes. The demo covers Day One.
Since I’m too tired to tell the long version (I’m actually writing this at almost four in the morning and queuing it to post… whenever it posts), here’s the short one.
Due to an unfortunate incident brought about by RPG Maker VX Ace’s lack of a “Save As” feature and a baffling glitch which caused it to change not only the file I was working on, but the one it was copied FROM, I have a fair bit of rebuilding work to do. I’m just glad I was able to salvage most of the original data.
Sorry about the delay. The demo should be ready by Wednesday or Thursday.
Yeah, I know: I already have an alpha demo out. But I called that one an “alpha” demo for a reason. I always planned to put out something more polished later on, and it looks like the time draws near.
The new demo will (like the old one) cover the game’s first day, albeit it slightly abbreviated. But there’s a lot more going on now and the scenery’s changed quite a bit. Yes, even beyond the recent update that I posted. Oh, and you’ll get to hear the game’s first piece of original music. Sure, it’s just a twelve-second loop, but I sequenced it myself and it fits the scene.
If all goes according to schedule (and it looks like it will), I’ll release the new demo Monday. Be on the lookout! 🙂
I’m making good progress with my first non-Twine game. Two months ago, I’d never used RPG Maker before and wasn’t even sure how to start; now, I have something that 1)is definitely a game with playable things in it, albeit an incomplete one and 2)is, in its way, pretty intricate as it slowly takes shape.
I’ve also settled on the game’s official name. It’s going to be She Who Fights Monsters.
I’d like to have a non-alpha demo done by early March. To give you some idea of what’s changed since the alpha, here are some Before and After screenshots:
Jenny’s Room – Old
Sanctuary – Old
Dark World – Old
Jenny’s Room – Current
Sanctuary – Current
Dark World – Current
There are still things to refine, art assets to make and songs to add (and game days to even START implementing), but I think the progress is clear.
And since RPG Maker’s character generator couldn’t give me quite the right color scheme, I made some noticeable changes to Jenny’s sprite. But I think I’ll save those for when the new demo comes out. 🙂
Oh, and as an added bonus, a peek at my Debug Room:
I got a free copy of RPG Maker VX Ace last December. Soon afterward, I got an idea: I would make a horror game. A horror game prequel to a certain other project that gets my focus next. But as I worked through things in my Game Ideas notebook, I realized parts of my own life were starting to bleed through.
I don’t really like to talk about my past–or my present a lot of the time. But I do like taking things and turning them into fiction. I started seeing the absolute worst parts of my childhood and wanted make something with them, a gameified version of what I went through and how I dealt with it. I started seeing how if I took that far enough, it could end up (hopefully) both really disturbing and rather unique.
Though the main character isn’t necessarily that Jenny, she does bear the name “Just Because.” And everything you see and do in the game is colored by her perceptions, by the way that things can look through a child’s imagination. Closets, basements and what have you can become new worlds and adventures; confronting her drunken father is… well… It can be rather unpleasant.
The Alpha demo I just finished is a small, incomplete taste of what I have planned for this game. Many of the graphics will chance, and so will the music. The gameplay will be expanded and the whole house will ultimately be yours to explore. For now, though, the demo does give some idea of what this game is emotionally. I also plan to release a second, larger Beta demo once the game is closer to completion.
So, very, VERY recently I heard of something called the Experimental Gameplay Workshop. Now, I can’t afford to go to conferences and such… but all I see on the page is that they’re looking for submissions, not that you have to be there.
Thanks to an interesting twist of fate (and being on Twitter at the right time), I got a free copy of RPG Maker from Madam Luna. Which, if I take a crash course in it, should let me put a game together in a relatively short time. I already have an idea. The only question is if I can make it serviceable by February 1st. I’m also thinking of sending in Eden and/or Shadow of a Soul.
“But Pixie,” you might be thinking (or at least I kind of am), “you’re total n00b. What makes you think you can do this? What makes you think that anything is going to come of it?” The answer is… I don’t. But I won’t know unless I try.
