Official English RM2K3! :D
Super Mario 64 Can-Can
Hi all. Things have been relatively busy this month. My parents are remodeling their guest bathroom, as they discovered there was a leak somewhere, in the wall by the tub I think it was. Of course, as long as they're doing this kind of serious repair work, they're going all-out, replacing nearly everything. They got my sister and her husband (poor guy) to come down for the weekend so he could lend his expertise at removing the tub, toilet, and sink, demolishing the wall, scraping up the floor tiles, and laying the groundwork to put all the new stuff in. I was there too, but I didn't end up doing all that much; you can only fit at most two working people in a room like that at any given time, after all, and I'm not particularly knowledgable about the tasks involved. I mostly helped out when there were heavy things needing to be carried, and participated in the cleanup. It's still pretty far from done last I saw, but it's coming along.
Work has been slowly getting busier, leading up to this upcoming week being finals. As usual, it should be very hectic on Monday and Tuesday, wind down on Wednesday, and be pretty quiet on Thursday, followed by intersession week when virtually nothing will be going on. Maybe I'll get some good coding done during that time.
One other thing of note: RPG Maker 2003 now has an official English port! :D It was a collaborative effort between the company that owns the RPG Maker property and some of the guys who are prominent in the RPGMaker.net community, including the guy who made DynRPG. This means I don't have to worry quite so much about potential employers thinking "Hey, isn't that illegal?" when they see Forgotten Gates on my website. X) Of course, it's still a Zelda fan-game, but...
That mysterious bug in Forgotten Gates I mentioned last time, in which holding the Shift key after battle would cause memory corruption, turned out to be a lot simpler than I thought. -.- It was simply that some old code for splitting a party, which I thought I'd deactivated by turning off a switch, gets reactivated after a battle, and pressing Shift calls it. What I'd thought had been differing behaviors of the bug from adding debug commands or running the game on a different computer were symptoms of a different bug. That's all fixed now, and I've released a new version on RPGMaker.net.
The Bombercan project has also had a decent amount of progress. I managed to get the basic movement working, which was an interesting exercise. I wanted to take advantage of Unity's built-in physics capabilities for moving objects by velocity and keeping them from overlapping by collision, but at the same time it needs to be grid-based, only allowing the player to move along certain lines. I wound up creating a sort of hybrid system which automatically "gravitates" the player toward the gridlines, correcting any divergence.
Not too much to report on the MU front. On NMR, I ran a mission as Sousa in which a couple of Suna nin (with Sousa just standing and observing for the most part B3 ) had to deal with another Garatsuku Asylum escapee: a hyperactive little girl with prodigious talent for speed ninjutsu, nicknamed Sugar Baby. She'd taken over a candy factory and was forcing its workers to continue producing sweets for her. Fortunately the Suna nin were able to separate her from her energy supply long enough to induce a sugar crash. X) Jon was in a brief mission with Amani (Fallon-player's Kumo alt) in which they were supposed to pick up some cadavers for medical study, but the company who was selling them got taken over by small-time crooks who tried to rip the Kumo nin off with bogus fees. Poor, stupid crooks. Finally, I did a cutscene for the What If? Get in the Game RP challenge as Cherii, as I'm determined to eventually do at least one for each of my alts. ;) But then, it wound up having almost nothing to do with Cherii as a character, just her name.
Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker:
If you've played a significant amount of Super Mario 3D World, you've already encountered the gameplay of Captain Toad. It's pretty much what you'd expect, a whole game of that with just a little more depth than they could comfortably teach players with the few Captain Toad stages in 3D World. The primary conceit is that responsibility for the camera is (almost) entirely rested on the player, and the stages are designed to reveal vital (or sometimes just score-increasing) secrets to those who carefully look at things from every angle.
I enjoyed this game on the whole, but it did get on my nerves toward the end. See, as a light puzzle and exploration game, it's pretty good, but as an action game, it's awkward and unforgiving...and of course, the further you get into the game, the more the design leans on skilled execution. e.e This is especially the case for the bonus stages, which usually are simply redoes of previous stages with extra pressure elements. In some of them you have to locate and bring the entire Toad Brigade with you to the goal, and all of them will die from a single hit. In others you'll be chased by a Mummy-Me, much like the Shadow Marios in the Super Mario Galaxy games. And then there were a few stages taken from Super Mario 3D World, with a few pipes and such added to allow a character who can't jump to navigate. It felt pretty tedious, re-exploring a space made for speedy, acrobatic play as a slow, ground-locked character. X)
Bottom line? It's a game worth playing in general, but I'm not sure it's really worth the $40 price tag. Maybe wait until it goes down in price a little.
