itch.io

Annotated artbooks are my most favorite thing in my library and I'm super jazzed to pore over this one! Should make for a good way to get through the tail end of the week ^^

Thank you very much for taking a chance on it! I've been pretty positively surprised with the reception Polar Seven has gotten and it's really nice to hear that you enjoyed the demo! I've been in the weeds on some other stuff for the last while, but when things lighten up for me I'm very much thinking about getting polar seven into a fuller-fledged state? So here's hoping! ^^

Very hype to see this come out! :D

I marathoned(?) this yesterday and it was hella rad, extremely good experience <3

This is a really good plugin in general! It adds a lot of style (and saves me time on drawing walkarounds, hehe)

I found a small bug in the MV version, at least. I tried it with all the other plugins turned off, but it wasn't a totally sanitized project so it's possible it may have just been on my end.

Bug behavior was, if you just started a new game and the flag for flipping on Y movement is off, moving left and right has no flipping effect until a vertical direction is pressed, at which point the flipping works from that point onward.

After rummaging around in the code I thiiiink (I know almost nothing about code, so sorry if this is inaccurate) this is due to the prevVerticalDirection variable throwing off a calculation when it is in an uninitialized or unpopulated state; I'm not sure what the default behavior of that is like in MV. If I had to make a shot in the dark, I thiiiink it might be line 170 not digesting properly, but am not able to determine that.

I resolved the issue by adding the following as line 81:

"this._prevVerticalDirection = 2;"

Which initializes prevVerticalDirection with usable input, and with that in place the horizontal sprite flipping functions as expected right off the bat. I tried it equal to 1 first and the problem persisted, which is why I think its uninitialized state is throwing off a calculation somewhere, but again, pure fancy on my end.

If no one else encounters this problem, I guess it's just me, but if anyone else does, that might patch it up. Oh, and the script version I am using is V 1.0 (initial release).

Anyway anyway, thank you for making this plugin and for all the others too! I've been buying all the ones I can and I'm super wowed by the functionality, will be keeping an eye on stuff as it comes out! ^^

This is hella rad and the horrible creatures are a delight, hell yeah XD

This was hella rad and I really sunk into the vibe of it, very good evening drinking it in

Howdy howdy! Just wanted to let you know I picked up the whole set of these. I do digital art and game making as a hobby and I'm always looking for like, interesting textures and things to jazz up the graphics I work on, so I'm excited to try 'em out! So thanks for making them and putting them out :3

B, A, B, B, A uh, if my memory holds. Performing social mechanics and things like that ain't my strong suit though XD

Good, fun read. Got a giggle and loved the super charming art ^^

This collection is amazing and I immediately ran and told like everyone I know about it (which isn't very many people cuz I don't a lotta folks), and like, was just super great to soak up! ^^

Appreciated the zine! I too am pretty tired of "wokeness" and "DEI" becoming a talking point about why games are good or bad; bad games existed long before those concepts did and I have yet to see an argument that could legitimately claim that whatever resources went into making a game inclusive, or it being inclusive at all, was also what skewered it. Not that I see any of those arguments moving in good faith either anyway, so that's never really the point.

I also appreciate the touching on of homophobic critique of games. I still remember the first time I had someone I was close to A) refuse to stop using "gay" as a pejorative when I told them it made me uncomfortable and B) reject games I suggested we play together because they couldn't stomach the "queer aesthetic". People are allowed their preferences of course, but I can't stand that, like...I'm not sure how to articulate it. There is no reason to propagate the way the world already tries to make us less proud, I guess.

Representative art was what finally gave me a window into who I really was, and yeah, in these shitty times, we need more of it.

