New niece
Pirate Shout by audio fidelity, Derek Meler, Eric Griffin, Marcus Affeldt
Remix of The Secret of Monkey Island Opening Theme
Hi all. My older sister birthed her first baby a little over a week ago. :) Everything went pretty smoothly from what I heard. We had a big family gathering on Sunday for everyone to meet the new addition. It has been much remarked upon that she's one of the few in our family to have dark hair, and plenty of it even as a newborn.
This month in Forgotten Gates, I finished up my rewrite of the high-level outline for the story's first arc, which ended up giving me some interesting ideas for mechanical uniquenesses in some of the early quests. :) Then I got to work on actually implementing the first quest. Naturally, this involved meeting up against some hurdles I'd only vaguely anticipated before. The main one was how to run cutscenes during a quest. Normally in RM2K3 you can just make whatever events you like and put scripting into one or more of them to make a scene play out, but since FG uses one BIG map full of one-screen rooms for all of the quests, I have to do things in a more modular way.
I eventually came up with the idea of having a variable holding the reference number of a common event used for special happenings in the current quest. I can set the variable to whatever it needs to be at the start of a quest, then call the common event at occasions when I might want to do something, like the start of the quest, the first time the player enters a particular room, or when a particular win condition has been fulfilled. In vanilla RM2K3 that would require having a bunch of conditional branches to call the right common event (or making the special handler events map events), but thanks to my first-created-and-still-favorite plugin DynParams, I can just call a common event by variable reference. ^.^ It took a while to get everything working right due to little details in my dungeon managing code that were easy to overlook when setting up a pre-constructed dungeon and a weird bug that interfered with text messages when skippable event movements were involved, but I finally managed to get the first quest working with a starting and an ending cutscene. I still intend to add some more cutscenes, and I should also work on a proper 'hub world' for entering individual quests.
On Zelda RPG, Tyron was about to finish Adrian off by swinging his scythe down to where he lay pinned, but Mituni hurled another Yiga into the group that was holding Adrian. Adrian was able to roll aside, jab his sword into Tyron's thigh, and hold his dagger up to meet Tyron's belly as he fell. XoX Adrian's crew were able to dogpile on the Yiga who'd been knocked down, and the rest saw that they were quickly becoming outnumbered and surrendered. >_> Bronk and Clatch slipped away, leaving their prisoner Jo to be untied by Mituni. And that's when this scene caught up with current events in Hyrule and the ocean outside drained away.
River City Girls 2:
Onward through the Brawler Humble Bundle. As you'd expect, River City Girls 2 is pretty similar to the first game, a little bigger, a few more enemy types, a couple nice quality-of-play improvements. The enemies feel a little more aggressive to me right from the start, but I was able to deal with that without too much problem thanks to knowing pretty well how to play. They changed the shops to display the stats you'll get the first time your character consumes a particular item, and those disappear once you actually have consumed it, which makes it way easier to keep track of which ones you should still get -- especially if you switch between multiple characters.
Speaking of characters, Kunio and Rikki, the protagonists of the original series who were unlocked as bonus characters after beating the game in the first River City Girls, are available to play as right from the beginning here. Partway through you also pick up Provie, a cap-and-hoodie-wearing breakdancer, and Marian from the Double Dragon series. However, you're discouraged from switching between characters by the fact that the first one you use is probably going to be significantly ahead of the others in strength, especially if you've been buying stat-boosting treats for them.
Oh, and story? The yakuza boss whose daughter you defeated at the end of the first game decides that this affront to his empire cannot go unanswered, so he cuts short his vacation in prison, breaks out, and basically takes over River City. The yakuza boss's son then shows up at River City High with some goons to expel our protagonists, both officially through the gang's influence with the school's none-too-upstanding-anyway board and practically with a bum rush out the classroom window. This...actually doesn't bother our delinquent 'heroes' too much, and they spend a couple months on Kyoko's couch, playing video games and letting their fighting abilities atrophy so they can start over at level 1. ^_^ Then Kyoko's mother finally tells them the sequel to the game they've been playing has been released just to give them a reason to leave the house, and they set off to acquire this MacGuffin...and one thing leads to another, particularly with the yakuza boss's daughter scheming to use the kids to foul up her half-brother's standing and get back in her father's good graces. Y'know, more goofy excuse plot.
Bottom line? It's an incremental improvement on the first game, and I liked that one well enough. Grab it if you like beat-'em-ups.
