Posted February 08, 2025 by KrimsonKatt
Hello everyone. The last couple of months have been really hard. For a while I suffered from the worst depression of my life, making it very hard to work on anything. I’ve also been addicted to the new game Metaphor ReFantazio, so not much progress could be made on the maker side of things. While trying to gather footage of my game for a sizzle reel for the upcoming RPG Maker direct, I ran into numerous MAJOR issues in my game that made my game nearly unplayable. From what I understand, my game has gotten WAY too bloated and overcomplicated, too much for its own good. Even after multiple scalebacks, it’s too much. For a good few months there (November to January) I believed that to make my game stand out, I needed to really hammer in on the graphics to create a stunning visual experience and draw people in. Well, after 4 months of numerous setbacks, technical difficulties, and visual and technical nightmare after nightmare, I have learned a hard lesson: no matter what I do, I am not within my current means to create the graphics I desire for my game, and ultimately that is okay.
To get my game to a playable state in the next couple of months, I need to cut back on a lot of things, mainly the states, enemy skills, and graphical presentation. I need to cut back on all those crazy graphics and UI plugins to go back to the default RM/visustella style, even if it hurts my game visually. Go back to side view and side view UI, ditching all those complicated perspective shifting battle visuals I was planning on. RPG maker just doesn’t have the means to make that sort of visual spectacle work without completely custom plugins to manage everything, despite my best efforts. This I what I plan to do to cut back on various aspects messing with my game’s performing, quality, and technical status:
1: Cut back on plugin use. Only use the plugins I ABSOLUTELY need. This means removing a large handful of plugins including all of SRD’s plugins, message letter sounds, most of the CasperGaming plugins, a minimap plugin, and various others.
2: Heavily cut back on the amount of states present. Reduce the 30+ ailments with just the bare minimum: Poison, Burn, Slow, Paralysis, Daze, Blind, and Curse, plus the element breaks. (which don’t really count imo.) No more sleep, bleed, constrict, silence, dread, disease, charm, stop, corrupted, sin statuses, tar, or infection statuses. To make things clear, here is what each of these states becomes:
Bleed, Infection -> Poison
Sleep, Stop -> Slow
Constrict, Tar -> Paralysis
Charm -> Daze
Silence, Dread, Disease, Corrupted, -> Curse
Sin Statuses -> Removed
This also means removing, rebalancing, and renaming certain restorative items in the game to compensate for this new change in statuses. These are the new items:
Poison = Antidote
Burn = Ice Chunk
Slow = Krimson GS
Paralysis = Soothing Sands
Daze = Trifold Map
Blind = Eye Drops
Curse = Holy Water
Break = Neutralizer
Debuff = Dispel Stone
All = Remedy
3: Removing Fatigue from the game straight-up. Too hard to implement and too frustrating for players. This means removing all fatigue states as well.
4: Removing the nightmare hour event. This means removing the Tinker Toy, Boo Boo Bear, and Bugaboo Wall bosses from the game and having the Oni and Archfiends moved to specific locations in the world map after certain conditions have been reached. The Oni will only appear at their specific tablets after breaking the seal at the Oni Shrine in Eternia, and the Archfiends will wander certain isolated areas at night in the postgame/NG+. This also means removing the regular nightmare bosses’ associated weapons and armor from the game.
5: Heavily restructuring enemy arts. Now there are far less enemy arts, as most of them have been cut or combined. Similar enemy arts that could be replaced with regular class arts were removed and enemy arts that were very similar to another enemy art were combined into a single art, like combining all claw-related arts (Fire Claw, Ice Claw, Hellfire Claw, etc) into a single “Wild Claw” art. This basically means that many of the arts have been “genericfied” so that they could work on multiple enemies instead of just one, cutting back on the amount of arts and development time.
6: The Dragoon class has been drastically rebalanced. Their “Jump” art has been replaced with “Jump Strike”, a simple strike-elemental physical art that merely pierces 10% of DEF, as the previous incarnation of the skill, which mimicked dragoon’s jumping ability from Final Fantasy, was far too complicated for RPG Maker to handle. Due to this many of their passive arts had to be changed. Speaking of which…
7: Many active and passive arts that previously required complicated JS effects to work have been changed to be different kinds of arts or have different effects. For example, the Dragoon’s “Chrono Force” and “Sky High” passive arts have been replaced with “Draconic Power” and “Draconic Defense”, which raise STR/MAG or DEF/RES respectively at the beginning of battle.
8: Cut back on the UI changes and revert solely to the “MZ/Visustella” default, mainly involving the visuals involved with my press turn battle system.
Hopefully these changes and more will cut back on the game’s overall bloat and keep things running smoothly going forward so I can focus on making the actual game instead of making graphics, UI, and fixing all sorts of technical errors. I will now go on to reset all my plugin settings and remove all the JS code from my game’s skills and states and see what that fixes. Then I will add the new JS to each of the skills and test them individually. Hopefully all of this will improve my development workflow and help me finish the game much faster than before, or at least get the demo out the door before the new deadline of June. I have also recently fixed some lore inconsistencies in the itch.io page for Chronicles Meteorfall. Thank you all for your time and patience. Happy gammak, and I’ll see you all next month for another update!