Hi.

Another month has passed (more or less) so here’s another trash filled blog post.

Life Stuff

I’m still at work a lot but there hasn’t been much overtime this month so I’ve been putting those extra hours into working on stuff at home. I’ve done a little work on PW but most of my efforts have gone towards working on The Thing 2 RPG’s v2.6 update.

Game wise I’ve been playing through Fire Emblem Radiant Dawn again (I love this game). I’m pretty hopeful for a Fire Emblem Switch reveal at E3 in June so it’s been good to revisit the franchise. I also started playing (Modded) Skyrim again. Did you know I’ve never actually finished Skyrim but I’ve clocked about 250 hours on it somehow? I’m setting out to beat it this time but I’m not super confident about that haha.

I also picked up a few games along with some DVDs this month. For Switch I got Darkest Dungeon and South Park the fractured but whole comes tomorrow, I’ve not played either of these games so I’m looking forward to them if I get the time. I’d really recommend checking Darkest Dungeon out if you like any of the games I make, it seems to push that ultra hard unforgiving RNG RPG style I’ve been looking for. DVD wise I picked up Harvey Birdman attorney at law season 3, Samurai Jack Seasons 1-4 boxset and Samurai Jack season 5. All classics of course, especially Samurai Jack.

The Thing 2 RPG v2.6 Update

Art: Arteaga has nearly finished the icons, there are a few more left to do but after this he is going to give the character sprites a makeover, making them more realistic in proportion and there will be some alterations to existing game imagery and some rework to tiles in the environments to fit the bigger scaled characters.

Dev: I’ve made a long list of changes, most of them are minor quality of life tweaks and fixes but there’s a few notable ones in there. I won’t list them all but they will all be in the change notes upon release. Focusing on what I’ve done this month though is:

-Added a lot more NPC’s to the Field Base in Story Mode, most of the more unique characters you meet will feature here now but I didn’t make a sidequest for all of them so most of the new ones give you a small reward instead for keeping them alive.
-Added “Enemy Alert Levels” via a script by Yanfly (Event Chase Player Script). What this does for the game is change the enemies completely giving them some basic logic to their movements on screen. Before they just randomly would roam around looking for the player character, now they randomly roam around but if they see the player they will begin chasing after them at a faster pace so will be harder to avoid. This adds a small stealth element to the game and puts more pressure on the player to fight or flight.
-I removed the shops from the Field Base in Story Mode, they’ve always felt a little odd and out of place and now the player can access Quintel’s Outpost and the Merc Trading Post they don’t need the field base shops.
-I removed the puzzle from the warehouse level in original mode, it felt kinda silly. Instead the upstairs computer just opens the door and there’s some extra loot up there now.
-The Puzzle in the Submersible has also had changes, it still exists but no longer displays the Neon letters, making it more challenging to deal with.

Planned: I’m still waiting on Jose a lot so it’s delayed time somewhat. I’ve decided to scrap the idea of animating the enemy battle sprites as it would require too much time and resources I don’t have. What I am looking at however is a party management script that will allow you to manage multiple teams and change between them. I’ve thought of 3 major uses for this as a mechanic if I can get it working.

In Original Mode when Blake is captured he looses all of his stuff, previously there’s been no way for me to save this gear so it gets destroyed. With this script I can save the gear so the player can recover it. This would make original mode a lot easier and I think would be a welcome change.

In Story Mode you tend to have a lot of extra characters you don’t use. I’ve been thinking of having a mechanic where you send out a team, like an “away team” that goes on a mission. After a certain amount of time expires they would reach their destination and you take control of them, gathering resources and destroying enemies in small generic areas. This would make use of more of the characters and allow more training to be done. This mechanic would be optional and serve as a risk/reward type of thing.

In Prequel Mode the base defense mechanic is pretty lame to be honest. Jose lets you know when the base is under attack and the results are based on how many defenders are left behind, with more giving less/weaker enemies attacking. With this party mechanic in place instead of just leaving people at the Bridge you would have to manage the Bridge teams resources in case they are attacked. When attacked instead of going to the bridge as Natalie you would instead control the Bridge team who have to repel the attack. The attacking enemies would likely be balanced on strength of the bridge team and how far into the story you are. Overall it would be a lot better than what it currently is.

It’s all down to seeing if I can get this Party Manager script by Hime working or not. At the moment Hime’s website is down which is weird as I used it the other day to view the script. As MacReady would say “There’s nothing more I can do, just wait.” I’ll post an update on it in next months blog post.

PW

PW received a bit of love this month. I reworked the scale of the map and the team had a brief discussion about the story events but it needs a lot more work. While work is being done on The Thing 2 RPG still PW will likely continue to get short posts.

PW Team: Richard2410, Sadonrii, Arteaga

Donations

I am now open to taking Donations and have added a page on my site with more information about what the money (if any) will be used for. If your able to help us out I’d really appreciate it.

For more information on Donations go here.
To Donate click here. (Any amount is welcome)

That’s about all I have to say for now. I hope that I can fill these blog posts with enough decent information each month to keep them readable. Thanks for reading this and playing my game(s) over the years :)

Richard