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.
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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.
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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.
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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.)
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Let me tell you about my adventures with multi-hit attacks. It was possibly the biggest nightmare I've had in programming in the longest time, not from getting errors or anything, but because of the game logic falling apart or misbehaving in ways I couldn't understand for a while.
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