So I'm finally working on this game again. Unfortunately, the way that I see it, there is a lot to do to get the levels that have already been made up to scratch. On one hand, this is very frustrating since it means that I'm not really working on "new" stuff. But on the other hand, it's also satisfying in that I can visibly see things that I'd already deemed "complete" becoming a lot better than they were.
The Item System and "Key Items"One of the first things on my target list was the item system. Previously, Cheska could only carry six items and two weapons at once, and this included key items/weapons that are near-constantly required such as the Screwdriver (in relation to the "hotwire" minigame) and the Sledgehammer (in relation to the "smashing" minigame). Over the course of the game, there are four such items/weapons that can be collected and this essentially meant that four out of the eight slots available (50%!) were being taken up by items that you had little choice but to keep with you. This was obviously not good design as it would only serve to frustrate players and limit their options.
To fix this, I've introduced the concept of "key items" to the game. Items such as the Screwdriver no longer take up item slots, can no longer be dropped and appear separate from "normal items" in the item system. In line with this, "key item" elements relating to weapons such as the Sledgehammer have been moved onto newly created items instead. In the case of the Sledgehammer, the item that has replaced it is the Battering Ram, which you can see in the screenshot below:
It took me longer than I would've liked to work these changes into the system since a large chunk of the item system eventing needed to be redone in order to accommodate, not to mention the fact that new item system overlays needed to be drawn up! By far the most tedious part was going through every single item drop in the game to make sure that they weren't dropping additional key items, since that would pretty badly break the system! However, I do think this was something worth doing (as boring as it was) and I'm glad that I was able to get it working. The game is much better off for it!
Cutscenes... Again!Another thing I've been working on is updating the look of the cutscenes, which is something that I've
mentioned working on before. I've updated several of the cutscene images on this gamepage to reflect the work that's being done and I personally think things are looking a lot better now. I won't link all of them here since you can find them under the "images" tab, but here is a taster:
I said this previously, but the best part about working on these is that I've been able to draw up a set of templates that allow me to streamline how I work on producing cutscenes, so doing this will help me to be much more consistent going forward.
ConsistencySpeaking of consistency, I've noticed a lot of inconsistency with how I've gone about some things in the game, most likely related to how many large breaks I've taken in development. A very basic example is the way that option dialogues look. Sometimes, option dialogues will look like this and pressing escape whilst in them won't do a thing:
What do you want to do?
>Do the first thing!
>Do the second thing!
>Don't do either thing.
Whilst others will look like this, with cancellation being achieved by pressing escape:
What do you want to do?
>Do the first thing!
>Do the second thing!
It's a minor thing, but now that I've noticed it I'm going to try and fix it.
Another thing that I need to fix in relation to this kind of thing is my massive overuse of ellipses (...) in the text, something that I personally dislike people doing in RM* games and something that I hadn't even realised I'd been doing to such a massive extent.
Finally, I've also been rooting out the use of \| (which pauses text) in message boxes and replacing it with \! (which waits until the player presses something), again because the use of the former it is something that I personally dislike and something that I hadn't realised I'd been doing.
Again, these are all minor things, but they're things that should be consistent so that the game plays more smoothly than it does at the moment.
Conclusions?It's good to be working on the game again. It's good to be making obvious improvements. It's good that I haven't forgotten so much about how the game works that I'm unable to mess with/fix/improve key eventing-based systems that the game 100% relies on being perfect. But there is a lot of work to do to get this game finished to the standard I want and that fact doesn't escape me. I've said before that, "I constantly worry that people are going to be incredibly underwhelmed when they realise this isn't all that different from most RPG games" and that hasn't changed. Hopefully I can prove myself wrong.
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