I'll be updating this on a weekly basis. I intend to make a whole real ass game by the end of it.

WEEK ONE

I've never uploded here so I apologize for the cluttered format. I started a game in SRPG studio and wanna post weekly about it so here I am with one and a half maps done and 20-25ish maps to go, as well as brand new audio and visual assets.

The first map is a light homage to Sacred Stones' first map in terms of there being mountains and a forest and a trail and three enemies. One of the enemies is a hungry ghoul who will target the kid npc directly and the other two are just gonna fight whoever is closest, probably you if you're doing your main character duties. The npc naturally flees in a path that is advantagous. I upped the hit rates of the swords cause I would just constantly miss. Over all a simple map. One thing I might try is upping the move of the hungry ghoul and lowering his attack (low enough that he doesn't one shot the kid).

The second map has a lot more going on. All the red prince folks are gonna get swapped with a spread of undead enemies and maybe normal soldiers. Originally the family of three in the house were going to be green but I ended up making them blue. I like them, they're really cute and I think their introduction fending off their own home on the outskirts of a town is fun, and I like giving players agency over using green units anyway. I know I've cursed at many green units in the past.

The character who spawns infront of the temple is this games Jaigen, and she uses light magic and is super strong. Among a band of 2 young men you start the game with and a family of three, she stands out as the oldest and strongest character as well as the most knowlegable of the worlds inner workings. No better introduction then her massacring a hoard of the undead single handedly.

Oh, and also, that skelly man at the top is a guy who will sell you stuff from his chest. I tried so hard to make it so you could talk to him and open a shop from that dialogue but it never worked. And you were supposed to be able to kill him and lose access to the shop but get some loot. It's pretty common in certain types of games, but I couldn't quite implement it so straight forwardly. What I need is a way to disable the shop if skelly is dead and it'll basically be the same.

The second map still has a lot of work to be done, chests to be filled, villages and npcs to script, the goal is next week to simply have the chapter fully ready to go. I do intend to use original visual and audio assets, but completely overhauling all of that is going to take a long time and I don't have a great eye for visually crafting compelling sprite art.

Anyways, after playing vestaria saga for 300 hours and really enjoying it, I figured I'd take my own crack at it. It's someting I've always wanted to do and this program is surprisingly really good at making it easy with only a few oddities. It helps me personally to talk out what I'm doing and if you read this far maybe you derived some kind of value from it as well.

I finished map 2.I had to redo a lot of work and carefully script the cutscenes and enemies and everything. It wasn't too bad.  Now I just need to carefully build a cutscene between here and chapter 3 and chapter 3 itself, which I'm planning on making a little more straight forward since this one is pretty challenging and chapter 5 is going to be challenging as well. If by this time next week chapter 3 is done great, if I'm still working on it though then the cutscene probably took longer to script then I'm thinking it will. Scripting cutscenes isn't mega hard but it can have some nuances and complications.

Hey guys. I made some pretty modest progress this week. I got the general concept for chapter 3 on paper and I have most of the end of chapter 2 cutscenes done with the start of chapter 3 cutscenes still needing to be scripted. I'm hoping to finish up chapter 3 and bridge all the narative pieces between 2 and 3. I will be out of town for half of the weak and working long hours at work the other half though, so I doubt I can do that. One thing I did do this week was experinment with importing freely made assets and make a few of my own. That'll be one of those things that I don't really show in any screenshots until I start commiting to colloring the world with it. I'm pretty confident it'll look good and be nice and good looking an unique. I am not sure how I want to do the character sprites, but they're less daunting to switch out so I'm not horribly worried about it. The faces/busts of the characters is something I think I might outsource but I don't know if I trust anyone else with my vision but that's another thing better figgured out sooner than later. 

In conclusion, on my trip I'll do my best to make tile sprites in my leasure time on my steam deck. Then I also need to code a win condition, the kids being loaded up into the slave ship, and zombie reinforcements (it's a heck of a map). And also bridge the narrative gaps.  Given how unexcited I am to do that, I'll probably break the narrative into smaller breadcrumbs for later and cut some pieces out entirely. 

Hello friends. I made 3 songs this week for my game. It's honestly so fun to make music for this game. I probably won't end up needing too many songs for this game maybe like 16 since it's pretty easy to reuse them and it's good to reuse them to. It's interesting because I can write a 5 minute song, cut out a  catchy part of it and loop it as chapter 1 music then bring that back later and kind of build on it organically as a motif. Etc. I do everything pretty free form without any quantizing, so it sounds more natural but at the same time less kind of pop and wow. I also did some spriting but it's not ready to be uploaded. No photos today. I did a lot of intelectual work that can't really be photographed. By this time next week I'd like to have implemented my own graphics to show off. Thanks for reading!

This is my 30th day working on this game! I have polished up chapter 3 and barring some stat readjustments it looks to be basically done. No major updates. Unfortunately big progress is slowing down after rediscovering my addiction to modded sonic adventure 2 but it still moved forward decently. By this time next week I'm not really sure where I want to be. I can either work on chapter 4, work on the connecting threads between the chapters, or work on oringinal sprite work, or work on the music. I think I'll work on sprite work. By this time next week I'll try to have some original basic grass sprites to paint the world with at the very least. 

Hi! Overdue update tiem. I do believe that it may be worth doing it biweekly updates or even monthly. I think the further I get into the project the longer a girthy update will take. Anyway, I've been experimenting with different sprites. I found a bunch of free to use premade ones curtesy of SSCAP discord, which I will edit to match some of my sprites and I still have a lot of work to go. I'm not sure how much visual polish I want to add, I didn't like SSCAPs grass so I made a few tiles of my own but it's hard to put all the pieces together, it takes a lot of experimentation and time and haven't these premade assets is a god send but there's still a lot of work that needs to be tuned in the visual presentation unless I want to send it like this, which I don't think is the worst thing in the world. I made a pretty nice alternate grass tile but to make it mesh w everything for example I need to make new versions of everything, or I can just stick with my more gen 3 pokemon looking grass. I guess I'll do that and go back and add more detail if I feel like it. Ultimately this games main appeal is going to be the writing and map design buy I do want it to look and sound distinct and pleasent.