Ardaceus

help I accidentally glitched cookie clicker by playing it too much. I had to turn down the graphics because it was tooo mmuch...

Ayo Kitoburrito! Welcome back! I wish I had time to spend on this website, but my time online has been limited for the past month, and I've been busy working on Wonder's War, and Nementia with Omar. I'll try to go back to my chat habits sometime this week.

The video speaks for itself mostly. Just one word of advice though. Don't believe everything you see. For not everything is as it seems. Hail to our father.

You'll know what it means sooner or later. https://soundcloud.com/ardaceus/capricious-symphony

I can help test it out... It's what I've been doing for other people on this site lately.

Take your tiem, dang Mark. It's not like a rushed project is better than a refined project.

Well, it should be a no brainer that lighting makes a map look better. Even the simple shadowing feature of any maker makes the map look far better. But the one thing that turns me off from those photos is the character sprite. Using the RTP sprites for playable characters is a sin in my book, and should be avoided. Take a look at Hollow Creek Stories: Felix's Nightmare (http://www.gdunlimited.net/games/hollow-creek-stories-felixs-nightmare), it uses shadows quite well, and an environment that looks amazing, plus the mack sprites look pretty good. If you are to make a map, make it look as best as you can, or want to.

I really like your style of music, it sounds much unlike other people's music that I hear online. And even in these epic battle themes, you still manage to use your calm and atmospheric style to create, well, epic battle themes. Nice work :).

Excitement! Drama! Romance! ACTIONS!! EXPLOSIONS!!! Looking really cool, I wasn't quite excited for this stuff back when you first announced it, but that's just me to when I don't get excited over stuff I don't know. But with how you make it sound, and the photograph you put up, it makes me more interested into this topic.

Stuff like this makes me wish I actually had money for new consoles. >:( P.S. Console is an equal race, stop being objectist by saying PC master race.

Good that you posted it. More it gets around, less chance people will mess it up.

I myself use Ready to Program 1.7.1 on the following page http://compsci.ca/holtsoft/ That's my preference. It was pretty much made for javascript.

Resources posted on this website tend to come from many different sources. Sometimes these people are the actual creator, sometimes they are other people that are sharing other people's resources for no apparent reason. And most of the time as I've found, there isn't any actual credit to give. One way to find the person who actually owns the resource, and to see the copyright on it, you should right click on an image, and search it on Google. If you find any links to a similar image on the web/ another page, it likely belongs to the person if they say so and have full credits and terms of use laid out for you. I wouldn't use any resource without any confirmation on who the source is, especially in a commercial game.

I tend to have these same problems with some kinds of screen recorders. I have tried a lot of different programs, and the following two worked the best. Camtasia https://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.html Works well, audio is great, editor is fantastic, though a little expensive if you buy the actual thing. But hey, there is a pretty good free trial if you'd like to do that. My current one: OBS Studio https://obsproject.com/ Free, very good visual quality, with a lower performance in screen audio recording, but still my preference. If you get it, make sure you get the studio version.