Remix of The Secret of Monkey Island Opening Theme
Click to viewHi all. My older sister birthed her first baby a little over a week ago. :) Everything went pretty smoothly from what I heard. We had a big family gathering on Sunday for everyone to meet the new addition. It has been much remarked upon that she's one of the few in our family to have dark hair, and plenty of it even as a newborn.
This month in Forgotten Gates, I finished up my rewrite of the high-level outline for the story's first arc, which ended up giving me some interesting ideas for mechanical uniquenesses in some of the early quests. :) Then I got to work on actually implementing the first quest. Naturally, this involved meeting up against some hurdles I'd only vaguely anticipated before. The main one was how to run cutscenes during a quest. Normally in RM2K3 you can just make whatever events you like and put scripting into one or more of them to make a scene play out, but since FG uses one BIG map full of one-screen rooms for all of the quests, I have to do things in a more modular way.
I eventually came up with the idea of having a variable holding the reference number of a common event used for special happenings in the current quest. I can set the variable to whatever it needs to be at the start of a quest, then call the common event at occasions when I might want to do something, like the start of the quest, the first time the player enters a particular room, or when a particular win condition has been fulfilled. In vanilla RM2K3 that would require having a bunch of conditional branches to call the right common event (or making the special handler events map events), but thanks to my first-created-and-still-favorite plugin DynParams, I can just call a common event by variable reference. ^.^ It took a while to get everything working right due to little details in my dungeon managing code that were easy to overlook when setting up a pre-constructed dungeon and a weird bug that interfered with text messages when skippable event movements were involved, but I finally managed to get the first quest working with a starting and an ending cutscene. I still intend to add some more cutscenes, and I should also work on a proper 'hub world' for entering individual quests.
On Zelda RPG, Tyron was about to finish Adrian off by swinging his scythe down to where he lay pinned, but Mituni hurled another Yiga into the group that was holding Adrian. Adrian was able to roll aside, jab his sword into Tyron's thigh, and hold his dagger up to meet Tyron's belly as he fell. XoX Adrian's crew were able to dogpile on the Yiga who'd been knocked down, and the rest saw that they were quickly becoming outnumbered and surrendered. >_> Bronk and Clatch slipped away, leaving their prisoner Jo to be untied by Mituni. And that's when this scene caught up with current events in Hyrule and the ocean outside drained away.
River City Girls 2:
Onward through the Brawler Humble Bundle. As you'd expect, River City Girls 2 is pretty similar to the first game, a little bigger, a few more enemy types, a couple nice quality-of-play improvements. The enemies feel a little more aggressive to me right from the start, but I was able to deal with that without too much problem thanks to knowing pretty well how to play. They changed the shops to display the stats you'll get the first time your character consumes a particular item, and those disappear once you actually have consumed it, which makes it way easier to keep track of which ones you should still get -- especially if you switch between multiple characters.
Speaking of characters, Kunio and Rikki, the protagonists of the original series who were unlocked as bonus characters after beating the game in the first River City Girls, are available to play as right from the beginning here. Partway through you also pick up Provie, a cap-and-hoodie-wearing breakdancer, and Marian from the Double Dragon series. However, you're discouraged from switching between characters by the fact that the first one you use is probably going to be significantly ahead of the others in strength, especially if you've been buying stat-boosting treats for them.
Oh, and story? The yakuza boss whose daughter you defeated at the end of the first game decides that this affront to his empire cannot go unanswered, so he cuts short his vacation in prison, breaks out, and basically takes over River City. The yakuza boss's son then shows up at River City High with some goons to expel our protagonists, both officially through the gang's influence with the school's none-too-upstanding-anyway board and practically with a bum rush out the classroom window. This...actually doesn't bother our delinquent 'heroes' too much, and they spend a couple months on Kyoko's couch, playing video games and letting their fighting abilities atrophy so they can start over at level 1. ^_^ Then Kyoko's mother finally tells them the sequel to the game they've been playing has been released just to give them a reason to leave the house, and they set off to acquire this MacGuffin...and one thing leads to another, particularly with the yakuza boss's daughter scheming to use the kids to foul up her half-brother's standing and get back in her father's good graces. Y'know, more goofy excuse plot.
Bottom line? It's an incremental improvement on the first game, and I liked that one well enough. Grab it if you like beat-'em-ups.