homestuckrpgmaker

[homestuckrpgmaker]

Nice! It's great to see you back in action! I hope you're able to work on this project without much hassle. I'll look forward to any future updates to be posted. Keep it up, man!

Thanks.  I finally unveiled the project to Reddit, so now I HAVE to make headway!

[homestuckrpgmaker]

Are you thinking of adding any other character, or is the current rolelist set in stone?

I’m hoping to eventually have just about everyone playable from the 8 kids/12 trolls.  The role list I posted before was just some examples.

Oh and maybe the Mayor.  As a Lethal Joke Character.

[homestuckrpgmaker]

IT’S ALIVE

So yes, sorry for the long time radio silence on my part.  Real life got in the way again.  Between my personal issues... and my concerns about stepping on What Pumpkin’s toes now that they’re a full game studio and not just making the adventure game... I really haven’t put in as much work as I would have liked.  Even though this is just a freebie fan-project, I wouldn’t want to get in their way if they ever decided to do an RPG in the future. We’ll see how things go from here; I’ll keep making slow and steady progress on this for as long as I’m allowed to, but should Andrew or WP say so, I’ll have to shutter it.

Well, now that I’ve bored you with that... let’s talk about what I have gotten done.

The second dungeon is done as far as layout goes.  I’ll need to do some tweaks and populate it with treasure chests and other interactives, but the map making is done.  Most of the enemies are too... the balance testing to make them appropriately difficult as you ascend the tower is way more time consuming than you might think.  Equius and Karkat have their skill progression fully layed out and prepared, though both John and Nepeta’s stop around LV15 for now, so I need to get them finished.  Also worked out the stats for various weapon varietys per character, though armor and accessories need a lot of expansion.

So... here’s what’s left to do. Each character has a single “Fraymotif” (limit break) so far, and I’d like to work out a way to do some cut in images when they’re cast.  I need to make a sprite for a Cavalreaper boss.  I need to script how a pre/post battle cutscene for that boss.  And the cutscene with Karkat joining the party slightly afterwards.  Then the second dungeon will be done.  The third dungeon is also done with mapmaking, but needs to be populated with loot and monsters still, as well as associated cutscenes.  The conclusion of the third dungeon will have Sollux joining the party, and some cutscenes where we’ll finally be catching up with the other kids, to wrap up Act 1 of the game, which will make for the first “release” version.

Act 2 will feature Rose as the primary perspective character, with different party members, adventuring elsewhere in the labyrinth.  The two groups will meet up for Act 3 and beyond, where they’ll start getting to the bottom of all this.

I promise, I will try my best to update more regularly.  Ciao.

[homestuckrpgmaker]

Have a menu screen

Got my work week coming up, but I'll hopefully have some new progress to show in a stream or something this weekend.  Snagged this screen while running some test battles against the new enemies in the second dungeon.

[homestuckrpgmaker]

Doing some work on The Thief of Time while listening to RDA re-runs.  Pop in if you're at all interested. :)

[homestuckrpgmaker]

Officially have him in the party and working now.  A little more combat balance work to do on F1-F4, and then, work starts on Karkat.

[homestuckrpgmaker]

Map creation for the second section of the game is well underway, just gonna need a little more tweaking and then I can start adding puzzles to it.

Took a break from the map making to start working on combat for the second dungeon, as well as working on some game balance for the upcoming new party members.

And as you can see above, went ahead and got the opening cut scene of the second dungeon done.

[homestuckrpgmaker]

Homestuck - The Thief of Time (v0.2) - Demo

Finally got around to recording a full video showing my v0.2 demo I put on Dropbox a few months ago.  Now that semester's over, I'm starting to work on this again.  Keep an eye here for upcoming livestreams and such.

[homestuckrpgmaker]

Twitch

Really honestly doing it this time.  Live now.

[homestuckrpgmaker]

OK, so the unforseen happened last time. Gonna try this again tonight then. 10:30 PM EST. Map Building. Equius. Battle System tests. Let's do this.

Dev Stream Tonight

Barring the unforseen, will probably be streaming a development session on Twitch starting around 10:00 PM EST. On the itinerary tonight, some experiments/play tests with a new damage calculation algorithims, and beginning of design work on the second dungeon!

[homestuckrpgmaker]

Dev Stream Tonight

Barring the unforseen, will probably be streaming a development session on Twitch starting around 10:00 PM EST. On the itinerary tonight, some experiments/play tests with a new damage calculation algorithims, and beginning of design work on the second dungeon!