Unfortunately I had to bow out of the jam, like, work hit a crazy crunch period and I had school start back up, just couldn't handle any more deadlines ;w;

I think this is a really cool idea! Like, a digital compendium of your creative universe is great! :D

Thank you!  Yes, the abruptness is an issue, sort of ran out of railroad? Spent a lot of time on like the bones and didn't have a lot of time to get a lot of content together, but I wanted to end on the highest point I had developed. I had built and tested the "talking to the dead" sequence pretty early on and figured it was the best way to end a demonstration, so I'm happy I got that far. 

I very much appreciate you trying it out, and I'll check out the video when I have a moment! ^^

Oh no worries, it is not too serious a "sorry sorry", just a habit, really. I am a person prone to apologizing even when it is not necessary, do not worry!

For what it's worth, I find your communication rather good; there are native english speakers who do much worse!

And my first ko-fi tip, even! I uh, I will have to see if that functions. First one and all. We'll see! I'm not sure my work merits tips quite yet, so uh, when I make my first like commercial release, I'll see if I can drop you a line and get you a copy or a key for it or something. However that works. No promises but I will look into it, I don't know how that stuff functions yet ^^;

Sorry sorry! Just one thing leads to another and I didn't want to leave a loose thread. I'm not sure how useful it will be since it's sort of just scattershot bits, but hopefully it is helpful to some degree. It's just everything where like, when I sit down to put graphics into MV, those are the things I immediately pull up.

The only other addendum I would have is there are other programs that are built for pixel art, Aseprite just has most of what I'm looking for when I'm building that.

If you have any specific questions feel free to let me know and time willing I will see what I can do to address them. No promises but happy to help.

I hope you have a good day too ^^

Sorry, small follow up, but poking around small shout out to the official RM website blog and tutorials? like this actually covers making an autotile pretty understandable, I hadn't seen it until just now XD

https://www.rpgmakerweb.com/blog/classic-tutorial-making-an-autotile

So maybe check their blog and tutorials and things too for such things.

Sure! I don't know how useful this is, but it's some stuff I do when I'm doing art assets and thing.

You might know already that MV's default tile size is 48 x 48 pixels per tile. For polar seven, I designed the sprites and tiles around a 16 x 16 tile size and then upscaled them by 3. I find working in that smaller resolution less intensive than trying to draw everything at 48 x 48 and I'm used to making sprites at that size from previous RPG makers, so that's what I generally do. If you try this out, all you have to do is make sure you're upscaling and downscaling with Nearest Neighbor as the setting in whatever art program you use, to avoid anti aliasing. You can also design things at 24 x 24 and then double them.

That's how I do things with pixel art, anyway. Things would be a little different if I was like drawing assets, which some people do and I haven't done in a long time. smaller canvas sizes would probably be uncomfortable for that style.

MV's documentation has the different asset sizes and stuff near the tail end of it, but I usually have these templates on hand for laying out tiles for the different tileset types:

https://invenblocker.tumblr.com/post/161891747018/templates-for-rpg-maker-mv-til...

The autotiles can be kind of difficult to make though, I don't do a lot of them because they are hard to visualize. If you feel unconfident with them (I usually do) you can get a lot out of just using A4 (walls) and A5 tiles with B-D, for the most part. To visualize how those work I use this graphic:

https://www.reddit.com/r/RPGMaker/comments/mil04n/autotile_template_for_mv_made_...

At the tail end of that reddit, someone has an Aseprite file that I have yet to try, but allegedly automatically displays how the autotile would look in full as you draw it, which seems very handy. I'm fixing to try that out next time I get the chance. There are also a good number of youtube videos explaining how autotiles work. They're trickier to design than the other tiles,  is all.

Making pixel art is kind of a whole thing, there's a lot of tutorials on https://lospec.com/. I also use them to sources palettes on occasion, since palette design is a skill unto itself.

