Developer’s Diary, 4/29/09: Yo, FUCK doors.
Goddamn, I can’t believe it’s been a month.
Anyway, I’ve been chugging away at the game, mostly with behind-the-scenes stuff. I’ve been working on some different event-scripting skills with the help of the friendly folks over at RMVX. Sad as it is to say, considering how easy the engine is, I didn’t really know what the hell I was doing beyond some basic stuff. Thanks to RMVX member Aindra’s RPG School game/tutorial (the bunneh rocks), I’ve learned how to do a lot of basic stuff. Through practice I’ve actually gotten to the point where I can write my own cutscenes, which is good, because otherwise the game would have sucked. I’ve made a video on the Your Tubes internets website demostrating a little bit of what I learned (don’t worry, it’s spoiler free, not that you cared):
It’s embarrassing to say that everything in this video took me about an hour to actually do. It’s some fairly complicated scripting, though, and with what I’ve learned, I shouldn’t need to take time out from story development to learn anything else for a while.
I’ve also updated my town, which you may remember from this post. In addition to some general updates and changes, I’ve also added an entire new part of town, which I haven’t totally finished yet.
Here’s the new northern side of town:
As of right now, the town is called Foxtrot, but that (as is everything) is subject to change. That big house up top belongs to a rich fucker who will be a catalyst for the beginning of the story. Other than that, there is an armor shop run by a paranoid old dwarf-man, and a couple of houses.
In addition to all this, I’ve completely finished all of the transfer events that lead to you actually being able to go inside of a building, which isn’t a major step, but is necessary. Here’s a piteous little aside regarding my skill as a “programmer”: One feature of RMVX is the “quick event”, which allows you to add a commonly used event quickly without having to actually add anything to it yourself. One of the quick events is the “door” event, which adds the graphic of a door, then the scripting to have it open upon touch. I added this event to every building in town, then went into the event scripting and added the locations I wanted to move to. This worked fine until I actually came back out, at which time, for some reason, the character would take a step forward, freeze, then teleport back under the door’s graphic. I couldn’t figure out why it would do that, because the character isn’t literally coming out of the door, he just touches a tile from the inside of the building that teleports him back out. I worked for a fucking hour to realize that what I had done was I had added a transfer function at the end of the first page of events, which concluded with a switch which, when triggered, moved your character forward, then teleported him to a location that was supposed to have been chosen when I created the quick event. So, in effect, I caused this problem myself by just not paying attention, just like the time I crashed my car through a Walgreens because I hadn’t noticed I had drank 28 beers. The cool side of this problem, however, is that I realized that, with a little modification, I could use that second page of events to make it look like the character was walking back out the door, which has already saved me a lot of time.
Now that I have all this mapping bidness finished, I’m going to move on to finishing the first part of the story.
Look for an update soon with my first dungeon. It will be drawn in crayon. I’m sure you can’t wait.
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raddevon on 05.01.2009
After watching the video, I can’t wait to play your game! The town looks cool and is very reminiscent of the SNES Zelda (A Link To the Past? Link’s Awakening? Whatever…).