Forest Glade by Neurophonic
Remix of Stickerbush Symphony from Donkey Kong Country 2
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Hi all. My family had that mega-birthday celebration I mentioned last time on the first Sunday of August. My own birthday was included among those celebrated, although most of my family had already given me my gift in the form of help with painting my apartment way back in April. Regardless, some of them also got me small extra gifts, like my middle sister who found a decent-condition copy of a Super Mario Bros. comic collection which I'd had as a kid and had lost the cover and a decent amount of pages from. X)
This month I decided to add a new chipset (the set of tiles which are used to make maps) to Forgotten Gates. Where the existing chipset I've been using is for a forest environment like the Lost Woods, this new one is for fields. Each chipset (at least the ones intended for use in the random dungeon system) has to be functionally more or less the same -- consistent in which tiles are walkable space, which are walls, etc. Also, there have to be six different walkable tile types, one for each of the magic elements in the combat system, although I'm purposely trying to vary which tile is associated with which element from one chipset to another. I was able to use rips from A Link to the Past pretty heavily, so this chipset at least didn't turn out too difficult. I did have to make a few original bits, though.
A few of the tile types make use of RM2K3's built-in animation capability, which is usually used for 'water' tiles. In the forest chipset, I ended up actually making all of them appear static -- I may go back and improve some of them eventually. In the field chipset, the LttP rips provided me with an easy animated option in the form of bouncing flowers (why they bounce who can say, but it looks cool). When I tried them, I discovered a problem I hadn't noticed before: when two different types of 'water' tiles are placed next to each other, they appear to meld together instead of having edges between them. That makes sense if they're actually depicting water (like an ocean tile with a whirlpool next to it), but it wasn't correct for my purposes, where the animated tiles are supposed to be distinct types of ground. :/a For a while I thought I'd have to make a design rule that the animated tiles can't be placed next to each other and remake any existing rooms which break this rule, but then I remembered a hack I'd accidentally discovered a while ago. It turns out that if you use the map editor's area select-and-move tool on some tiles, they won't change the appearance of their edges to match the way they'd be drawn if you placed them the ordinary way. :o So I was able to draw the animated tiles in the midst of non-animated ones, then move them to where they're needed. B)
Each of the walkable tile types also needs a corresponding battle background. I mostly make the battle backgrounds by copy-pasting the actual tiles into a base background, so that wasn't too difficult. The animated tile set me off on another unexpected improvement campaign. Since battle backgrounds are static, I couldn't really have the flowers bouncing in that...OR COULD I? +.+ It occurred to me that if I used the 'frames' battle background type, and made the back frame a moving swathe of the animated tile in its various states, then I could make them appear animated by having a static front frame with holes showing through to the back. :D
So I gave that a try, but it turned out there was a problem: the maximum movement of the frames normally allowed is 8 pixels on each axis, but the tiles are 16x16 pixels. So it was DynRPG to the rescue once again! I updated the DynDatabaseOverride plugin to allow changing the frame movement speed (and everything else about Terrain data while I was at it) so that I could set it to something outside the bounds allowed by the RM2K3 database editor. It turned out that when the frame movement is set to something above 8, instead of adding to it, it doubles -- so setting it to 9 makes it move 16 pixels, 10 makes it move 32 pixels, etc. Fortunately that works just fine for my purposes, and I was able to achieve the animation I wanted.
The scene on Zelda RPG has gone smoothly through to conclusion. Lundir's worry that the flower might be a lure of some monster proved unfounded, but Oran did start to slip over the cliff's edge as he grabbed the flower. o.o; Lundir grabbed his feet to anchor him, and Shemri and Itami came to the rescue, and between them all Oran was safe again pretty soon. Then Shemri exploded at Lundir for running off with a random boy, who for all she knew might be a HROSHGULT! >XO Of course, a big part of the reason Shemri was so upset was because she overheard Lundir saying earlier she didn't have a family. ;.; When this came out, Lundir clarified she said she didn't have a family LIKE ORAN'S, but she did regard Shemri (and her other adoptive daughters, and Aubrey and Fallon for that matter) as family. And there was much tears and hugging, with Oran and to a lesser degree Itami standing by in awkward confusion. X)
River City Girls:
Still more Humble Bundle stuff, this one from a bundle of brawler games. River City Girls is a relatively recent spin-off from the NES cult-classic River City Ransom. A pair of delinquent girls, Kyoko and Misako, are sitting through detention at River City High School when Kyoko receives a text with a photo of Kunio and Rikki (the protagonists of River City Ransom) being hustled into a van. 8o The girls immediately ditch detention to go rescue their boyfriends, although the other students make this difficult by turning hostile on them. Also, the girls don't really know where the boys were taken. e.e; They receive enough leads (which are mostly just ideas from various NPCs about where the boys might be) to keep them bouncing around the city, brawling all the way with rival gangs, corrupt cops, yakuza, and even parodies of Terminator robots. Hey, plot doesn't matter, what matters is beating up goons! :D
Like the game from which it's spun-off, River City Girls is different from most brawlers in that it has some open-world flavor. You wander from one area to another, with an occasional choice of different doors you can go through, and you can (and will) double back on occasion to re-explore old territory. There are almost always a few enemies around when you enter an area, and even after you clear them out more will appear if you wait around for a bit. Every so often the game locks the screen until you finish off a certain number of enemies, but for the most part, you can choose to just slip past the random goons and be on your way. There's also an RPG aspect to it with character stats and experience points for beating foes. On top of that, you pick up cash which can then be used in shops to purchase accessories and restorative items, and most of the restoratives also give you a small but permanent stat boost the first time you use them. However, the game doesn't tell you what any of the items do until you've used them once. :P
Mechanically, I would say River City Girls is a bit more fair and engaging than most brawlers, especially when you include the old-school ones, but frustratingly still a good ways short of allowing reliable avoidance of damage. The game does provide a block button, and even timing-based counters, so that's good...but you have to be facing your attacker for it to work. The only way you can really know an enemy is about to attack you is if they dash at you, and that makes it very difficult to get the timing right if you also have to move a bit toward them in order to change your facing. So you're generally better off being the first to attack, which works out well most of the time...but then you might well end up stuck in attack animation lag while another enemy decides to attack, which happens more often as the game progresses and enemies get more aggressive. And finally, there are some boss fights, which range from Mario-esque 'I could get through this without damage once I'm familiar with the attacks and openings' to bizarre 'I'm being asked to thread through a bullet spread while being threatened by randomly-acting goons'. =.=
Bottom line? Worth a play if you'd like the general feel of an old-school brawler without it being nearly so crushing, but don't expect something TOO elegant.