When making a map, you need to take in to consideration many things. The main thing is the style of the game. For 3 examples, let's take Ib, To The Moon, Undertale, and Lisa. Also yes I know, I'm bad at counting. Ib is a psychedelic thriller game with quite a lot of beauty into story and writing. That is an example of one of the maps. What this game does well with mapping is not that it is complex, and I prefer that over complexity. What it lacks in detail, it certainly makes up for in everything else. It uses atmosphere to create emotion, sounds to create tensity, lighting to create the effect of decoration, and certainly the gameplay. The game mostly works as you have to not die, and sometimes it involves running from, or into things that want to kill you, so the ability of easy passage works well as it gives you space to move, time to think on where to run, and it is balanced this way. So the mapping in this game is very great, despite not having a care for walls half the time. One more thing to add is that it really makes that empty art gallery feeling, it really did make me feel as if I was in an art gallery when I played it, as they are usually spacious rooms and hallways with paintings on the walls and statues in the middle of it. To The Moon is a fantabulous RPG, it really gave a good example on what mapping should look like in RPG Maker when you take it to the limit. RPG Maker is constantly thought of to be a simple program for amateurs, but when put in the hands of an artist, it can make legends and stories in our minds that will last with us for the rest of our lives. That is probably the most well-known map from this game. In this scene, you can see all the intensive detail, and it's perfect for this game that focuses more on story than any actual gameplay and challenge. It is resource heavy in the lights, the decorations, and the parallax, which were all made to work with one another. Just look at how the map is terraformed. nothing is in reflect with one another, except for the lighthouse, and it creates the feel of a natural setting on a cliff. And the best part is that this isn't parallax mapping! This is tile mapping! This looks like the perfect kind of graphic for the game. As to say, you also need to take in mind the other graphics of the game, such as how this game uses Mack sprites, which are more in detail than most other spriting types. So it stands to reason that you’ll use graphics that are really detailed, and mapping techniques that are more random. I’ll go over later on what not to do when mapping, which is the perfect example. Undertale is my favourite game of all time, mainly because of its ingenious story and soundtrack. You can really take any single map you’d like, and I’ll always give you the same reply… but this one stands out among the rest, for it’s just so different from the rest of the game. This manages to completely captivate the player through just the way the room acts. The map uses no music whatsoever, and waits until you finally get judged to release the music on you. Timing and choice of music is an important part of mapping, so don’t choose music that doesn’t fit the time at all, or if it’s better, consider no music at all. Then just look at how this map matches the rest of the game, it keeps that retro style the game has had the whole time, which are in match with what the characters look like. This has made for some pretty awesome moments, like pretty much every map in Waterfall. Speaking of Waterfall, I like how the map glows all over the place, and the use of darkness as an element in mapping and eventing. If you want to get good at doing this stuff, first figure out how to do it, by figuring out how to play with your graphics to achieve this, or find a script to achieve it. Play around, you won’t get good from hearing words as much as if you play with it yourself. Finally, Lisa. I’ve only gotten into this game recently, but it’s captivated me pretty quickly. Mainly what this game does best to captivate me is the lifefull and lifeless maps. It knows when to have people appear, how to appear, and where to appear. Positioning events carefully can add to a lot more to the player’s emotion. Don’t make any map be pointless, have every map have good points to them, whether it be just to talk to a pointless character, a battle filled field, or a stop and gaze at beauty point. Truly, nothing is completely pointless, everything is there for a reason. This game draws that out beautifully, even though you play in a barren wasteland where almost everybody is a pedophile. And going back to graphics, this game focuses more on character animation more than environment animation, which is perfectly fine. What it lacks in environment animation, it makes up in blood, gore, and creepy ass mutants. Now what don’t you do? Pretty much everything in the game below. Too linear, no detail, basic trees, too much RTP showing, all characters are from the RTP, the music is loud, no pointfull maps, just try not to be that. Tricks I use when mapping, that actually not many people know of or utilize, include: -Hold shift while auto-tiling to disable it. -Get a script that plays sound effects on certain tiles, makes it sound like you are walking on certain things… like a wooden bridge. -Use as much graphics that you made yourself as possible. -Use the pitch when you are playing music and lower the volume. -If shadow scripts don’t work for you, make all the damn shadows yourself. And pay heed when placing in walls, they may put in awkward autotiles. -Use color hues to do the work when adding atmosphere to a map. -GET A WEATHER SCRIPT! -GET BGS’s! -Look around on the internet for inspiration, such as when I didn’t know what to make the main antagonist of my game look like, I searched “Red and black knight†on Google till I found stuff that I liked, and made a character out of it. Which mainly involved a black mask, a horned crown, bright red and black plate armour, and a big damn cape. -It also works for graphics, when you don’t know what to do for a map. Just either a)Search the kind of map you want, whether it be a canyon or a waterfall, or a place you saw in a dream. B) Play video games for inspiration for maps. Such as Firewatch, it inspires quite frankly into a valley filled with trees and lush colours. -It doesn’t matter if you have your houses a little smaller than the interior, cause it always feel like that in real life. But don’t make a tent lead into a 2 story house, or a garage into a mini-airship workshop with a huge basement. -Finally, make nature and dungeons 1 map big. Don’t have the map transition all the time, have it all on one map. I personally don’t like transitions, as they sometimes take away from the players attention, and it makes the place your in feel bigger than it is. I use this in my game, and it feels good to not be restricted while exploring, except for random encounters. And to answer your question on how to plan your maps... you can go in blind, or make drawn out maps, but what I find works best is to draw your world map down on a piece of paper, or a large area, like from a city to a cave, with forests and a mountain inbetween, and figure out what directions the player has to go in to get to the cave. Such as: Start off with a medium speeded harp and drum soundtrack You spawn in the City of Lembornoobsberg Leave through the west gate Play melodic harp and synth theme Travel west through a willow filled forest Drop down north to a swampy area Play a low Oboe soundtrack Travel in a question mark shape through the swamp which has a maze built of water Exit to lower mountain entrance Play a high flute and bass woodwind soundtrack, with some drums in the middle Circle the mountain once to get to the dragon cave Dragon cave has an ominous feeling, with dark and booming music Dragon cave's caverns are randomly shaped with a drawer Once you are done and got the general idea of what the ground the player can walk on/through, then you add in decorations and detail. If you want an idea of what maps should maybe look like, I could get a screenshot of the maps I've drawn if you like. So yeah. That’s my ‘short’ self-approved 5 star guide of the year award guide on how to make maps. Hope it helps. :o) Honk. Plz like flavortie n supscrib!

