Saturday, November 7, 2015

A New Demo

Alright. I still have mixed feelings about RPG Maker MV, but the excellent community at the RPG Maker Forums have provided an unofficial tool to resize graphic sheets from VX Ace in order to be compatible with MV (while reducing many of the inevitable flaws inherent in enlarging pixel graphics - the results are actually quite satisfactory, in my opinion). So that largely eliminates one of my biggest issues.

As such, I've been working on adapting my game Ascension to RPG Maker MV, building from the ground up - so I can apply all the updates I didn't get around to making on my last, aborted version. I'm taking advantage of the opportunity to learn the ins and outs of RPG Maker MV while working on a smaller and simpler project (Ascension), before I ultimately return to my RPG (Dragonfaith). So expect periodic updates.

To start with, I have finished up my first stage on Ascension, and so this will serve as a test run for deploying my game on a trial basis. I would appreciate anyone reading this and following my games to give it a download and try it out, and let me know how (if) it works. The first stage is very short, so it shouldn't be a huge time commitment. And for those of you who have played my game before, the stage looks a little bit different than the last time you saw it (I will be applying other changes to later stages as well).

Allow me to inform you of some of the most notable changes in the RPG Maker MV program, that you might notice as differing from when you played my game created with VX Ace:

* Graphical resolution - The first thing you'll probably notice is that the game looks bigger - the graphical resolution is 1.5x the size of VX Ace's graphics.

* Cross-platform support - From now on I'll be providing downloads for both Windows and Mac versions of my game. (Mobile versions are also supported, but I haven't played around with them yet, so I'll leave them out for the time being. There are also rumors that you can run games straight from web browsers, but I haven't looked into that yet, either. I'm going to start out with what I know, and go from there. Stay tuned for additional options in the future, maybe.)

* Mouse input - The new version of RPG Maker supports mouse input (and presumably touch input, in the case of mobile devices). I haven't changed my game to account for this (and I don't know that I will). I don't know to what extent it will change how my game is played. I don't intend for the user to use the mouse, as that's not how I've designed my game, but you can certainly try it out and let me know if and how it affects the way my game is played.

* No RTP - There is no RTP in RPG Maker MV, so every download is going to be the full project. This is conceptually simpler - you don't have to pre-download an extra game pack to play my games, but it also means that file sizes might be larger than they have been in the past. That's just the way it's going to be now. (By all means, feel free to delete older versions when you download the newest releases - I intend for you to do as much).

Without further ado, here is my first MV release:

Ascension: Chapter 1 - Limbo
Download (~90 MB): Windows | Mac [see sidebar for latest release]