Mutant Mudds:
I was really close to platinum status in Club Nintendo, so I figured I should go ahead and get a little something from the e-Shop to put me over the top. Considering the rewards for platinum status included some triple-A titles (I wound up getting Mario Party Island Tour, will probably review that next month), it was probably worth the little bit I spent on Mutant Mudds just for that. Can't say I'm pleased with Mutant Mudds itself, though.
Mutant Mudds is a simple and cartoonish platformer about a boy with a water gun and a jetpack fighting against alien mudballs. The conceit of Mutant Mudds is that you occasionally jump between midground, background, and foreground. It's a neat little visual effect and I imagine it looked especially nice on the 3DS (I got the deluxe version on Wii U). It doesn't have a huge effect on the gameplay, though. It just creates one-way passages between sections and makes visibility greater in some parts than others, since the closer you are to the foreground the more "zoomed-in" everything is and the less fits on the screen. This is especially irksome because enemies will often move in from offscreen to threaten you, including during critical moments like jumps over chasms. :P
The control of the game is sluggish and awkward. The hero walks slowly, jumps oddly, and falls at a constant, floaty speed. The jetpack holds him in midair and allows lateral movement for about a second, or less if you press the jump button again before it exhausts itself, but regardless you have to touch the ground before using it again. The really irksome thing is, the level design in later stages forces you to make near-perfect use of these blocky mechanics. It gives situations like needing to fall to the level of a passage, activate the jetpack, and hover into it, all with the exact timing needed to catch a strong, swift-moving enemy just as it turns away so you can hit it three times from behind before it comes back toward you with its shield blocking your shots. :P
Bottom line? It would be so nice if Mutant Mudds was the spiritual successor to Commander Keen it looks like at first glance, but no, it's not. -.- This one's not worth your time, let alone your money.
Star Stealing Prince:
This one's another free game that was tossed in the RPG Maker Humble Bundle. I actually skipped over a couple others after getting a little ways into them. So many games, so little time (especially when it comes to RPGs, they're time vacuums :P). But this one held my interest long enough to complete it.
Mechanics-wise, it's a fairly standard JRPG for the most part. It plays a lot with status conditions, having some skills that slather tons of them on a target (or all targets!) at once. They also have a some items that act as skills, and a few of them are reusable as many times as you like. I found the Child's Coronet, which inflicts Attack and Speed-reducing conditions on an enemy for a few turns, to be indispensible for surviving some of the bosses. Considering it's something you pick up by thoroughly exploring the town where you start the game, I have to wonder what I'd have done if I'd been the sort to pursue the meat of the story first. -.-; Finally, some of the skills in the game use not MP, but IP, which I assume stands for Injury Points because it accumulates when a character takes damage. It's a rather interesting mechanic, giving you a little more power in situations where things are tough enough to drain your HP quickly.
As hinted at above, some of the bosses in this game are extremely tough. In a way I like that, it makes the game something you actually have to figure out and optimize in order to win instead of just an activity that will go slower if you don't do it right. On the other hand, the fact that there's little margin for error means there's also little margin for bad luck, and until you've tried and died enough times to figure out little things like, "Oh, I can actually stop the boss from getting two actions every turn by inflicting a speed-reducing status" and "Ah, he does his super-whammy attack every five turns, I need to brace my party for that", it feels like you're just getting unfairly trounced with nothing you can do about it. :P Definitely a lesson I need to bear strongly in mind for my own game design, communicate to the player what they're doing wrong (or at least that there is something they can do to improve their chances besides go grind against mooks for a couple hours).
The story takes place in a world of magic-as-science similar to that of In Search of Immortality, although it's not as humorous. It follows the adventure of the prince of a small kingdom on a snow-covered island, as he discovers that the tranquility of his kingdom rests on a spell that his parents placed to keep it essentially ageless and tied to his own well-being. A lot of effort was poured into the graphics of the game, which evoke an old-time, paper-rough book illustration feel with a bit of anime influence. Most of the game has rather subdued, solemn feel, in keeping with the snowy setting where it takes place. It definitely seems like one of the more serious and well-crafted RPG Maker games, perhaps even more so than the commercial ones I've seen.
Bottom line? If you like RPGs enough to spend the requisite time on them, this is a pretty good one, and yeah, it's free, so check it out.