I really hate being the one that prefers VXAce... and now actually 2k that I have it, over the other RPG Makers. So yeah, my buddies are 2k and VXA. So here we go cause why not, my “small†list of what I like about each RPG Maker (Excluding VX because it's like lv 3 and evolves at lv 30 into VXA) 2k vs 2k3 2k Once you get the mapping down, the rest is easy. No scripts, nothing too complex, it's just nice if you want to create a retro RPG. It is the most simplistic of the modern RPG Makers, and has a nice charm to it. I like how everything is set up the way it is, like the regular classes are removed, and put on to a single character. Makes it easier to keep track of all a person's things on one page without having to go back and forth between tabs. The RTP is also very good, having good variety for such a small program to create small games, and I absolutely love the music! Another thing I like is the animations in the database, a preview of what you're using such as animations and character sprites. I also like the selection part, like the unique feature of having only some actors able to use items, and the checklist format. These are just some of the features that I could talk about, cause there's also a glossary, customization transitions, terrain battlebacks, it's fairly a good program to say. 2k3 Almost like 2k, except has a few improvements, worse things, and additions. The soundtrack is what I want to point out first, the soundtrack is added onto in this version, and it sounds great! There are a lot of new RTP items also besides that, though not so much graphically, more or less, it felt like the graphics were demoted a little bit. But to make up, the animations are what makes this stand out from 2k. There are new and better animations, new character stances, and classes devoted to a character, I find the way that this uses classes to be very unique from the rest of the series. But besides that, it's mostly the same. Unless if you want to use that search event function, not much else. 2k and 2k3 I would suggest to use one of these if you want to make a really retro looking RPG, with not too much detail. I highly doubt you could make a game as gorgeous looking as FFVI with these makers, but I like using them because I want to make a short little Retro game when I go on a mindfizzle with Wonder's War. Only use them if a really old and short game is what you are trying to go for. As for which one to choose, it really all comes down to if you want side view battles (2k3) or front view battles (2k), I personally like 2k cause I like front view battles the best... as everyone knows. I'm probably going to go off and make a thread to people that use side view, because they are usually all doing something that annoys me every single time. XP vs VXA So VXA and XP are both extremely similar when you come down to it, more than most people can think of actually, and it really doesn’t matter about graphics or the database or the mapping or the whatever it is you want to argue about. You can get the same scripts, graphics work for both since they are 32x32, database is pretty similar, system settings work fine, RTP tilesets are good in both, not much to compare except what’s in the next few paragraphs. VXA has better eventing because you can choose more layers where eventing takes place and more ways to trigger events, XP has 4 animation frame movements for sprites, but neither of those factors matter because you can use clever switches and have a good knowledge of layering to event the same in XP, and it really doesn’t matter that XP has 4 animation frames for walking in a single direction, for VXA’s animation looks so similar to XP’s animation 99% of the time as the only way XP’s 4AFM helps is for when you are not using a character that is walking on two legs or is breathing while standing… which is pretty much almost everything, this only provides a bonus to vehicles and flying animals...That’s it. XP has 3 layer + event graphing which can help in plenty of situations and infinite tilesets, VXA looks way better in the editor and is far more organized in terms of tilesets. There is not much I can say to this except that XP has no right to be better because of the 3 layer graphics… seriously, you can do the same in VXA with events to overlay or underlay another, and VXA has a counter card that costs 1 blue mana and 2 colorless to the infinite tilesets, as you can just make oversized character spritesheets, and fill that spritesheet with stuff like pillars, chairs, etc, and place the graphic you want in an event. You want proof of how well that works? Just look in the following photo bellow for my proof, guess how many events are in this scene? I’m not saying that VXA has better graphics, but you can get pretty good looking games in And one of the biggest complaints I see, “XP HAS BETTER GRAPHICS THAN VX ACE!†To which, I say utter bullcrap, since graphics are not a part of the program at all. The RTP is a part of the program, but with some knowledge, you can easily use VXA graphics in XP or XP graphics in VXA. Speaking of which, the Mack vs Chibi sprite. I already talked in the past about how you should use the Mack sprites in a game that focuses on realism and maturity, and Chibi sprites in a game where the focus is emotion and deep fantasy or humour. But you can use either in either program. But if I have to get personal about this, look through the RTP of both games in the characters section, and you’ll see that it is way easier to make emotion sprites for Chibi, and really hard to do the same with Mack, considering all the RTP has for Mack emotions is laying on the ground, feeling like garbage. Just look at the game on this website called Machine Made: Rebirth, it uses Chibi sprites in XP, and it looks great! And looking at the other side, I can’t really find any games that use Mack in VXA, so I found a website instead that does just that. https://grandmadebslittlebits.wordpress.com/tag/rpg-maker-vxace-mack-style-sprites/page/2/ To put it plain simple, they are both almost the same thing. Best advice I can give is to use VXA if you want to use a program that visually looks better in the editor, or use XP if you want to use the program that is socially acceptable by so called “Pros of game makingâ€. P.S. I also have to mention that the songs in the XP RTP are absolutely terrible. It’s so echoey and makes my ears bleed when I listen to it. MV vx VX VX VX is 10x not as good as VXA. MV The best engine in my opinion for everything, but I wouldn’t suggest using it for most projects because of two reasons, I’ll first go over what MV does great. MV has an easy script system, good organization, good starting opportunities, and is the current up to date version. MV also has an amazing looking RTP, paired with a good soundtrack. Something that this has that it shares with VXA is a character generator, except in MV, it actually looks good, and has much more variety in terms of what you can do for details because of the bigger sprite sizes. VXA has not so good of a generator as it limits you to colours, the faces look absolutely terrible, and there isn’t much in terms of clothing. MV also has the ability to increase the amount of equipment types, neat. Now looking at the two cons, which mainly involve the size of graphics, and the look of graphics. I don’t like a 48x48 tile size, it means that your characters are going to have to be pretty large to match the rest of the map size, which can be difficult for using styles like Mack, Chibi, and 2k kinds, since you’ll likely need to double the size of Mack and chibi sprites, while tripling the size of 2k sprites. So it can make things a bit awkward when trying to use an old style of game for MV… which brings me to the next problem. The characters are great and all, and look really well done, but I kinda don’t like them as much as Mack and Chibi sometimes. It took me a while to figure out what it was that made it different from the rest, and I found a video where it felt as clear as day what the problem was. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAvVs-lJ3p0 Those sprites do not match the environment at all. They look very bright compared to what the scenery looks like. I think that would be a place where you would use a Mack Sprite. And looking on the other side… of course… I think Chibi sprites would work better here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTGZWlulzJw But never the less, I think that you can make some great games with this. So overall… All versions have their perks, and I think I can put them into categories based on your needs. 2k/2k3 – Use if you want retro, not very detailed. 2k – Buy this for Front View 2k3 – Buy this for Side View MV – Use if you want really detailed Games and if you want to make advanced gameplay easily, it also helps you learn javascript which is a big component of computer design. VXA/XP – Use if you want flexibility with the graphics of an RPG, whether it be retro, fancy, or fantasy. VXA – If you want a better looking editor, and want an easier time with mapping, but some added judgement by the community. XP – If you want to join the cool kids, want a harder time with mapping, but less judgement by the community since many great games were made with it, like ‘To The Moon’. P.S. Don’t worry about scripts, the same scripts are available for every version of RPG Maker somewhere at sometime, and 2k and 2k3 have no scripts.

