I have been very busy with my game lately (The Prodigious Journey is its name, not sure if that was ever established). For a while I've been working on a particular area, the Capitol of the Kurenai Empire, but for some reason, even though I think that place came out mostly great, I just wasn't feeling it. I guess the thing is that beyond that one part there are so many greater moments in the game that I'm really excited to get to as soon as possible that I guess working on the Kurenai segment felt less exciting in comparison to thinking about those other parts. Man that sentence sucks, oh well. I've left off at Kurenai for about a year and didn't work on it due to stuff with school and whatnot, but now that Summer came around I found the time to start working on the place again. And even though it may be lackluster in comparison to everything else I've made so far, I'm still fairly happy with how it came out!
So some background before I start throwing up some screenshots. In my game, there are three evil guys all serving under the main antagonist, Mittens Nomsney, and all of them seek to take over the world and spread out some horrible anti-human-rights crap. One guy runs a female sex slave trafficking network, and another guy runs some genocidal forces against gays and lesbians. So after the party kicks the sex slaver's ass, they head on over to Kurenai to help out a band of gay rebels trying to stop Nomsney and his right-hand homophobe from creating the ultimate super-weapon against the resistance: the "Super Aryan."
I designed Kurenai as a sort of dungeon-city, where the main segments are three particular districts: the Industrial District, the Residential District, and the Agricultural District. Each district has a sort of miniboss you have to defeat, each of them weak to a particular element. Once all three are defeated, the party can storm Kurenai castle and save the day.
So at the Industrial District, once you've opened the way to move to the guardian, a cocky little asshole named Solomon will come out to help you.
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| The background of the whole story is that Axel (me) stumbled into this world by accidentally leaving the universe Earth is from. And everyone in this world knows about this, as it's a famous prophecy. |
"Oh come on, Cheetah/Axel, that's not so bad. He seems fine to me, maybe he just didn't know."
Not convinced he's a douche? Well, how about this. In the game you have a character in your party named Hageshi. She can control the powers of lightning and water, and is one of the very few who can wield Shock Katanas, blades infused with the power of lightning. However, when the party goes to fight a Water Guardian, one of the three minibosses, who is weak to lightning, Solomon steps in and shoves Hageshi aside.
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| As a display of his douchyness, Solomon one-shots the boss AND is the first to walk away when it's slain! What an asshole! |
So yeah, he one-shots the boss in a completely unnecessary display of power. The other girls sort of swoon over him and he casually strolls out of the building. He is such an asshole and I love how he came out. Every now and then later on, he'll appear and sort of help the party out, but the question is: is he really a friend or a foe?
In the Residential District, I set up a pretty neat little "puzzle" in which you have to trade items with different citizens in order to progress to the Frost Guardian.
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| Just what is going on in the corner up there?! |
Here's a look at what happens when you meet up with the Frost Guardian in his own home.
Once you defeat all three guardians, it's time to storm the castle!
Once inside, you regroup with the resistance, and you have to decide whether you want to take the seemingly-convenient one hundred and eighty-eight unguarded stairs straight to the boss, or if you wish to just charge in through the front and deal with a bunch of tough encounters. Either way, you should be at the right level to stop the Super Aryan from being formed.
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| Climbing up stairs for hours starts to take a psychological toll... |
So at last, you've fought through the castle's guards (or climbed that huge stairwell), and you're ready to stop the Super Aryan. But standing between the party and the technology to shut it down is none other than Joseph Goebbel's, Hitler's head of Nazi propaganda, who somehow wound up in this world when he secretly escaped the Allies during World War II. It turns out he oversaw the creation of the Super Aryan, and upon Jules killing him, he released the Super Aryan itself, who turned out to be none other than Hitler himself! Although, something was wrong with the picture...
Will you be able to stop Super Aryan Hitler, infused with the powers of a Super Saiyan from the Dragonball universe (each with a horrible Nazi twist to them)?
Completing this chapter isn't the only thing I managed to do with the past month or so of my time with this. I also created a new party member based off of the character's my friend would make in Dungeons and Dragons: needlessly broken characters that are constantly trying to kill the other party members for no reason.
