Dev Log 2! 🎉 - October 17, 2024

Hello, I'm Mecha! 😄 I'm here to share the latest craziness and progress in my project. Get ready for a rollercoaster of emotions! 🎢

First of all, I've made an epic change: combat now starts with enemy contact instead of being random! 💥 Goodbye to surprise encounters, hello to immediate action! I've also resolved several issues, such as enemies not initiating battles when touching allies. Crisis averted! 🎊 This allows me to include some overpowered enemies for you to defeat later, which is impossible with random encounters.

I've finished the database with my enemies. Some have special sounds and animations. For example, if you kill a zombie, it sprays blood! 🧛‍♂️ It's quite a show!

The save zone now allows you to teleport to Lost Town, where all the NPCs you rescue from the castle will be. A mini city of heroes is under construction! 🏘️

I'm almost 90% done with mapping the normal castle, but here comes the exciting part: I'm implementing a mechanic called "Nightmare Castle." 🏰💀 It's a parallel dimension of the castle that's much tougher, with super strong enemies! Whatever you do in that dimension will reflect in the normal castle, opening new paths. Let's challenge the limits! 🚪✨

As for the quest system, it's almost ready. I've programmed the battle counters (I'll pray they work because I did them quickly and I'm not familiar with the RPG Maker MZ environment). If the quest screen isn't polished, please don't judge me! 😅 I'll finish it once I get the important stuff done.

Character Creation (I'll detail it better here since I missed it earlier):

Character 1: She's the typical waifu in horror video games and the final girl in horror movies. She's pale because she's dead. Inspired by Alucard, but since Alucard is super overdone and everyone makes characters based on him, I decided to make it female. Her outfit is made of blood, which is why it's red, like the girl from Bloodstein.

Character 2: I drew inspiration from the dark wizard from Final Fantasy. I gave him a helmet that covers his face and big eyes. Totally mysterious! 🦸‍♂️ Plus, it saves me animations in battles. It's a character I created to fill out the roster, simple and serious; I don’t have to write much text, it’s fine.

Character 3: I wanted to use a scene I created with her sprite riding a horse, which is why I chose her, but she didn't fit. So I thought: why not kill her and use her ghost? I gave her a bluish color and a floating effect. The result looks fantastic.

Character 4: He was going to be a werewolf, but his sprite broke the seriousness, so now he'll be the comic relief. I accept the challenge! 😂 I haven't made him talk yet; he just blinks, but I can't draw, so I can't animate him opening his mouth. The justification is that he speaks telepathically; otherwise, he would just growl and bark, without any eloquent language.

I've set the characters' voices to Japanese. It sounds amazing! 🎤 I also solved issues with my code for character formation, where the position parameters weren't reflecting correctly. That's already fixed! 🔧

I have some ideas for the story; I made drafts before the jam, but I'm not very convinced by them. The game makes me change the texts drastically, so I’ll improvise a bit. 🎭

I've balanced the classes and enemies, except for the boss, which still needs testing. The game is designed so that level isn't that important; it should matter but not be essential. I want strategic battles to be won before they even start. For pure habit, characters can level up to 100. 😂 Nobody asked for it, but there it is! If you farm millions of zombies, maybe you'll reach that level. 🧟‍♂️

I messed up the luck system a bit, and it's exclusive to four characters. If you add more, the game accumulates the luck of all and goes crazy! 😱 Fortunately, I only have four characters, so I hope it doesn't break anything. I get chills touching the code blindly. 😅

I've implemented a soul slot system for using abilities. I feel this enhances strategy, and with so many abilities, it's cumbersome to choose in real-time. I need it to be simple and effective! ⚔️

Tomorrow, I'll focus on creating the graphics for the ATB and customizing the counters and the bar. If I have time, I'll add a custom sprite for each weapon. I had already set it up for the weapons to have attack animations for both ranged and melee, but we'll see what happens! 🤷‍♂️

I think that'll be enough for me to work on tomorrow. I hope to have everything ready for the weekend and focus on the details! The character scenes will take me the most time; they really tire me out. Just like the mapping, which I enjoy, but sometimes it wears me out. I made about 20 maps for the first level! 😩 I'm all in! I'm really liking how it's turning out.

Until the next update, my dear RPG enthusiasts! See you! 🎮✨