[MicMotorhead]

Finally cracked open the biggest remaining task, which is writing the varying story scenes that happen after boss battles and at the end of the game.

Spent some time writing a complete outline, then moved on to writing the individual scenes and their final text directly on the boards that will load in after bosses. The scenes that play after bosses trigger in a certain order, no matter in what order you fight the individual bosses.

5 scenes complete so far. Theare are 8 major scenes and a couple minor scenes that are presented in another way, elsewhere in the game after a couple minor events.

[Done] Scene 1.
[Done] Scene 2.
[Done] Scene 3.
[Done] Scene 4.
[Done] Special event that triggers when entering the second half of the game map. Includes a mini-boss variant of regular enemy.
[] Scene 5.
[] Scene 6.
[] Scene 7.
[] Final boss pre-fight scene.
[] Final boss post-fight scene.
[] Scene 8.

None of the scenes are long. Each consists of a few short paragraphs at most, so it is really only a question of me feeling inspired to write something.

This post has been edited by MicMotorhead: 18 June 2024 - 08:41 PM

[NoahSoft]

Nice progress bud, sounds like you're getting close!

[MicMotorhead]

Finished the 1st of two phases of the final boss. BUT then realized that some other bosses have some pretty bonkers coding in their ability scripts. I'm still not through fixing that stuff, but that's making games in a nutshell. Two steps forward, one step back.

One boss script in particular could not possibly ever have been actually tested. I had to rewrite the whole thing while shaking my head at past me.

[NoahSoft]

We've all been there. I'm impressed with your commitment to going back and fixing. I think the pay off will be worth it.

[MicMotorhead]

NoahSoft, on 04 July 2024 - 08:53 PM, said:

We've all been there. I'm impressed with your commitment to going back and fixing. I think the pay off will be worth it.

/>

I enjoy working on the game, so it seems always just a matter of time before I get down to business.

It feels like I should be finish it up as soon as I can though. My mind has been increasingly playing with the idea of what game
I want to make next.

[MicMotorhead]

Today I just did some fun stuff, instead of working on the last couple imporant elements that need to be wrapped up.
So there are now several new secrets and costumes to find. One secret is super well hidden. I like the idea of having layers, where secrets range from easy enough to find if you're a bit perceptive, to being very obtuse and requiring some luck to figure out. I always like that feeling where you've completed a game but you aren't sure if you even saw everything. I hardly ever use guides for that reason. They ruin the sense of mystery.

Also made all throwable weapons even more accurate AND cheaper to buy in bulk. I suppose I would have to explain the combat system to make that change seem significant, but trust me - it is.

This post has been edited by MicMotorhead: 05 July 2024 - 04:53 PM

[NoahSoft]

Clearly not falling into the pitfalls of the new Elden ring DLC LOL

[MicMotorhead]

NoahSoft, on 05 July 2024 - 09:31 PM, said:

Clearly not falling into the pitfalls of the new Elden ring DLC LOL

I'm probably not going to play the DLC. But I did come back to my old save for a handful hours in the week leading up to the Erdtree release. I beat Radahn and found my way to Nokron for the first time.
Haven't been back since. Elden Ring is cool, but I never quite loved it.

The last couple weeks, I've been playing something completely different. Sniper Elite 5 is my jam right now and I completed Still Wakes the Deep a little while ago. Both are really good.

This post has been edited by MicMotorhead: 15 July 2024 - 12:47 PM

[NoahSoft]

Oh cool! Yea I been feeling like some sniping mechanics. Might have to check that one out.

[MicMotorhead]

Didn't do much work on the game all the way through my summer vacation and the first couple weeks after that were kinda busy at work.

I've been doing new things with the game this past week and I'm pretty happy with some changes and additions I've made. Also reworked the interface a bit, which has been needed for a long time. Just some nice things like the equipment window and the inventory window not sending you back to the top every time you do something, but sending you to the top of the relevant section instead (melee weapons, throwable weapons, pendants, consumables, outfits, etc.)

I need to do a new board count so I know if I can add a few new boards for a couple ideas I have. 250 is a hard limit and I'm definitely well up in the 200+ range and I know that I need to reserve a handful or so for the last few story screens. But it will probably end up under 250 in total, I'd think.

At this point, I could finish the game at any point, but I really just wanna make sure that I've done everything that I wanted to do with this project. So I'll let some ideas simmer for a while longer.

---

Not sure what I wanna do next, but I was thinking about something with a toxic wasteland and the player controlling a party of little animal-like mutant freaks. Perhaps meeting new recruits as you go through the game and changing your team configuration on the fly.
A cartoony sort of post-apocalypse, with fluorescent green radioactive waste and colorful mutant creatures.

This post has been edited by MicMotorhead: 26 August 2024 - 10:48 AM

[MicMotorhead]

Doing some of the boring stuff, like testing that things work before I cross them off my "game completion chekclist". 5 of 8 bosses have been tested and crossed off the list.
A few of them got a slight adjustment to make them easier or harder.

Many boards in the game have little notes, like "change this puzzle - it sucks", "add more to this store", "add another NPC?" and such. But going through all of those is not going
to take that long. It's a series of quite small tasks that mostly aren't essential - just stuff I felt could be better.