(Even if I can’t finish a prototype in time, this particular new game idea is something I really want to do. In other words… it’s going to get finished. One way or another.)
I think I’ve settled on all the technical stuff for Jenny’s game. I’ll be using Unity3D as the game engine. The graphics will be rendered in Blender. It’ll be a 2D sidescroller, albeit with graphics made in a 3D program. And the game itself may have some platforming, but technically, it’ll be more of a beat ’em up.
One reason I picked Unity (well, besides it being free) is because there’s a crapload of info and tutorials for it out there. If you’ve got a question, someone’s likely got the answer and it won’t be hard to find. With Construct Classic and especially IG Maker–which I assumed would be a good program since it came from the RPG Maker folks—not so much. (I’ve been kicking myself for months for not having gone with my first thought and bought RPG Maker instead. Oh, well.)
As far as Construct Classic goes, that has similar problems. I’m sure it’s fine for what it is, but there’s just not enough resources and support. But at least that one is free, and it IS easier to find tutorials for it than it is for IG Maker.
I also find Unity’s interface more intuitive in some ways, which is funny since working with Unity takes a decent amount of scripting and the other two programs are mostly WSIWYG. And if I’m going to have to learn a whole new system anyway, I might as well learn programming, too.
But the best thing about Unity is it makes cross-platform downloadable games while Construct Classic and IG Maker only export to Windows and Flash. With Unity, my Mac and Linux-using friends won’t be left out. 🙂
I decided to go with rendered graphics because despite the learning curve and initial time investment, I think it’ll ultimately be easier for me than drawing/animating sprites by hand. I know how I work and what I [don’t] have patience for. I could easily spend ages perfecting a 3D model, but drawing the same thing over and over would eventually drive me bonkers. Besides that, there are ways to make 3D art look cartoony—and that would be a lovely look for what I have in mind.
As for why the game will be a beat ’em up (think old school Splatterhouse), that’s because it suits the main character and what I’d like to do here—namely make something that’s fun to me with plenty of gratuitous violence.
Prompted by a question from my friend Matthew, here’s a Twine tutorial on how to create hidden links that the reader/player won’t see until they mouse over them. Click here to see what I mean.
JavaScript and HTML
First, you’ll need this snippet of HTML and JavaScript from Glorious Trainwrecks:
Where it says PassageName, use the name of the passage you want to link to. Where it says Link Text, substitute whatever words you want to use as the link.
Now, here’s where the fun starts. Where it says class=”internalLink”, change it to this:
class=”internalLink hidden“
With hidden being the name of the special class you’re going to apply to this link. (You don’t have to name the class “hidden”. I just picked it because it’s convenient.)
CSS: Hiding the Links
Now, create a passage with the tag stylesheet. (more…)
(If you just want to get to the picture, keep scrolling. If you’re on the homepage, click the post title and then keep scrolling.)
Here’s the main character of what, in all likelihood, will be my first non-Twine game. Her name is Jenny (it just kinda stuck), and it took me a while to pin down her appearance. The coat, boots, black lipstick, meat cleaver and ponytail were always there. So was the idea that she should look kind of badass. And I always saw her as more-or-less racially ambiguous. It’s the other details that got me: her height, her features, that sort of thing.
The first sketch didn’t feel quite right. I liked her attitude, I thought she looked too butch. (Butch women are great, BTW. That’s just not how I saw Jenny.)
The second looked more like Jenny’s face, but she wasn’t having enough fun. She was also much too tall.
The third sketch was almost there. Almost, but not quite. And after I scanned it an loaded it up in Manga Studio, I couldn’t figure out for the life of me why I just couldn’t ink it. Then, it hit me: go back to the source. The thing that helped inspire the game. The problem was I was drawing this more-or-less in my usual style. If I was going to make it work, I’d have to adjust some things. (more…)
