RPG Maker 2003 plugins!
Something Beautiful by Newsboys
Hi all. Things are picking up again at work with the fall semester, so my general progress will likely slow down a bit. Not much else to report in terms of life happenings.
Visible progress in Forgotten Gates has hit something of a standstill, as I've had to stop and reassess how I'm doing things. Now that I know of the existence of plugins for RM2K3 that can be made in C++, possibilities for doing things much more efficiently are open to me, both in terms of development and how the game runs. I may even reimplement many of the internal workings of the combat system to run in an object-oriented way, which would be a big extra task in the short run but could pay off in the long run.
Meanwhile, there's one plugin writing task which I definitely want to tackle. Somebody wrote a plugin called DynPointer which allows scripters to overwrite the parameters of certain variable commands. For example, one of the commands possible normally is "store in variable X the amount of potions held in the inventory". Well, with this plugin, you can change it to "store in variable X the amount of the item referenced by variable Y", making it much more flexible. After looking through the source code for this plugin, I realized that the basic principle of overwriting parameters could be applied to a lot more commands. So far I've succeeded in extending the plugin to control commands for showing battle animations, so that I can tell it what animation to show and who to show it happening to by variables.
I've also messed around with the battle-controlling plugin which I'd hoped could fix (or rather avoid) the skill-cancelling bug in RM2K3. I managed to make the action meters stop during hero skills and item use, but the bug still happened. I think I could still avoid it if I entirely take over the action meters and only allow monsters to take an action when heroes won't be doing so for the next couple frames, but the creator of the plugin mentioned he made some tweaks to it himself, so I'm waiting on him to release his new version for the moment.
On NMR, we've finished up the chuunin exams. A group called the Silence made a terror attack during the final stages of the exams, proclaiming that they were comprised of disgruntled secret operatives from all the hidden villages and would reveal those villages' dirtiest secrets if they didn't confess themselves. Later on they made an attack against Sunagakure, pouring out the lives of brainwashed mercenaries to cover a strike by their leaders to steal classified info. Said leaders are a pair of brothers with hax powers created just for the plot, able to absorb chakra and send it back out either the same as it was or transformed into blue flames.
Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons:
Another indie darling, which I asked my little brother to get for me as a birthday gift while it was on sale in Steam. The basic premise is that you play as two brothers simultaneously, using the joysticks and trigger buttons on either side of a standard controller to move them independently (ideally of course, it's possible to use the keyboard too). The brothers must frequently cooperate to accomplish tasks neither of them could handle alone. It's really not a new concept; the cult-classic from the early PS2 era, The Adventures of Cookie and Cream, made excellent use of the conceit for either solo or cooperative play, and it wouldn't surprise me if there are examples from even further back (comment if you know any!). Still, it's something not many games attempt, for the obvious reason that it's difficult for the human brain to manipulate more than one thing at a time. Therein lies the challenge, and whether it's a good challenge or a frustration is largely a matter of taste (I know I enjoyed Cookie and Cream a lot more playing it cooperatively with my sister than trying to master it alone).
For its part, Brothers doesn't demand too much on the skill end of things. Most of the tasks in the game are fairly slow-paced, and it's rare that the game forces you to switch the positioning of the brothers such that which side of the controller controls which brother is unintuitive. Most of the challenge comes from puzzles, which aren't too difficult either. There are things which only the older brother can do, like lift heavy loads, and there are things only the younger brother can do, like slip between bars. Some of the puzzles are rather clever and amusing, but they're not very taxing once you realize what needs to be done.
That leaves story, which is probably the main strength of the title. The tale is told entirely through display, with the vocalizations of the characters being brief foreign-sounding gibberish. The brothers are seeking water from a legendary tree to heal their ailing father, having already lost their mother to the sea. It's an old-style northlandish fairy tail, which means that the world is fantastic in an earthy, often dark and dangerous sort of way. There are a good many light-hearted moments to be sure, probably more in total than the sad ones even, but yeah...people die. :P I can't say it was really to my taste, although I will say they at least didn't waste death narratively. I'll put it this way, if you like "bitter medicine" stories, you might enjoy it more than I did.
Bottom line? Not a general must-have by any means, but maybe worthwhile if you like artsy little story games. Which lean on the True Art is Angsty side.
Bit.Trip Runner 2:
Yay for Humble Bundle stuff. This one came as part of a bundle of rhythm games, although personally I think calling Runner 2 (and most of the other games in the bundle for that matter) a rhythm game is a stretch. The gameplay produces a bit of a melody with the sounds from each obstacle you overcome, and I suppose familiarizing yourself with the tempo of that melody can help you time your jumps and such, but it's not really about rhythm the way a DDR or the like is.