[homestuckrpgmaker]

SUMMARY OF PARTY ROLES

Given the nature of Homestuck and the powers that character's possess as well as the nature in which they are gradually revealed, it takes a good deal of creative liberty to make the transition to combat oriented RPG. For the sake of gameplay, it's also important to have characters fill diverse roles in combat to give players a reason to use many characters and not the same fixed party at all times. To illustrate my point, I'm going to briefly take you through the first five party members, how I adapted their abilities, and what their role in combat will be. John -> Hybrid Mage John was actually fairly easy to adapt. The diverse nature of his windy thing could translate into many abilities and spells, from wind spells that damage enemies, barriers from storms, or tailwinds that raise the parties agility. While he'll still have access to a few physical skills to put hammerkind to good use, John will learn a diverse skill set of offensive and defensive magic, including buffs and debuffs. The challenge for the player is to figure out which ones will let John fill a meaningful niche in your party. Nepeta -> Physical DPS Nepeta's "Rogue of Heart" abilities never seemed to properly manifest in the canon, but she is still an established huntress and quite skilled with those claws. High agility let's her take initiative in combat and use a wide range of physical skills, many of which have unique quirk such as striking multiple enemies, striking multiple times in a turn, and causing crippling status effects. Some of her late-game equipment will even focus on this last aspect, increasing her status chance or adding status effect to her normal attacks. Though she is eclipsed by other fighters late game, the status effects can make her viable against most opponents. Equius -> Tank Equius still has his canon STRENGTH, but he's also extremely durable. His tank abilities buff his own defenses or those of his teammates, and draw fire to him and away from more vulnerable allies. Though he learns a few darkness related abilities to tie in with his aspect, his relatively weak magic stats make them unhelpful except exploiting an enemy's dark weakness. His late game physical attack moves are obviously amongst the strongest in the game. Karkat -> Support Karkat fulfilled his role as the Knight of Blood by unifying and leading his team, but never seemed to gain any extra combat powers from his class. Karkat starts with some low level healing options, and a rapidly growing assortment of buff skills. While he lacks damage potential on his own, he can ultimately double or even triple the effectiveness of the rest of the party. Sollux -> Magic DPS Sollux's psiionic powers made him relatively easy to translate: he's the one you call when you want to blow something out of existence with eye lasers. A portion of his magic is typeless, meaning enemies are neither weak nor strong against it, but he also learns both fire and ice magic that let him target enemeis with weaknesses. To balance his powerful offense, he's a bit of a "squishy wizard" and his MP supply will definitely prove a drain on your resources. So, that's the rough plans so far. Things should feel more clear once you're able to actually play.

[homestuckrpgmaker]

Twitch

Tonight I start working on setting Equius up to join the party in Alpha 0.2

[homestuckrpgmaker]

File Size: 218 MB

At last.  There are a few aesthetic bugs that need fixes, but you should definitely get a feel for the game in this one.  Instructions and other details below.

Instructions (Apologies, PC only at this time)

1. Download and run the file above. (Hosted via Dropbox)

Dropbox has I believe a 20GB/day bandwidth limit, sorry not much I can do about that.  This isn't high profile enough that we'll run over yet.

2. When run, will extract to a folder at the destination you choose.

3. Inside that folder, there will be several files named "Game" and one of them is an application.  Run that one to being the game.

Known Issues

- The post battle dialogues run on a single line and get cut off.

- Characters who HP = 0 remain standing in the battle graphics.

- Character portraits have slightly off positions.

Notes

- The introduction to the game in the black room is a placeholder. This will be eventually replaced with a more elaborate cutscene set after A6A6I2, in which the Thief appears and steals memories from a number of characters.  Thus, when John wakes up at the beginning, the last thing he remembers is installing the beta back in Act 1.

- A large quantity of VxAce default resources (map tiles, animations, sound effects) are currently present.  Efforts to replace these with original/homestuck resources are planned.  A number of unused resources built into the RPG Maker are packed in with the file, and I'm currently investigating removing them to reduce the file size.

- Obvious Legal Disclaimer - I don't own Homestuck or any of it's characters. This entire project is a fan-made, labor of love, with zero profit intention. I will cease work if asked to do so by Hussie or his representatives.

- Work on Alpha 0.2 is already underway.

Enjoy, and any constructive feedback would be highly appreciated.  Feel free to submit such through the ask box.

- ClubsDalek

[homestuckrpgmaker]

File Size Approximation

Did a test export of the demo.  RPG Maker sort of requires you to pack it's default resources in with the game, even if they're not gonna be used, so I was worried about the file size.

My test export of the demo looks to be around 220 MB.  This could probably go up to around 230 MB once I add the last two music files.  That doesn't seem too bad so far.

Based on this file size, I'm planning on uploading the demo and making it publicly available through Dropbox.

So give me one more night to polish.  I'm shooting to upload Friday before midnight.

[homestuckrpgmaker]

Got the combat difficulty balance about right... just need to tweak a few skills, add some sample equipment, and fix a few text wrapping glitches. Running through the demo, including cutscenes, chest hunting, and random/scripted encounters total up to around 30 minutes. Once that's done, I'll figure out where/how to host the demo. I've already begun writing/level design for the next segment of the game, which will add Equius, Karkat and Sollux to the playable party, along with some other characters showing up in some capacity... I also found a script that I might be able to use to create an alchemy system, but it would be a lot of effort and would make boondollars kinda under powered and useless. Not sure if I'm going to yet, unless there's a huge demand for it. We'll see. Assuming I can find a good host, expect the demo some time this weekend.

[homestuckrpgmaker]

Twitch

Starting in about five minutes.