In Which I Return to the Internet Land

"I'M GOING TO UPDATE SO OFTEN IT'S GOING TO BE AWESOME."

Completion of the Third Town

Morrowmere in its woody, once-occupied glory.

Oh joy of joys. I have finally completed all of the maps I need for the third town, Morrowmere. This is pleasing to me. TELL ALL THE MINSTRELS.

For the month of November, I intend to do at least one map per day, or the equivalent of one to two hours of game-makery. November is a month of hardcore gam mak. Y'all better respect. I managed to squeeze out five maps since Friday, so that's me exceeding past-Shannyn's expectations, and that's always a good thing. The partner and the hound understand too (the partner begrudgingly so—we usually watch things (currently DBGT) on the laptop for about an hour before bed and I am eating into this time selfishly).

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.

Updates of Good

Hey—remember when I said I was going to update heaps and everything was going to be special and magical and full of wonder? Well, I didn't. Such is life. I'm in bed sick, so I'm updating, as is the custom. I haven't been laying dormant this whole time (since April, geez I'm lazy), however!

Today, the real test is figuring out how to attach pictures. Some days I feel really tech-savvy and like I can do something real fast and stand back and snap my fingers, like, "uh-huh, uh-huh, that's how it's done." (I'm totally that sassy in real life, by the way—ask my dog) Today is not one of those days. To be honest, I haven't even tried yet. That's the problem with reading: to me, this is all happening one word at a time and it's an adventure and who knows how it'll all turn out. To you, dear reader, it's a wall of text and you can look below and see what's happened. It's like Instant Transmission.

All right, enough philosophising.

I've been using my hardcore mappin' skillz and I've made a handful of maps. That's impressive for me. A lot of the stuff I've been making progress on is pretty invisible and pretty much consists of me making spreadsheets in Excel. I love Excel. I barely even scratch the surface of Excel's capabilities (the makers are surely horrified that I'm just using it to make lists of shit), but I love it. Since my last post I have made ... *checks RPG Maker and counts* eight maps. TWO HANDFULS. Want to see some screenshots? Rhetorical question.

Introductions

"Make a blog," they said. "It will be fun," they said.

No, but seriously now, folks. My name is Shannyn (alias A-Moonless-Night) and this is my game-development blog. I've considered making a blog for some time now (like, five years) but I could never figure out what it should be about. I'm still contemplating making a blog about the things that I hate but I thought perhaps I should make this blog first.

When I say that I make games, I mean that my hobby is to use RPG Maker to make games that may or may not see the light of day. I've been using RPG Maker since I was about nine or ten (so since about 2000—makes me feel so old) and I've always had a game in the making, but this is the first time that one has been well thought out and, can I say, promising. This is the first time that I've had the whole story planned out (and separated into palatable 'acts'), instead of just opening up the developer and being like, "this is the very first cutscene ... fuck it, I'm going to play Minecraft."

Not that Minecraft existed back then, but you get my drift.

So, the game that this blog will be focussing on is Vermilion. *cue epic music or some shit*

I have topics on rpgmaker.net and the official RPG Maker forums. Read the topics I just linked; it's easier than me copying and pasting what the game's about.

Vermilion is being made in RPG Maker VX, referred to from here on as RMVX. The game will be free when released. I'm doing everything myself (except, of course, for all the pre-made things, such as scripts and tiles), so it's going to take me a while. I would say that the game has been in-development for about a year and a half, but I only really started making progress in about July last year (I was off work sick for a while and had lots of free time).

Parts of game-making that I enjoy:

  -  Story/character creation and all that jazz (aka writing)
  -  Spriting characters
  -  Parallaxing maps (for those not in the biz, this means painting out a 'background' in Photoshop, rather than using RMVX to create the maps tile by tile)
  -  Creating face-sets

So, you know, basically all the writing- and drawing-related stuff.

Parts of game-making that I hate find difficult:

  -  Script-making and -altering (it involves writing in code, which reminds me of maths)
  -  Making and altering enemy stats (i.e. making the battle system work/be balanced)
  -  General databasing (making items, armour, etc)

So, yeah. That happens. I think this is enough wall-of-text for now, but I'll update when I can. I might even include pictures, if you're lucky.