I've already reviewed the original, and Runner 2 only adds a few extra tricks to the stuff you have to learn, mostly combinations of existing stuff. For example, you can, and sometimes must, kick while sliding. The graphical feel of the game is smooth rather than the intentionally blocky homage to pixellation of the original. It also seems to play smoother, though that could be because I'm using a good PC now. X)
Not much else to say, really. It's a solid, enjoyable action game. Get it if you like such.
KickBeat:
Now this definitely qualifies as a rhythm game. It's basically a DDR variant with a kung-fu theme that's intended to be played with a controller rather than a dance pad (theoretically you could use a dance pad if you had one hooked up to your game platform but it would be ridiculously tricky). The arrows flowing up the screen are replaced by mooks who step in and circle around the hero before needing to be smacked at the proper time by a press of the proper button. There's also little bonuses floating above the heads of some mooks which require a double-tap to collect, and if you want to maximize your score you have to keep an eye on a chi meter and activate chi mode whenever it gets full. The double-tap thing gets aggravating when there's lots of beats coming in at once, but other than that the basic gameplay seems solid to me.
The music that came with the game is mostly hip-hop and electronica, the former of which doesn't appeal to me because of the lyrics. :P The electronic stuff fortunately is pure music, and fits very well with the gameplay, but it's only about a quarter of the total. There's also a bit of fanservice in that the female of the two protagonists wears a low-cut shirt in some of her costumes.
You can also play with your own music, and there's a feature which lets you set the tempo for a given track by either entering a time in (decimal) seconds or by manually tapping a beat. I had high hopes for the latter, as my experiences with the PS2 title Dance Factory have been very mixed according mainly to how strong and consistent the beats in a given song are. An algorithm that detects rhythm and makes a dance for you is great when it works, but when it doesn't, I reasoned, why not make use of human music recognition capability and have the user tap out the spots where they want dance steps? That shouldn't be too hard when they only have to worry about the rhythm and not where they're stepping. Unfortunately the manual tapping in KickBeat is only there to establish a tempo by measuring what the user thinks is the basic beat. The help section specifically says you should stick to music with a regular beat throughout. :P What's more, my attempt at using it didn't produce very satisfying results, even though the tune I used was extremely regular in its beat (which I know on a technical level because I created it in electronic music class).
Bottom line? An interesting and fairly enjoyable little game mechanically, but most of the music within it is rancid. Can't really recommend it.
Click to viewHi all. Things are picking up again at work with the fall semester, so my general progress will likely slow down a bit. Not much else to report in terms of life happenings.
Visible progress in Forgotten Gates has hit something of a standstill, as I've had to stop and reassess how I'm doing things. Now that I know of the existence of plugins for RM2K3 that can be made in C++, possibilities for doing things much more efficiently are open to me, both in terms of development and how the game runs. I may even reimplement many of the internal workings of the combat system to run in an object-oriented way, which would be a big extra task in the short run but could pay off in the long run.
Meanwhile, there's one plugin writing task which I definitely want to tackle. Somebody wrote a plugin called DynPointer which allows scripters to overwrite the parameters of certain variable commands. For example, one of the commands possible normally is "store in variable X the amount of potions held in the inventory". Well, with this plugin, you can change it to "store in variable X the amount of the item referenced by variable Y", making it much more flexible. After looking through the source code for this plugin, I realized that the basic principle of overwriting parameters could be applied to a lot more commands. So far I've succeeded in extending the plugin to control commands for showing battle animations, so that I can tell it what animation to show and who to show it happening to by variables.
I've also messed around with the battle-controlling plugin which I'd hoped could fix (or rather avoid) the skill-cancelling bug in RM2K3. I managed to make the action meters stop during hero skills and item use, but the bug still happened. I think I could still avoid it if I entirely take over the action meters and only allow monsters to take an action when heroes won't be doing so for the next couple frames, but the creator of the plugin mentioned he made some tweaks to it himself, so I'm waiting on him to release his new version for the moment.
On NMR, we've finished up the chuunin exams. A group called the Silence made a terror attack during the final stages of the exams, proclaiming that they were comprised of disgruntled secret operatives from all the hidden villages and would reveal those villages' dirtiest secrets if they didn't confess themselves. Later on they made an attack against Sunagakure, pouring out the lives of brainwashed mercenaries to cover a strike by their leaders to steal classified info. Said leaders are a pair of brothers with hax powers created just for the plot, able to absorb chakra and send it back out either the same as it was or transformed into blue flames.
Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons:
Another indie darling, which I asked my little brother to get for me as a birthday gift while it was on sale in Steam. The basic premise is that you play as two brothers simultaneously, using the joysticks and trigger buttons on either side of a standard controller to move them independently (ideally of course, it's possible to use the keyboard too). The brothers must frequently cooperate to accomplish tasks neither of them could handle alone. It's really not a new concept; the cult-classic from the early PS2 era, The Adventures of Cookie and Cream, made excellent use of the conceit for either solo or cooperative play, and it wouldn't surprise me if there are examples from even further back (comment if you know any!). Still, it's something not many games attempt, for the obvious reason that it's difficult for the human brain to manipulate more than one thing at a time. Therein lies the challenge, and whether it's a good challenge or a frustration is largely a matter of taste (I know I enjoyed Cookie and Cream a lot more playing it cooperatively with my sister than trying to master it alone).
For its part, Brothers doesn't demand too much on the skill end of things. Most of the tasks in the game are fairly slow-paced, and it's rare that the game forces you to switch the positioning of the brothers such that which side of the controller controls which brother is unintuitive. Most of the challenge comes from puzzles, which aren't too difficult either. There are things which only the older brother can do, like lift heavy loads, and there are things only the younger brother can do, like slip between bars. Some of the puzzles are rather clever and amusing, but they're not very taxing once you realize what needs to be done.
That leaves story, which is probably the main strength of the title. The tale is told entirely through display, with the vocalizations of the characters being brief foreign-sounding gibberish. The brothers are seeking water from a legendary tree to heal their ailing father, having already lost their mother to the sea. It's an old-style northlandish fairy tail, which means that the world is fantastic in an earthy, often dark and dangerous sort of way. There are a good many light-hearted moments to be sure, probably more in total than the sad ones even, but yeah...people die. :P I can't say it was really to my taste, although I will say they at least didn't waste death narratively. I'll put it this way, if you like "bitter medicine" stories, you might enjoy it more than I did.
Bottom line? Not a general must-have by any means, but maybe worthwhile if you like artsy little story games. Which lean on the True Art is Angsty side.
Bit.Trip Runner 2:
Yay for Humble Bundle stuff. This one came as part of a bundle of rhythm games, although personally I think calling Runner 2 (and most of the other games in the bundle for that matter) a rhythm game is a stretch. The gameplay produces a bit of a melody with the sounds from each obstacle you overcome, and I suppose familiarizing yourself with the tempo of that melody can help you time your jumps and such, but it's not really about rhythm the way a DDR or the like is.
I've already reviewed the original, and Runner 2 only adds a few extra tricks to the stuff you have to learn, mostly combinations of existing stuff. For example, you can, and sometimes must, kick while sliding. The graphical feel of the game is smooth rather than the intentionally blocky homage to pixellation of the original. It also seems to play smoother, though that could be because I'm using a good PC now. X)
Not much else to say, really. It's a solid, enjoyable action game. Get it if you like such.
KickBeat:
Now this definitely qualifies as a rhythm game. It's basically a DDR variant with a kung-fu theme that's intended to be played with a controller rather than a dance pad (theoretically you could use a dance pad if you had one hooked up to your game platform but it would be ridiculously tricky). The arrows flowing up the screen are replaced by mooks who step in and circle around the hero before needing to be smacked at the proper time by a press of the proper button. There's also little bonuses floating above the heads of some mooks which require a double-tap to collect, and if you want to maximize your score you have to keep an eye on a chi meter and activate chi mode whenever it gets full. The double-tap thing gets aggravating when there's lots of beats coming in at once, but other than that the basic gameplay seems solid to me.
The music that came with the game is mostly hip-hop and electronica, the former of which doesn't appeal to me because of the lyrics. :P The electronic stuff fortunately is pure music, and fits very well with the gameplay, but it's only about a quarter of the total. There's also a bit of fanservice in that the female of the two protagonists wears a low-cut shirt in some of her costumes.
You can also play with your own music, and there's a feature which lets you set the tempo for a given track by either entering a time in (decimal) seconds or by manually tapping a beat. I had high hopes for the latter, as my experiences with the PS2 title Dance Factory have been very mixed according mainly to how strong and consistent the beats in a given song are. An algorithm that detects rhythm and makes a dance for you is great when it works, but when it doesn't, I reasoned, why not make use of human music recognition capability and have the user tap out the spots where they want dance steps? That shouldn't be too hard when they only have to worry about the rhythm and not where they're stepping. Unfortunately the manual tapping in KickBeat is only there to establish a tempo by measuring what the user thinks is the basic beat. The help section specifically says you should stick to music with a regular beat throughout. :P What's more, my attempt at using it didn't produce very satisfying results, even though the tune I used was extremely regular in its beat (which I know on a technical level because I created it in electronic music class).
Bottom line? An interesting and fairly enjoyable little game mechanically, but most of the music within it is rancid. Can't really recommend it.