The Fifth Element

*Disclaimer: this blog has nothing to do with the movie starring Bruce Willis.

Do you want to upgrade your elemental skills throughout the game? You betcha goshdarn tush you do. Well, luckily ya girl has been slaving over a skill upgrade system for the last couple of months, and things are getting pretty real.

Learn Suffocate? Wow, what a wholesome skill!

Triumph of Sword and Shield

Picture this: you start off in your small, picturesque hometown in the middle of the sticks, and you buy Armour 1 and equip it before you leave the village. You trek through the Forest Dungeon to Slightly Larger Town, where you purchase Armour 2 and equip it, leaving Armour 1 totally irrelevant. Not long after, you reach Decent Size Town, and you buy Armour 3, and now Armour 1 and Armour 2 are either cluttering up your inventory or have long since been sold for a pittance. To make matters worse, you now have two more party members to feed and clothe, so you need to purchase extra Armour 3s.

While there's nothing inherently wrong with this model, I've recently decided to go a slightly different route with Vermilion. For those that played the demo (which is still available, by the way), you may remember that your equipment consisted of the following items:

• Weapon
• Shard (two slots)
• Conduit
• Armour
• Other (two slots)

Shards are items that you equip to access elemental magic (fire, ice, etc.), while conduits are accessories you equip to boost your Power (magical attack). Armour was mostly for improving defense, but some items also improved other stats. The Other slots consisted of accessories that performed a range of different features, such as improving tolerance to certain stats or boosting one's Water attacks, etc.

Tools are TBC; just wanted to test things out

Apparently I should update more often

What is UP, my dudes. It's been a while. I've been making quite a bit of progress on my game, but it's always small things and I never think it's worthwhile making a blog post about. However, now I have a handful of small things, so maybe it's time to make an update. I'll even include pictures, because otherwise WHAT'S THE POINT.

Everybody look at me 'cause I'm sailin' on a BOAT

Hey everyone, come see how good I look

New menu of niceness.

Hey friends. It's been a while. I haven't totally dropped off the face of the earth. Trust me, I have been working on gam, but I have also been spending a lot of time playing gam as well, which has been awesome. Finished FFVI and I've clocked up quite a few hours in the Witcher 3—such a good game. I don't have a plethora of free time, since I work full time and I train everyday (kickboxing and lifting weights), so I kinda have to split what's left between working on creative pursuits and just relaxing (i.e. playing vidya games).

Anywho, you may recall an earlier blog about how my goal for 2018 was to learn Ruby ... I think I've almost accomplished that goal! I'm nowhere near as great as, like, anyone else with actual programming knowledge, but I've been doing a lot of bug-fixing and modifying existing scripts for people, which has been great for me knowledge. I've also managed to convert a bunch of event-based mechanics in my game to scripts, which is AWESOME. It makes me feel like a wizard. It also means less copy-pasta in the event editor, and things are a lot more flexible and easy to change.

HEY FRIENDS

Remember how I said I was going to have a demo ready? Yeah? Well, I do ... I was just waiting on a couple of beta reports that never eventuated (I guess because holidays?), so I think I'll aim to have a release by the end of the week. Isn't that exciting? Kinda worried that I'll release it and then the beta reports will finally come in and they'll be like, "GAM BREAKING ERROR in this scene". But, hey, I guess that's part of the adventure.

My goal for 2018 was to finally learn Ruby, which is the coding language used for RPG Maker VX Ace. See, I've always been terrible at maths, and any time I see things that look vaguely 'maths'-like, my brain immediately switches off, and that has been a barrier for me with things like coding and scripting, because they reminded me so much of algebra (which I hated). I'd been reading through the base scripts for Ace for a while and trying to understand things, and I could do some simple stuff (for example, 'if' branches) and I kinda got the gist of how things should work, but couldn't really understand why they worked that way.

Look, wordy bits! And I understand them!

Happiness and Cider

Today is a good day. Want to know why? Other than the fact that I've got a nice cold cider in hand, I managed to overcome a problem that was almost driving me to tears. Nothing tastes better than a celebratory cider, especially after being so frustrated that you almost bawled like a small child. And we all know small children don't drink cider.

The product of a day of almost-tears.