I bought everything. No joke. I am now the one nerd to rule them all.

That script you linked me to only works during test mode apparently, and is not a script I think that is required in a final product. So when you want to test out the intro scene I linked in my post up there, just disable the debug script or export it to notepad and save it to a place you can find it later, and use the intro scene script. Then when you want to use the debug script for whatever it is you want to debug, just take out the intro scene script and replace it with the debug script. It won't damage the game to remove either script and have one of them in at a time. So when you want to export a final product, just remove the debug part and have the intro scene in its place. I've used this intro script, and you can't change switches, add any items, characters, or change anything in the database. All you can do is use events, such as changing the music, changing the map, move routes, texts, scrolling texts, or any of the normal event stuff that doesn't change the database. I think what's going on is that the debugger can't function because there are no items or things to check in the intro scene, so it wants to do a read on the map, but can't.

Here's the one I use for Wonder's War http://himeworks.com/2013/10/splash-screen-map/ It works really well. One thing to suggest though is to look up how to credit Tsukihime in your game if you do use it.

Wow, I have been waiting for this announcement from you for a while, glad to hear you are still working on your project! I know the story you have right now, and I suggest it would be better to start the alpha after the intro, as I do agree that a lot of the game would be spoiled for just an alpha, so yeah. Hopefully I'll get to play your alpha soon :o)

Good to hear you got it figured out.