Progress Report

For those of you keeping track of the progress of my game, and eagerly anticipating the release of each new demo, I should warn you, I'm not a linear game developer. I put together the prologue early, because it was one of the clearest scenes in my head, and afforded a great opportunity for me to learn how to put together a cutscene (aided greatly by this guide, which I recommend to each and every beginner; considering how important events are, I'm surprised the provided tutorials don't do such a good job explaining what they are and how they work). And I began building the first village because it seemed - logically as well as practically - a good place to start. Now, once I got started, I was very excited and eager to have something to show to the few (but important) people who were anticipating my game, and to show off all the exciting things I'd learned to do in just the first week of marathon developing. And because I was limiting myself largely to one self-enclosed village, my progress seemed well suited to be demonstrated in a, well, demo.

Fact is, I've spent an awful lot of time polishing the events in that first section of the game, specifically so that I could release it in a coherent format for people to play through. And the truth is, a lot of it may change as progress on the game as a whole develops. Now that I've got something out there, and I've got a foothold in the opening section of the game, I have a lot to think about regarding the rest of the game and where all the pieces are going to fit in, and filling the holes in the story, and about many questions regarding some of the very basic elements of gameplay (like going back and forth on making medic skills item-based, or using MP, despite them not being magical in nature) - many of which are constrained in various and often unexpected ways by the program I'm working with (and though myriad scripts abound that change the way the program functions, I'm taking, at least this early in the development process, a simplistic and puritanical approach - if it can be done without scripts, that's my first choice, and if it requires scripts, then I have to think long and hard about whether there's another way to do it, and if it's something I want or need bad enough to go the script route).

So anyway, here's a list of some of the things I've been working on, and maybe even some that I've accomplished, since releasing my second demo:

* I have Dragon Island all mapped out. I've actually had this done for a number of years already - using tiles pilfered from the Final Fantasy 1 world map. Now, I have it all ported over to RMVXAce's tilesets. Their beaches aren't as nice and rounded, but I worked it out. Dragon Island is a location you travel to near the very end of the game.

* Following the completion of the second demo, I did move on a tad bit linearly and worked out a rough draft of the second town you visit, which is smack dab in the middle of forest country. I've also got the second dungeon all mapped, with what I think (and hope) is another awesome cutscene at the climax, which ties in to your reason for going there in the first place. It's a tree-based dungeon - a little bit more dungeony than the hillside the first dungeon was, but not quite full-on dank cave...yet. I'm very excited about it.

* Other than that, I've been spending an awful lot of time familiarizing myself with RMVXAce's tilesets - particularly the world map terrains and, more recently, the dungeon tiles, to help spark my creativity, as well as get a feel for what kind of environments I'll be able to craft in my game. I don't have the main world map for my game mapped out yet, and I don't even know all the towns and dungeons that are going to turn up, so that's something I need to explore and flesh out as the game slowly grows.

* I have created a really neat tropical island, which I believe is going to be the location of a hidden  (but still crucial to the plot) town that you visit later on in the game. The town itself is sort of half-built at this stage, but it's another one I'm especially excited about (which is, probably, the reason it's one of the ones I've started on first).

* I also, just last night, was playing around with some dungeon tiles, and got the first level of a later dungeon mapped out, which is a very cool homage to the Sea Shrine from Final Fantasy I. There are going to be a lot of homages, or some might say, rip-offs, of the first six Final Fantasy games, and probably more than a lot from the first Final Fantasy, in my game. But the way I view it, honestly, is that I'm inspired by what those games did. I'm not trying to recreate something that's already been done, because I do have an original idea for my RPG. But I like a lot of the stuff those other RPGs have done, and so I want my game to feel like a cousin, like it belongs in that universe of gameplay, and since those games were so good, I want to borrow the genius of what made them so much fun to play.

* Other than that, I've also got four more playable characters sketched out, three of which are still as yet unnamed, with loose ideas in my head of how they enter the story and join the hero's quest. I don't want to say much about them until they have their chance for a proper introduction in the game itself, but I can say that I'm trying for a good balance between skill types and gameplay, echoing the differing roles of the starting party - fighter, support, medic. I think that, in lieu of the Final Fantasy IV system, in which playable characters come and go, never exceeding the maximum number of slots in your party,  I'm going to have a point where the player gets to choose between the characters available, based on who they like, or whose skills they like, and how much they want to balance (or skew) their team. But there's still lots of time yet to work that out.