The last time I wrote about My RPG!! — when the original beta demo came out — was back in 2019. A lot has happened since then, over the course of these few years. This admittedly hasn't really helped with the game development side of things, largely due to said things all being real life bullshit. But I still wanted to try and get something written to update you all. Let's see how this goes.
I want to write more blog posts here. Or in the very least, it's something I feel I should be doing. The blog section exists for sharing some long-form thoughts and more textual parts of my projects, but I've barely touched it and I fear that may give an impression that I've neglected this place. Or if not that, my neglect leads to falling out of habit of writing things here.
That latter point is where I think several causes may lie.
This post admittedly become something of a vent. I'm not really sure if it's a productive vent in the end — I'm sure there's a non-zero number of visitors to my website who barely know me, and maybe there's stuff in here they don't actually need to know. All that said, it's the best way I felt I could elucidate these feelings.
Content warnings: mentions of death, harassment
With the unfortunate closure of Cohost, the internet is once again looking a large and unknown land where it is very difficult to find your way. However there is some amongst us trying to fight that and bring back the classic 88x31 personal link buttons.
We went through an era of forgetting about linking to personal websites, because everyone was all on Twitter or the like. There was no buttons - heck no RSS either - Twitter took that too. It's so bad honestly - I went looking for new button images to use and some webcomics that I know did have buttons to use no longer do.
Being a creative is a curse, I swear, sometimes.
I was talking with a friend about Witness to Unity, and struggling with some mechanical and structural thoughts I had for it. Specifically around its calendar/day-night system.
I started thinking about it again after watching a little of Metaphor's demo gameplay, and I saw it had a five day calendar system. If I was going to extend WTU's gameplay loop to try and balance out some pacing issues I was worrying about, maybe I didn't have to even have seven days in a week! However this gets into other tricky factors about WTU, and that is by its nature of a world-hopping story.
For a long time now I've wanted to write a big post about the direction Witness to Unity has taken since I previously properly discussed it, sometime in 2016. The problem with this is oh god that's such a long time. So much has changed in its design and code direction. I don't know if I even have it in me to write a proper rundown for each element, so maybe I'll just bullet-point it.
As much as I think I could create a persona/demon fusion system for this Two Halves Persona concept, the problem in the end is a matter of scope. Even after limiting the number of personas and tiers per arcana to manegable levels, I still had 100 personas to create — that’s art assets, coding their skills/builds, and then balancing them.
The thing about damage calculation is you kinda have to feel it out by vibes. You want increasing stats by certain amounts to feel like a noticeable difference in your damage output, whether that's +1 or +10, or anything else. But to achieve this, it feels like you need to write damage formula and then shape everything else around it and hope for the best.
Which is a problem if you reach a point or come back to it later and the vibes are off.
I'm presently struggling with looking at Witness To Unity's damage formula and thinking... this thing seems a mess. I'm multiplying or dividing the stats a lot just to get things into the "shape" I want, and maybe that's bad? I'm not sure how to explain this, so I'll start with how the stats and all currently work.
So since Witness to Unity uses a “side-view battle system”, it means I need to have animations mirror depending on where they’re coming from. Unfortunately, RPG Maker XP does not even have under the hood ability to understand this, because it was front-view by default. (VXAce meanwhile added some unused variables for scripters to make use of that made this sort of thing easier.)