Devlog #1
Posted 9/23/2024
I'm making a video game! I haven't done that in multiple years so this is a big move for me. I'm developing this in rpgmaker MV, at least for now as I create the demo. I'm just more well versed in rpgmaker's logic and javascript which is like 90% of what's under MV's hood. I might switch to Godot when I have more time to learn that engine but rpgmaker is a hella powerful game engine on its own.
I'll say I don't yet know what the game is gonna be called. Which… I gotta…. figure out… I'm floating a name for the moment, but it's just a word in another language so idk if it'll stick.
I have been working on this game for several weeks at this point but I want a record of it here on my blog rather than a smattering of gifs in random places. This devlog is collecting all of them in one place, so apologies if you've seen them before.
August 18th 2024
idk if this is all that impressive but it took me the past couple of hours to figure out, but with some javascript logic and put into the rpgmaker event processing flow, i have figured out how to make a text parser of a kind in rpgmaker (with the help of this plugin)
the start of any of my game dev ventures with rpgmaker always look like this, the default screen with a shit ton of events tied to a bunch of different plugins and scripts im trying out. inshallah it will hardly be recognizable as an rpgmaker game by the time im done with it.
August 20th 2024
before i returned to rpgmaker mv for this game i was messing around with decker for a little bit and now it has me on wanting to make my game either 1-bit black and white or some kind of monochrome (like how i color my sona all purple with a purple color overlay) and i cant tell if i should listen to that part of my brain or not lol
pros are ill have to make some intentional choices about how i do the art in the game and it would overall lighten the art load, cons are obviously i cant rely on color signifiers for certain things and players would miss out on what some characters are actually colored like. like someone in the game could be colored blue and you wouldnt know!
August 22nd 2024
doing more stuff slowly and steadily. It all is very ungly and placeholder but this is leagues ahead of where i was a couple of days ago at least. there's still a lot of random little functionality i gotta put together before i can start putting in the actual game's script.
it will permanently have this kind of "split view" because i want it to have that look of an old adventure game/interactive fiction that has the top of the screen dedicated to some kind of visual and the bottom to the text itself.
Sept 21st 2024
every time i post screenshots of how im making this game it just looks crazier and crazier.
Sep 23rd 2024
last night i stayed up to figure out how to do this and i'm just too damn proud of how i figured this all out. if i took out those rpgmaker sprites you'd barely know that it was the engine lol
but figuring out how literally this part of the functionality worked out means that i now get to do the fun (hard) part of implementing my script and creating the art i need for the rest of this tutorial level. none of the original art in here is in any way final, i just needed to see Jow actually in the engine for sizing and how it'll all feel. and it's just nice to be able to have him actually present in this little gif demo.
Blog bonus info:
So the touchstones I'm using for the gameplay are professor layton games and ace attorney, but with the additional element of parser based interactive fiction. Jow idling in the corner is supposed to be reminiscent of layton screens where there's an NPC hanging out that you can talk to for either a puzzle or some clue for the main mystery.
Obviously the big inspiration overall for this game is detective fiction, namely Poirot and Columbo. Unlike those, you're acting as Jow's assistant, rather than being the little detective man. Jow is defo more inspired by Columbo, but works as a linguist. If I gave myself any amount of fear, it's that I'm not representing the profession of linguistics that well with Jow (because the field of linguistics is so fuckin broad) but that he doesn't sound like he'd be a linguist in the way he speaks since his speech patterns are based off of my own lol. Now that I'm saying this I wonder if I should give Jow a stutter too since I have one. hmmmmm. Much to think about.
Anyway, thanks for reading!