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| You might notice that damage is like at least five times the maximum health of the each party member. You'll need a special item to protect you from that bullshit. |
Some of you WoW enthusiasts might also be familiar with these spells. That's because I figured if I am going to make a broken character I might as well base the class off of what was once the most broken class in WoW: the Death Knight. This character, Endymion, has some nasty game-breaking tricks up his sleeve, all of which are perfect for the kind of player who likes to take the "cheap" way through. It is entirely optional, with the exception of one minor section of the game, to use Endymion in your party though, so if you prefer to play the game as it should be played and enjoy a challenge, you don't have to have him tarnish your party, But he's still a pretty fun character to play for how hilarious he is in terms of how broken he is. Also I think I held pretty true to the Death Knight class. Necrotic Plague is an ultimate ability that does exponential damage over time. It got to the point where it was literally breaking the game, so I had to limit it to doing no more damage once the enemy is at one hit point. It shouldn't even matter way before then anyway, because Blood Boil, in honor of the way that spell used to be in WoW, does increased damage if the plague is on your enemies. With Necrotic Plague on, it does ten times the normal damage. It will do increased damage for other "diseases" too, although not as ridiculously as much.
Like Death Knight's in WoW, Endymion's trait is his survivability. One ultimate he has allows him to live for five turns even if his hit points are down to zero (Purgatory). Another move, imperative to Death Knights and their survivability in WoW, is Death Strike. In WoW, Death Strike would heal you and its base rate would be affected by how much damage you took in the last ten seconds. Because doing something like that is way too challenging for me, what I did was I had Death Strike in my game take into account the enemy's Attack and Magic Attack stats into its HP Drain formula. So basically, this means that Endymion can heal himself for pretty much all the damage an enemy caused on him, just like in WoW! This also means that, if he can take a hit from a boss that is way higher a level than he is, he can heal himself back to max health.
The unique thing about his class is what I call its "runic system," which is inspired by the runic system for Death Knights in WoW. Basically, Endymion's really powerful attacks that cost a harder resource to build up refunds magic points, and magic points can be used for weaker abilities that generate the resources for the stronger abilities. So playing as Endymion is all about shifting your resources back and forth from abilities of varying strengths. Still, at the end of the day, Endymion is the most broken central character in the game who can ruin the entire challenge, especially if you are able to grab his legendary weapon in the very small window of opportunity that the game gives you way before you even meet him. However, there is no indicator of this opportunity; for that you have to think outside the box.
Another awesome thing that I managed to implement into my game (and fairly easily too in spite of the French/butchered Google-translate instructions) is what's called Mode 7, which turns the world map into a sort of 3D thing when you hop in an airship, like in Final Fantasy 7 (and perhaps FF6 as well)!
And last but not least, I got really into porting a bunch of shit from Fire Emblem into my game, as I have just recently played most of Fire Emblem: Awakening and fell so much in love with it that I had to snag a few things. I took a couple of songs from that game (Divine Decree was a must have), but that wasn't the pinnacle of my achievements with all that. I managed to port Anna's sprites and portraits into my game!
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| She is seriously the greatest. |
But then, not too long after I did this, I saw Anna's character design in Fire Emblem Fates, and I immediately had to use it. Of course, though, there's no access to her sprites from that game as far as I know, so I figured the best thing I could do was make my own sprite of her. This coincided nicely with my recent acquisition of Game Character Hub, which lets you make sprites specifically for RPG Maker, thanks to the amazing Humble Bundle sale I took advantage of (two thousand dollars worth of software and assets!). I was on the fence about making her a playable character, but after I found this and figured I can make a unique sprite/portrait from an NPC variant of her (also her ported sprites would have to be heavily edited for being able to walk around), I decided why not?
