Entry 2 - Plugins on Plugins on Plugins on Plot
I made a wonderful amount of progress today, mostly thanks to Yanfly's plugins.
I'm not going to go over the full list in detail here, because the answer is a lot. I mean just look.
It's poppin. One nice thing about RPG Maker MV as an adult with money as opposed to a child is that:
- I understand what scope creep is and
- I can pay people to make my shit cooler instead of trying and failing to do it myself
As a result, combat is going to be a lot more engaging than your average default RPG Maker game, which is nice.
One thing I plan on doing in particular is leveraging the one thing I think I have any real talent at, which is writing. Rather than try to script cutscenes by making characters move and around and shit, I've decided instead to use Visual Novel-like cutscenes that are written more akin to a novel. These will take place during key points of the game, as well as reduce the weight of writing them and the events that I'll need to trigger. I love doing less work, doing less work is your boy's favorite pastime.
An example of that (I know it's riddled with errors, I just got super excited when the screen properly showed up and took a screenshot, lmao):
Beyond that, a lot of misc. work got done, like the combat buffs I mentioned above, and some fixes to tilesets I incorrectly installed. I also got a battle theme ready, and it's going to be simultaneously epic and hilarious if you know what it actually is.
As you might have noticed above, I also have created a summary of the plot, and am now scripting it. That'll take a while, but it's the most important part, so I have to grit my teeth and get it done.
I've also decided that I won't try and stat scale the game. This is because it's hard to gauge how much a character should grow over the course of the hour or two it'll take to finish this game.
Instead, the characters won't level up at all. Their skills will be set in stone from the go mark. The party will grow by picking up equipment throughout the maps. This encourages exploration on the player's end, and reduces the workload for me, as I can then slowly ramp up the difficulty of the enemies from map to map. If they're too strong, you might have to backtrack and explore further.
Lastly, I came up with a silly little secret boss that I'd hazard will only be beatable by fully decking out the party before they get to near the end of the game. Or, a silly little secret set of bosses, I should say. 👀
That's all for today. Tomorrow I'm going to keep with the script. If I somehow finish that (I doubt it) or need a break I'll start to outline the maps by hand. I also want to add symbol encounters, because fuck random battles all my homies hate random battles.