There's also a lot of plugins out there for tweaking aesthetic things, Like I usually disable the cursor blinking and have fully opaque windows since I find the transparent ones kind of distracting (and inauthentic if you're making deliberate homages to like NES/SNES games).  I typically have Aries's free customizations plugin from here handling the cursor (https://ariesofsheratan.itch.io/aries002-systemcustomiser) and have Yanfly's suite of plugins slotted in and their core plugin handles the window opacity. They have a free essential bundle that I believe includes the core plugin (https://yanflyengineplugins.itch.io/). Galv (who has an external site) also makes a lot of free MV plugins that I see cited pretty often, though sometimes there is compatibility issues. Himeworks and SumRndmDde (SRD) also make a lot of plugins and I see their names come up in credits frequently. Many of these include aesthetic tweaks you might be interested in at some point, so just including them for future reference. For example, I use SRD's plugin that makes the sides of the window border tile instead of stretch all the time when I'm using pixel art.

I won't prattle on, but hopefully some of that is helpful? That's like my general environment for sitting down and making assets for MV. I'm not sure how useful any of it will be for just starting out. I use Aseprite for a lot of the work since it can do tiled canvases, which helps a lot when trying to visualize how tiles will look laid out next to each other so you can get rid of the visible like, seams. I can try to field specific questions, but that's sort of the off the top of my head stuff!

Atmosphere is a particular interest of mine; I spend an awful lot of development time fussing with fonts and color and windows and sound and things, so I'm happy that makes an impression! I use MV exclusively right now. I don't really like the default atmosphere that comes across with MV's default everything, so building that is a big part of things for me ^^

I'm happy the robot spooked you a little; they're not the creepiest thing ever since the setting is very cold and sanitized, but I was really hoping their first appearance would be surprising enough to give people a little jump :D

Thank you! It is a little vague at the get go; my goal with the scenario is for context  to build up as the game goes on. Right now, it is very incomplete though ^^;

I appreciate you playing it all the same, and the encouragement is very nice as well! :D

Thank you for giving it a go! Every play means a lot to me, and every comment, the world! XD

I do hope to find some more time to return to Polar Seven; I'm elbow deep in other jam work, classes, and uh just work work so the schedule is strained as-is, but I put so much time into it already that it would be nice to see it through. I had two modules (like the light and heater) planned that didn't make the deadline, and I need to add some more environment stuff and puzzles and things, but it's reassuring to know that other people can see it and think it has potential despite how little time there was to make content after doing the graphics and systems and stuff.

The tripwires are a delicate thing. I planned them around how visible they were on my setup, but I've since played a few games with puzzles that suffered a lot from visibility issues caused by like not having your monitor at full brightness and I need to account for such things better, I think. A feature I had planned that is actually easy to do but I couldn't find a moment to implement it is to make the tripwires have higher contrast when the player's light is on. This would solve the problem of them maybe not being visible enough, but I'm worried it would trivialize them too, hmm...

On the other hand it would make them easier to notice and hurry to for the tasty blast XD

Thank you again for playing and commenting! It really does mean a lot! :D

Yo this sounds super great! Very excited to add this to my library ^^

Remember playing this way way back when. It was really cool to revisit those memories during my playthrough of Renewal through the dev commentary. Good stuff ^^

I thought this game was atmospheric and sweet. Ending got me ;w;

Just wanted to give you a heads up that Chrome blocks this file download as something potentially malicious. I've downloaded and scanned it with Windows Defender and Malwarebytes and got no threats though, so I think it is just auto-flagging it since it is an uncommon file. 

Still, might be good to look into and get it like, unflagged as dangerous, or something. I don't know the process.

Right now it's mostly mechanical, like, you don't do a lot other than walk around and find things, and while it's intended to be a short enough game to kind of get what I can out of that, I'm still trying to find some other angle to make it more exciting, I dunno. Dwelling on it. If it's not super long maybe that's all it needs anyway.

I do think the Nemesis angle needs more attention; you don't see it worked with much. Like, if one of the requirements is that the Nemesis-like can be encountered on an unscripted/non-set piece  basis, the only other thing I can think of is like...Hellnight, maybe? I think the critter in that evolves during the game and is randomly encounterable. I'll have to keep it in mind as I keep making horror games, it is a good idea :D

Download version is now minted (hah) and seems to run as intended in my tests. It is as content-light as the browser version, just, you know, playable on desktop instead. Good exercise; I needed to learn how to do this sort of deployment anyway.