Click to viewHi all. Things have been relatively busy this month. My parents are remodeling their guest bathroom, as they discovered there was a leak somewhere, in the wall by the tub I think it was. Of course, as long as they're doing this kind of serious repair work, they're going all-out, replacing nearly everything. They got my sister and her husband (poor guy) to come down for the weekend so he could lend his expertise at removing the tub, toilet, and sink, demolishing the wall, scraping up the floor tiles, and laying the groundwork to put all the new stuff in. I was there too, but I didn't end up doing all that much; you can only fit at most two working people in a room like that at any given time, after all, and I'm not particularly knowledgable about the tasks involved. I mostly helped out when there were heavy things needing to be carried, and participated in the cleanup. It's still pretty far from done last I saw, but it's coming along.
Work has been slowly getting busier, leading up to this upcoming week being finals. As usual, it should be very hectic on Monday and Tuesday, wind down on Wednesday, and be pretty quiet on Thursday, followed by intersession week when virtually nothing will be going on. Maybe I'll get some good coding done during that time.
One other thing of note: RPG Maker 2003 now has an official English port! :D It was a collaborative effort between the company that owns the RPG Maker property and some of the guys who are prominent in the RPGMaker.net community, including the guy who made DynRPG. This means I don't have to worry quite so much about potential employers thinking "Hey, isn't that illegal?" when they see Forgotten Gates on my website. X) Of course, it's still a Zelda fan-game, but...
That mysterious bug in Forgotten Gates I mentioned last time, in which holding the Shift key after battle would cause memory corruption, turned out to be a lot simpler than I thought. -.- It was simply that some old code for splitting a party, which I thought I'd deactivated by turning off a switch, gets reactivated after a battle, and pressing Shift calls it. What I'd thought had been differing behaviors of the bug from adding debug commands or running the game on a different computer were symptoms of a different bug. That's all fixed now, and I've released a new version on RPGMaker.net.
The Bombercan project has also had a decent amount of progress. I managed to get the basic movement working, which was an interesting exercise. I wanted to take advantage of Unity's built-in physics capabilities for moving objects by velocity and keeping them from overlapping by collision, but at the same time it needs to be grid-based, only allowing the player to move along certain lines. I wound up creating a sort of hybrid system which automatically "gravitates" the player toward the gridlines, correcting any divergence.
Not too much to report on the MU front. On NMR, I ran a mission as Sousa in which a couple of Suna nin (with Sousa just standing and observing for the most part B3 ) had to deal with another Garatsuku Asylum escapee: a hyperactive little girl with prodigious talent for speed ninjutsu, nicknamed Sugar Baby. She'd taken over a candy factory and was forcing its workers to continue producing sweets for her. Fortunately the Suna nin were able to separate her from her energy supply long enough to induce a sugar crash. X) Jon was in a brief mission with Amani (Fallon-player's Kumo alt) in which they were supposed to pick up some cadavers for medical study, but the company who was selling them got taken over by small-time crooks who tried to rip the Kumo nin off with bogus fees. Poor, stupid crooks. Finally, I did a cutscene for the What If? Get in the Game RP challenge as Cherii, as I'm determined to eventually do at least one for each of my alts. ;) But then, it wound up having almost nothing to do with Cherii as a character, just her name.
Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker:
If you've played a significant amount of Super Mario 3D World, you've already encountered the gameplay of Captain Toad. It's pretty much what you'd expect, a whole game of that with just a little more depth than they could comfortably teach players with the few Captain Toad stages in 3D World. The primary conceit is that responsibility for the camera is (almost) entirely rested on the player, and the stages are designed to reveal vital (or sometimes just score-increasing) secrets to those who carefully look at things from every angle.
I enjoyed this game on the whole, but it did get on my nerves toward the end. See, as a light puzzle and exploration game, it's pretty good, but as an action game, it's awkward and unforgiving...and of course, the further you get into the game, the more the design leans on skilled execution. e.e This is especially the case for the bonus stages, which usually are simply redoes of previous stages with extra pressure elements. In some of them you have to locate and bring the entire Toad Brigade with you to the goal, and all of them will die from a single hit. In others you'll be chased by a Mummy-Me, much like the Shadow Marios in the Super Mario Galaxy games. And then there were a few stages taken from Super Mario 3D World, with a few pipes and such added to allow a character who can't jump to navigate. It felt pretty tedious, re-exploring a space made for speedy, acrobatic play as a slow, ground-locked character. X)
Bottom line? It's a game worth playing in general, but I'm not sure it's really worth the $40 price tag. Maybe wait until it goes down in price a little.
