proxxie
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Development Journal 1/14
🕑 Added 2018-01-14 17:06:01 +0000 UTC Greetings!This was a fairly productive week as far as game work goes. I read a couple of relevant books, which helped sort out my own thoughts on plot and theme-related matters. There's still a lot of plot work to be done, but I now have a much clearer idea of where I want this game to end up and how - more or less - it's going to get there.
I also did work on mapping. There are a number of RPG Maker games out there with really pretty maps, and some folks had expressed hopes that maybe The Proteus Effect could be like that, too. If you see a map that looks drastically different from a stock map, chances are it was made through a technique known as parallax mapping. Basically, the technique involves making one or more images, usually in a program like Gimp or Photoshop, and then overlaying those onto a stripped-down RPG Maker map. The player then sees the pretty, sometimes handpainted map instead of the basic RPG Maker one.
I did a fair bit of investigation into parallax mapping this week, but I've decided I won't be using it, for two main reasons. First, it's very time intensive. There's no way I could stick to a more-or-less monthly release schedule if I used it. Even fairly basic sprucing-up of the stock maps takes quite a long time. Second, it impacts performance. Parallax maps take up thousands (!) of times more memory than the standard RPG Maker maps. This can cause a number of problems for folks playing the game on not-exactly-stellar hardware, particularly for larger maps. It can also cause lag when switching between zones, even if you do have good hardware. Maybe all this stuff is fine if all you're doing is turn-based combat, but if you're using a lot of action sequences - like I am - it just doesn't make sense.
If the project ever brings in a lot of money, I might think about hiring someone to do parallax mapping and trying to figure out a way to make it work. But as it is, if you like this game, I figure it's mostly because of the writing and the renders (and maybe the gameplay), so I want to devote most of my development time to those.
Having said that, I did investigate some other methods that will make the maps look better, but without the drawbacks of parallax mapping. They won't have as drastic an impact as parallax mapping, but I'm having good results with them so far, so hopefully you like it!
If everything goes as planned, I'll finish up the maps in the early part of the week, and then start scripting events and writing dialogue in the later part.
I hope you have a good week, and thank you for your support!
Comments
Proxxie
Default asset resolution is fixed in MV. You could get around that by making a lot of your own assets, but that's an enormous amount of work. Enough that if you were thinking about doing that, you should probably just use another engine. Overall resolution can be changed easily in MV, but I very specifically chose to use the default one, for two main reasons. The first has to do with (artistic) composition, and the second has to do with the closer and more intimate feel of the game experience. To answer your question, no, parallax mapping doesn’t change anything about the underlying engine. It just puts a (potentially) nicer face on it.
OhioOkie
I really enjoy the writing as it is light, playful, interesting and grammar and spelling is good. Some games the plot line is good but the writing is bad, but not yours. Both are good. I would like to have larger screen areas for RPGs and higher resolution for more detailed sprites. I guess from reading all the comments MV works but increases memory size needs. Question, using parallax maps does it the allow vector movement using a mouse or is it still, left-right, up-down movements? I have a suggestion for a book where one could get ideas for your virtual reality game. It is more how an real thinking AI might use VR to conduit it's own social experiment. The book is an older sci-fi called The Andromeda Strain. There is no VR but the AI conducts social experiments on people world wide. But the AI in your game may use our two heroes to learn about human responses. But at this time I think I see where your game is going where the hero's are lost jumping from one VR game to another. But it does seem the AI in that game can learn from the heroes like in the town with the soldiers.
Proxxie
I hadn't even considered how it would affect changing the map later. Yes, it would make it considerably more difficult in most cases.
Ah that's really cool, had no idea RPG Maker could get so involved (I knew writing and plot were hard when I tried RPGM 3 back on the PS2 as a kid... #BlunderYears). I've actually been messing around with GIMP as I've had way too much free time, editing teh naughtyz so this looks fun to learn. Anyways, makes sense to wait on it either way, doing the work now then having to change it all when you need to edit a map or change it entirely wouldn't be very much fun or efficient.