The only new things I allow myself to add at this point is stuff that qualifies as tying up loose ends. Like a couple special keys that don't yet have a purpose, a few items that can't be
found in the game world yet and such. For a long time, I felt that the latter half of the game didn't have as many secrets and things to do as the first half of the game, but
at this point I think I've done a good enough job of fleshing that out that I can leave it alone. It's just so tempting to keep adding more crap everywhere lol

One tedious task I need to go through before wrapping up is figuring out which of the several hundred files in my development folder actually need to be in the released game.
A few unused sound or mzm files might sneak their way into the final zip file.

October release at the latest!

This post has been edited by MicMotorhead: 09 September 2024 - 06:16 AM

[MicMotorhead]

I've got a large stockpile of music that I've written over the years. I'm going through them right now, selecting tracks for the Cybil OST.
The only track written specificall for this game is "Cybil & Sarah" which I linked a couple years back or so.
And there's a very old track named "Cybil's Theme" which was written for a completely different version of the game that I was trying to make way back in 2014 or something.

I'm making .ogg files with fairly much compression. Maybe that will work out well. Wouldn't want to make a huge download.
What I'd like to do is include these files in the basic archive, and then maybe make a separate music DL with high quality files for overwriting if anyone wants it.

I've noticed game archives on the main site excluding music often. Is that a requirement? Is it a problem that my .RAR archive will probably be pretty umm... chunky?

This post has been edited by MicMotorhead: 10 September 2024 - 09:35 PM

[MicMotorhead]

Done for the night.
Over my bedtime for sure!

Over 135 minutes of music at 109MB, so I might have to include the soundtrack as a separate archive.
The game world itself is about 12MB and the varying MZMs and WAV files included take up almost no space.
Combined, I'm guessing that a 120+ MB file might be considered a bit much.

Perhaps tomorrow I can get down to business with assigning tracks to the varying game screens. I've got a rough
idea how I want to utilize these tracks, based on their general vibe.

[Lachesis]

MicMotorhead, on 10 September 2024 - 03:52 PM, said:

Over 135 minutes of music at 109MB, so I might have to include the soundtrack as a separate archive.

When you have a lot of music it generally works better this way anyway—if the music zip is the same between the original release and a bugfix release, the archive can deduplicate it (though currently you still have to reupload it to the new version). This means the game zip can be fairly lean and each bugfix release takes up less storage.

Quote

WAV files

Ogg Vorbis compression works great on sound effects too.

Quote

.RAR archive

As a heads up, for numerous reasons, RAR can not be submitted to DMZX and this probably won't change. The few RARs that are up currently are mostly from people who didn't listen 10 years ago.

[MicMotorhead]

Lachesis, on 12 September 2024 - 05:41 AM, said:

When you have a lot of music it generally works better this way anyway—if the music zip is the same between the original release and a bugfix release, the archive can deduplicate it (though currently you still have to reupload it to the new version). This means the game zip can be fairly lean and each bugfix release takes up less storage.

That's a great point! I'll make sure to do it that way. No reason to re-upload over a hundred megabytes to fix one line of code in the world file.

Lachesis, on 12 September 2024 - 05:41 AM, said:

Ogg Vorbis compression works great on sound effects too.

For this game in particular, all of the sound effects have been created with a program called SFXR that creates simple wave forms. So the .WAV files take up extremely little space, exported straight from that program.
But for future projects, it's definitely good to know. I wasn't actually aware that .OGG files could be used for sounds. When I started making the game, I'm not even sure I knew what .OGG files were.

Lachesis, on 12 September 2024 - 05:41 AM, said:

As a heads up, for numerous reasons, RAR can not be submitted to DMZX and this probably won't change. The few RARs that are up currently are mostly from people who didn't listen 10 years ago.

I'm sure I can find the means to make good ZIP files instead, so that's no issue. I do plan on reading the release instructions very thoroughly

Thanks. Helpful as always!

This post has been edited by MicMotorhead: 12 September 2024 - 06:16 AM

[MicMotorhead]

Another important milestone down: Final boss phase 1 completed. Now I need to do the final phase and all bosses are done. The second phase of the boss fight is very, very simple so I assume I'll get it done later today.

Then I just need to wrap up a couple short scenes with some dialogue and all major milestones will be complete.

Oh, and I guess I should have some sort of "THE END - Thank you for playing" screen.

[MicMotorhead]

All boss battles completed now!
Did a lot of work related to implementing the game's soundtrack.

What remains is a bit of dialogue writing and some minor tweaks, plus of course final testing of varying things.

[MicMotorhead]

The last three days I've been allowing a bit of feature creep. In a previous version of the game, where it had more of a sci-fi theme and was supposed to be an action game, the main character had an apartment you could visit. This would be just a single screen in a first person view, from which you could read some documents, sleep and listen to music. I wanted to stuff that feature into the current project and so that's what I've been doing over the last 3 days.