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| Very much placeholder dialogue. Almost none of this will be in the finished game. |
Not too long after I did this, I started finding all these funny videos where Lucina is voice-swapped with lines from other games that her voice actor has worked on, namely Saints Row 3. So Lucina in turn goes from being a fairly bland character to hilarious with a the crazy crap she would say (Lucina to her father, "I bet you'd be into some nasty shit if you tried it"). So after I thought about that, I figured it would be funny to put a nasty-mouthed Lucina from the Outrealms into my game just because, and thus a beauty was born.
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| It's funny because it SPOILER ALERT SPOILERS SPOILER ALERT actually happened once, possibly even twice. |
I've been having so much fun with all this, and I really can't wait to see what this will all turn out to look like once it's finished! At this point, I'd say I'm about twenty-five or maybe close to halfway through the game's main plot. It's all been written already, when I was in high school, but there are plenty of additions and changes being made, like there's an entire section where you go to a desert city and help free all those sex slaves I mentioned-- that was never in the original story. So far from playing what I've made, the game is about six hours. So if twenty-five percent is about correct in how far I've come with this game's main plot, the main story should take about twenty-four hours to complete. Then there are all the sidequests and dungeons to do, but I don't expect that to take too long to finish working on after I'm done with the main plot of the game.
As far as other news is concerned, I do have to address a few things. First off, I cancelled the Wolfecraft videos. World of Warcraft right now is in a pretty bad slump. Funny how in 6.1, when there was no actual new content whatsoever, I was in huge denial about it, and expected it to get better in 6.2. In 6.2, I was initially amazed by the new Tanaan Jungle zone, and I still really like it, but none of it is enough. I haven't done the new raid though, and I don't know when I will even though I really want to see what's in there. The problem is now whenever I play, I just never feel like playing it. It's probably because I picked up The Prodigious Journey again, as well as got way into FE Awakening (which is legitimately way more fun to play than WoW is in its current state). Also, end cinematic of this expansion is complete bullshit. I'm not even going to touch that stupidity. Also, the developers don't want people to play Demonology. Why even have the spec if you don't fucking like it and don't want your players to use it? I'm really upset with how Blizzard has been handling a lot of things about Warlords right now. The way I feel about that expansion is this: aside from some exceptions (like Blackrock Foundry being badass and amazingly fun), everything is extremely lackluster after you get over the initial reaction of fangasming over seeing what Outland and all these lore characters were like before all the events of WoW. I can't even imagine how disappointed players who haven't been around during The Burning Crusade must feel.
But in light of not playing WoW, I got tremendously into Fire Emblem Awakening. Holy shit. Sadly I'm not sure if that means I'm going to actually enjoy the other games, but I am looking to give Fire Emblem 7 a try. Of course, I'm getting Fates too, but Fates is carrying on the things that made Awakening so successful, so I wouldn't really count that. But I am going to get more into all this once I actually finish Fire Emblem Awakening, because as you may have guessed I am absolutely going to write about this game.
And what happened with our little Square Enix conference I was going to post about? Well, I decided to drop it. Why? Because there was really nothing to talk about at all with that piece of shit of a conference. In my head all that post was amounting to was some snarky remarks about how awful of a job they did at translating what the Japanese spokesmen were saying, a huge circlejerk over how hilarious that was when the director of Nier came on stage with that moon with a face on his head, how stupid it was of them to put Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy, the games that actually matter, in the middle of their presentation rather than at the beginning or the end, and how stupid it was of them that they, once again, focused on Western-targeted games like Just Cause 3 and Hitman. My remark on that is this: nobody who actually follows Square Enix gives a shit about those games, and nobody who enjoys those games gives a shit about Square Enix, as they either have no idea who they are or could care less about Japanese studios and developers. SE really needs to realize this and get on the fucking ball with marketing their Japanese games, the games that people who actually care about SE actually give a shit about, and forget about these generic as hell Western-targeted games (although Tomb Raider was pretty cool, I'll give them that). The one good thing that truly came out of SE this year was the announcement of the Final Fantasy 7 remake, which I guess at the end of the day is all that matters. The problem is, they already used it in the Sony conference... so yeah, don't have a conference ever again, Square Enix.
I hope to have that Fire Emblem post up real soon because my god do I love Awakening.
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