Mutant Mudds:
I was really close to platinum status in Club Nintendo, so I figured I should go ahead and get a little something from the e-Shop to put me over the top. Considering the rewards for platinum status included some triple-A titles (I wound up getting Mario Party Island Tour, will probably review that next month), it was probably worth the little bit I spent on Mutant Mudds just for that. Can't say I'm pleased with Mutant Mudds itself, though.
Mutant Mudds is a simple and cartoonish platformer about a boy with a water gun and a jetpack fighting against alien mudballs. The conceit of Mutant Mudds is that you occasionally jump between midground, background, and foreground. It's a neat little visual effect and I imagine it looked especially nice on the 3DS (I got the deluxe version on Wii U). It doesn't have a huge effect on the gameplay, though. It just creates one-way passages between sections and makes visibility greater in some parts than others, since the closer you are to the foreground the more "zoomed-in" everything is and the less fits on the screen. This is especially irksome because enemies will often move in from offscreen to threaten you, including during critical moments like jumps over chasms. :P
The control of the game is sluggish and awkward. The hero walks slowly, jumps oddly, and falls at a constant, floaty speed. The jetpack holds him in midair and allows lateral movement for about a second, or less if you press the jump button again before it exhausts itself, but regardless you have to touch the ground before using it again. The really irksome thing is, the level design in later stages forces you to make near-perfect use of these blocky mechanics. It gives situations like needing to fall to the level of a passage, activate the jetpack, and hover into it, all with the exact timing needed to catch a strong, swift-moving enemy just as it turns away so you can hit it three times from behind before it comes back toward you with its shield blocking your shots. :P
Bottom line? It would be so nice if Mutant Mudds was the spiritual successor to Commander Keen it looks like at first glance, but no, it's not. -.- This one's not worth your time, let alone your money.
Star Stealing Prince:
This one's another free game that was tossed in the RPG Maker Humble Bundle. I actually skipped over a couple others after getting a little ways into them. So many games, so little time (especially when it comes to RPGs, they're time vacuums :P). But this one held my interest long enough to complete it.
Mechanics-wise, it's a fairly standard JRPG for the most part. It plays a lot with status conditions, having some skills that slather tons of them on a target (or all targets!) at once. They also have a some items that act as skills, and a few of them are reusable as many times as you like. I found the Child's Coronet, which inflicts Attack and Speed-reducing conditions on an enemy for a few turns, to be indispensible for surviving some of the bosses. Considering it's something you pick up by thoroughly exploring the town where you start the game, I have to wonder what I'd have done if I'd been the sort to pursue the meat of the story first. -.-; Finally, some of the skills in the game use not MP, but IP, which I assume stands for Injury Points because it accumulates when a character takes damage. It's a rather interesting mechanic, giving you a little more power in situations where things are tough enough to drain your HP quickly.
As hinted at above, some of the bosses in this game are extremely tough. In a way I like that, it makes the game something you actually have to figure out and optimize in order to win instead of just an activity that will go slower if you don't do it right. On the other hand, the fact that there's little margin for error means there's also little margin for bad luck, and until you've tried and died enough times to figure out little things like, "Oh, I can actually stop the boss from getting two actions every turn by inflicting a speed-reducing status" and "Ah, he does his super-whammy attack every five turns, I need to brace my party for that", it feels like you're just getting unfairly trounced with nothing you can do about it. :P Definitely a lesson I need to bear strongly in mind for my own game design, communicate to the player what they're doing wrong (or at least that there is something they can do to improve their chances besides go grind against mooks for a couple hours).
The story takes place in a world of magic-as-science similar to that of In Search of Immortality, although it's not as humorous. It follows the adventure of the prince of a small kingdom on a snow-covered island, as he discovers that the tranquility of his kingdom rests on a spell that his parents placed to keep it essentially ageless and tied to his own well-being. A lot of effort was poured into the graphics of the game, which evoke an old-time, paper-rough book illustration feel with a bit of anime influence. Most of the game has rather subdued, solemn feel, in keeping with the snowy setting where it takes place. It definitely seems like one of the more serious and well-crafted RPG Maker games, perhaps even more so than the commercial ones I've seen.
Bottom line? If you like RPGs enough to spend the requisite time on them, this is a pretty good one, and yeah, it's free, so check it out.