It's nothing that actually affects the core gameplay loop, so it's a harmless addition as such. You don't actually need to ever visit the apartment. If you do, you can listen to music (you find each separate track across the game world as "CDs"), read the manual, sleep or use a computer that periodically updates with access to new posts to read. It's nothing important and 100% optional. I just really liked that idea from a previous prototype, so I felt compelled to finally add it. The whole thing is 100% complete now.

Now where was I... Oh, right. I was supposed to finish the story...

This post has been edited by MicMotorhead: 26 September 2024 - 12:04 PM

[MicMotorhead]

Over the weekend, the game received quite a lot of fixes, adjustments and some new content. I'm starting to feel like most areas of the game are really nicely wrapped up by now.

While I haven't written a single word of those final story screens that need to get done, I have been thinking about how to go about it every day.

Basically, I'm rapidly arriving at a stage where everything left to do will be decidedly minor.

This post has been edited by MicMotorhead: 30 September 2024 - 12:11 PM

[NoahSoft]

This is incredible! Excited that you've moved onto primarily story considerations. Should we have a shared character/cameo or something? Could be cool?

[MicMotorhead]

NoahSoft, on 30 September 2024 - 07:36 PM, said:

This is incredible! Excited that you've moved onto primarily story considerations.

I don't feel confident in my writing abilities at all, so the story part feels like the toughtest part to do, even if there's very little of it and it's not complex at all />
It's easily the thing I've been avoiding working on the most often.

NoahSoft, on 30 September 2024 - 07:36 PM, said:

Should we have a shared character/cameo or something? Could be cool?

I'm down with this idea. What kind of thing would work for your game? My idea of how your game works is a bit hazy lol

As far as adding a cameo to my game, it does have a good number of NPCs standing around the game world. They typically offer some sort of one-off trade, advice or they're just there for giggles. So I could easily add a character of yours if you perhaps share a .txt with the script or something.

If you got other ideas, I'm listening.

This post has been edited by MicMotorhead: 01 October 2024 - 09:09 AM

[NoahSoft]

Yea this is sick. We could just make up a character that shows up in both as an NPC. Just a name, a char, a personality, nothing crazy but could be a cool link between them! i could take oneof your existing NPCs if you already have one with personality and stuff.

[MicMotorhead]

NoahSoft, on 02 October 2024 - 03:33 AM, said:

Yea this is sick. We could just make up a character that shows up in both as an NPC. Just a name, a char, a personality, nothing crazy but could be a cool link between them! i could take oneof your existing NPCs if you already have one with personality and stuff.

I was going through some NPCs to see if I had something perhaps suitable and actually ended up re-writing some very early NPCs partially.
One candidate for a collab could be the NPC whose script I'm sharing in the below Google Drive link (just a .txt file).

Drunken captain NPC:
https://drive.google...iew?usp=sharing

He's an NPC located in a town by the sea. He sells some wares from far away places. He's been in the game for several years, unchanged.
The gimmick with this guy is that Cybil can only comprehend what he's saying when having the "tipsy" status.

That's a first suggestion. Tell me what you think and any suggestions you have

This post has been edited by MicMotorhead: 02 October 2024 - 06:32 PM

[MicMotorhead]

Oh, and it just occurred to me that by far the most mentioned character in my game is a travelling explorer who you never actually meet.
You bump into notes left behind by him in even the deepest dungeons. Those notes don't exactly contain deep world building or story telling.
Just dumb jokes about how much he hates the places he goes to and how he continually fails to find any valuable treasure.
Sometimes, his notes might provide hints for secrets and such. This character is named "Arod the Explorer" (Get it?)

This post has been edited by MicMotorhead: 02 October 2024 - 06:50 PM

[NoahSoft]

Oh man. I could probably just put Arod or the drunken captain, or both into my game? maybe in the airship area?

[MicMotorhead]

i could put one of your characters in my game too. Just give me a description or something. There's plenty of places I could stuff an NPC. And then maybe adapt the character to do something that fits the game systems.
There is a small hidden area in the game that's MegaZeux themed. Maybe you have something that would fit in there?

[MicMotorhead]

So I really haven't had much time to look at the game over the last couple weeks, but I'm still aiming to finish it in October.
I've got one week off from work coming up, so that would be a golden opportunity to slap the last bunch of things together.

[MicMotorhead]

Another story screen down.

[MicMotorhead]

Several more boxes checked.
Getting reeeal close now.

Added a "The End" screen listing your final score, difficulty level and whether cheat mode was enabled.
Not that anyone will likely ever reach that screen legitimately, but it's a must have feature lol

I've also developed a headache, so I don't hope that's anything that's gonna interfere with my plans.
Gotta strike while the iron is hot.

This post has been edited by MicMotorhead: 12 October 2024 - 02:09 PM

[MicMotorhead]

Currently testing all links between dungeon floors. I found a couple mistakes, so now I pretty much have to go through all of them.

The thing I want to do last is adding music to all boards. Because working on your game in the editor while music is playing is super annoying.

Anyway, I've gotten a LOT done lately, so it's really going very well.

Only one small story screen left. I wrote it yesterday, but didn't like it and deleted the first draft.

This post has been edited by MicMotorhead: 13 October 2024 - 09:41 AM