Unity Student of Autumnhearth - Character Creator

Saki_Sliz

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May 3, 2018
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Oh, perfectly understandable.

I'm similar, just spent a year working on a project, commissioning writing, developing my own art and engine framework. I have a lot of art I still need to do... but now that I've got my own art to a point that I can accept it, I want to focus on actually making and completing a game, and stop trying to 'perfect' the game/engine/code/art (being perfect is what I do as an engineer, but i realize I need to be more of a manager and get something released). This past month I stopped to explore other ideas and started a new project with a focus on getting a simple game intro out, and focusing on story telling through characters. limiting myself to renpy, but also being inspired by youtube videos complaining about bad vns and ways of improving them, I'm starting a project that's vastly different and I really enjoy it, and I may adapt what I learn and like to my original project.
 
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dedalo92

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Aug 21, 2016
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Oh, perfectly understandable.

I'm similar, just spent a year working on a project, commissioning writing, developing my own art and engine framework. I have a lot of art I still need to do... but now that I've got my own art to a point that I can accept it, I want to focus on actually making and completing a game, and stop trying to 'perfect' the game/engine/code/art (being perfect is what I do as an engineer, but i realize I need to be more of a manager and get something released). This past month I stopped to explore other ideas and started a new project with a focus on getting a simple game intro out, and focusing on story telling through characters. limiting myself to renpy, but also being inspired by youtube videos complaining about bad vns and ways of improving them, I'm starting a project that's vastly different and I really enjoy it, and I may adapt what I learn and like to my original project.
i love to hear that, and i am hoping to be able to see your proyect on the games forum!!
 
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lewdpirate

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Apr 15, 2019
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honestly right now I am working on something else, much simpler, with the Twine Engine. And while there is a ton of limitations that doesn't really work with the artistic vision I have for the game, I might revert back to it, simply because it allows me to create content much faster, than any of the other engines I have been playing with., and since I want to have a quite large playable area with pretty much the whole school, having to create nice art is a huge bottleneck.
 

Saki_Sliz

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May 3, 2018
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since I want to have a quite large playable area with pretty much the whole school, having to create nice art is a huge bottleneck.
THIS

I wanted to do something I thought was simple, cartoon, with cartoon backgrounds, but I really couldn't get the look I wanted, at least not without a ton of effort, and just in general I wasn't interested in putting as much effort into backgrounds as I do in character art. I ended up coming across Manreign which is a twine game that uses pixelated backgrounds. Simple but I thought it gave it a decent ambience, enough to set a mood, and that's when I realized that's all I really need (at least for me and my projects), just set a mood. So I made a new mock up with a new UI and made some test images in this post, just 3D renders 1/4th scale and using a custom pixelation technique I like. It's still effort though, buying 3D assets and ripping them and porting them to blender, but I'd rather do that then outline and shade/paint backgrounds. being able to light the scene seems to be what really bring the mood to life, which I can't really capture well with painting yet, I still really suck at shading. That and I'm starting to think I have ADHD, I like to experiment with 3D scenes rather than focus on grinding out artwork. but that may not match your needs if you want to bring a world to life.
 
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lewdpirate

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Now the thread has been revived, this is some of the stuff I am toying around with:
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Leaning a bit more into building random encounters on the hallways, having lectures and school-work mainly be based on attribute and stat rolls, for instance potion-making would rely on your crafting stat, while trying to learn the recipe could be either a study or Retention roll, depending on the circumstance.
 
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Saki_Sliz

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Now the thread has been revived
Rise! I command thee!

Sometimes I feel like I don't do much month to month, since I'm not grinding out artwork or making playable areas, but I'll update my writer and try to keep it brief, but doing so tends to show me how much i've actually done, a real motivation booster. I'm guessing something similar in this case as well with your post.

Really like the sort of RPG like stats you got (beauty = fit + soc), reminds me of... i don't know, but rpgs!

Leaning a bit more into building random encounters on the hallways
Love those, also fun to design and code 'event' type engines.

Though the issue I foresee would be, even after everything is coded up and work, the main issue then being writer block, or at least that's what's been happening to me, design a game, figure the story out later, only to realize I can't write. I'm getting better now, and in fact the project I started was to focus on writing.

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lewdpirate

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I agree with a lot of your points, I really wanted to write a lot as well, but it ended up being too much reading to be enjoyable, and then I wanted to use pictures to allow myself using less words..

I think the route I am going with it now, is to have certain story beats be more fleshed out, while the other parts are allowed to be "filler".

Basically for week 1, you get a few "story quests"
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and then the other classes will be rolls and brief explanations, about who the teacher is and what the class is like.
 

Saki_Sliz

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May 3, 2018
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I think the route I am going with it now, is to have certain story beats be more fleshed out, while the other parts are allowed to be "filler".
which you can figure out and explore when you get to that part, detailing out scenes line by line, but it sounds like that's not your focus right now. You were saying you weren't too sure about engine you wanted to use? I assume this is mostly due to trying to get a certain UI experience (ie the stats page), and a certain way for crafting the game logic (ie twine's graphical branching node system)?
 

lewdpirate

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Apr 15, 2019
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You were saying you weren't too sure about engine you wanted to use? I assume this is mostly due to trying to get a certain UI experience (ie the stats page), and a certain way for crafting the game logic (ie twine's graphical branching node system)?
Mostly I have been struggling with the fact that I want the whole school to be explorable, I also wanted to stick to a strict colour palette, which is hard if I want to have fade in and outs, I got it working in godot but I had to convert to a gamma colour-space which kinda broke some of the colours..

so there are many things to it, I think twine is fine for what I wanna do.. maybe

I tried using RPG maker for a while, and I could make nice story segments, but it became too tricky to do a lot of the custom stuff I wanted to implement.

Both unity and godot, are good for most of the things I wanted to do, but since I want to make a story heavy game, it started requiring a lot of content, so while the passages in Twine very quickly becomes a mess, I think I can make it work if I rely more on JavaScript and widgets than I did previously.
 
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