Let me see what I can do. I haven't done a downloadable version before, but it can't be that hard to put together, right?

Thanks! I'm kind of grumpy with it; it was a lot of good development experience but I'm worried it doesn't have much of a "hook", I'm still chewing it over a bunch mentally. I'm hoping to figure out something gripping about it so I can proceed on it with confidence...

I appreciate you spending some time with my smaller projects too. My goal this year was just to publish something small, and I did that, and next year my goal is to publish something with more meat on the bones than my prototypes and jam projects!

I jotted off a response, though I doubt it will be too helpful, I have too many beloved vibes to give too coherent data XD

I really appreciated this, thanks for making it <3

Thank you for trying it out! Even if there's nothing really to it other than an intro sequence. I am hoping to return to it someday as well. I learned a few things just from implementing what is here, so either way it was worth it ^^

Happy to hear it! I saw you were offering commissions for tracks and I do have an interest, just I need the wallet to be willing and an in-dev project that needs music, and right now I'm a little short on both ^^;

Regardless though, I think you should be pretty proud of what you do. I do a fair amount of  scrounging together sound assets since it's the part of game dev I have no skill in, and most of those assets are generally stylistically narrow, which I understand. I imagine for most folks selling assets has a pretty narrow margin, so gotta hit the most relevant and popular genres/styles for the sake of it.  Don't see a lot of Killer7/Suda, SMT, or jungle inspired works, but that late 90s / turn of the 2000s sound just scratches an itch, so it's cool to see that in your stuff.

Anyway, anyway, won't talk your ears off, just really good to hear your stuff :D

For what it's worth, I did think the chase was pretty clever. Having to quickly notice a change in a repeating pattern and react to it actually works pretty well, adds like a layer of texture on top of the usual chase experience. Very sharp stuff! ^^

Hey this is crazy good, and it got me to listen to more of your work and I think it's really pretty dang amazing; just some really quality stuff! :D

I thought this was pretty neat! I liked the graphic choices a lot, reminded me of like games that were made around when the consoles were straddling 2D and 3D, so you'd have like pretty detailed sprites, smooth gradients, and like texture patterned floors and stuff. I thought the finale worked pretty well too ^^

I found a bug or two, but on small projects that's not a huge deal. Overall I liked it :3

Thank you for checking it out! There's not a whole lot to it, and I had to tone it down a bit in spots, but it felt good to make something like this, hope to do more of them that are just a little more navigationally interesting or at least have more art and effects. I had to make it on a pretty tight timetable too, so I wish I coulda drawn more things and stuff. I think the car turned out surprisingly well (cars are hard to draw ;w;)

Around here the roads are pretty tight, but when you get out on some of the big stretches, like dallas to austin or austin to corpus christi, there's so much like, raw terrain, it's pretty wonderful.  Can go pretty dang fast if there isn't a lot of traffic. If one was so inclined to do so, of course 😎

The only way I haven't been is out westerly, and I imagine it's even emptier out that way. Doesn't have a major hub as far as I can tell.

Anyway anyway, thank you again for giving it a go! Means a lot to me ^^

Thank you! I think it turned out alright. Clumsy, maybe, but it does the job XD

I'm hoping to keep doing more personal works. My biggest barrier as an artist right now is not really having a grasp on like that internal self of sorts, so I'm hoping by making more stuff I'll slowly get to where I can harness that better?

Good luck with your own such endeavors too, of course! ^^

I thought this was pretty dang good! The atmosphere is really strong through the whole thing and the visuals are very ambitious and inventive. As someone who used to sacrifice a lot for people I thought loved me, I was very absorbed in it through its runtime and thought it said things of substance.