iamsobrave-dev

[iamsobrave-dev]

Ugh universe really doesn't want me to work on a game huh. Been busy three days in a row going on fourth except now im in pain as well

From other news uhhh background music stopped playing in the playtests?? Randomly??? I didn't even change anything from last time and it kinda just broke by itself???? But it works in the distribution package???????

[iamsobrave-dev]

teehee mature adult making decisions

[iamsobrave-dev]

Doing my depression game about a hopeless girl's world falling apart and thinking how people could say I plagiarized from real life

So close to being done with Kit's interactions! Gotta praise myself where I can lol. 12/18 interactions finished at the moment of typing this! Might take a break for drawing the cutscenes but I've been kind of scared of that for some reason.

Pic of Kit being a little weirdo for attention

[iamsobrave-dev]

ALSO I've come to a realization that the way I named my assets sucks ass. Like literally

I have three kinds of pictures, first ones are for in-game 'animations', second ones are for 'cutscenes' and third ones are for character dialogues.

You can see here which ones are which, and how they're named. In-game 'animations' and 'cutscenes' are named in an adequate fashion, while the dialogue portraits are.... huh. In general it's just the first-letter based Character name + Body sprite version + Mouth type + Eye type + Brow type. Which is kind of logical because most of Eugene's expressions cannot be described fully in one or two words like the animations or cutscenes... But also when I see these names in the event editor I go "Now what the fuck is that string of letters and numbers supposed to look like" soooo uhhh. And that's one of my most major frustrations. Yeah.

Maybe trying to describe them in one or two words should've been The Way To Go.

[iamsobrave-dev]

Ughh I think I started somewhat burning out on the game. I started thinking a bit too much about the potential next game and I think it moved my interest to the side, and also my main source of motivation is busy with work and that ain't helping. I am so so close to being done tho... But I also still have so much to do.

I don't pause working on it for periods of time larger than like 5 days tho. (Due to stupid job search)

Stuff I have left to do, in order from most to least frustrating:

All the remaining cutscenes (a fuuuucking lot)

"True end" map (big one, but also the least usable, and also the most complicated cuz it's the outside map, but also it will make the game more interactive and not just like a visual novel with some required 'press button' moments. All of that and I only have a barebones sketch so far)

Secret third thing that I still don't know if I'll add or not but I already Kind Of Started

Finish coding all the interactions with Kit (about halfway done, but it's directly connected with the cutscenes progress)

Sprite changes for Eugene and Kit for "true end" and Backpack Eugene (tm) for immersion

Something else that will inevitably come up and make me suffer

Pictures for attention

+ Special request

[iamsobrave-dev]

we need to start romanticizing doing household chores in tank tops and sweatpants in the same way that we romanticize knighthood and i am not fucking kidding

[iamsobrave-dev]

Me, a week ago: christ i need to make soundtracks for the endings aside from the main game huh... goddamn how am i supposed to make it have a similar vibe to the first one but also be different and ughhhh mann

Me today, having just finished two best soundtracks of my life: WOOOOOHOOOO BROTHERR

[iamsobrave-dev]

Eugh

In order to do the ironing cutscene I needed to figure out the lighting issue. So I tried to figure out the lighting issue, and I just can't make it work. Photoshop's calculations of the blending are just that different from rpg maker's calculations of blending of the same layer so it just looks wildly different no matter what I do. So I just decided to remove the lighting from those parts entirely.

Which is sad, but whatever.

Now need to update all the cutscenes for the bathroom.

[iamsobrave-dev]

Haven't done an update in a little bit, but that's because I didn't particularly DO anything game-related. (still trying to get a job, unfuckingsuccessfully)

Just did this (arrow up) and fixed up a cutscene. It's now almost 3 am. Need to really focus tomorrow and do something big like a big cutscene, like the whole breakfast interaction maybe, and the ironing probably. Like I could do that in one day easy. Hopefully nothing comes up like it did today

[iamsobrave-dev]

Nope cutting out the part with the lighting out of the frame doesn't work because i need it to overlay the static character underneath. I guess that's what i get for doing the most animations in a room with lighting... Maybe closer to the end of development I'll fix all the animation frames. Maybe not. We'll see i guess

So what I'm talking about:

This is the bathroom. It's the only one of the two rooms that has light like that thru the window. And during the cutscene it looks like this:

Which looks significantly shittier and I don't know how I didn't catch it until like a few days ago but SOMEHOW I DIDN'T. And it is pretty obvious when it changes from sprite animation to frames.

So like whatever. I'll be doing other stuff for now like the cutscene for the Endings 1 & 3 cuz they're a bit similar in their insanity

Was playtesting recently and found out that I fucked up with the animations because the lighting in the animation frames is way different from the lighting in the actual game itself and I didn't catch it in the in-rpgmaker playstests because it's all covered up with the red event rectangles.

Options to fix it:

Don't (very appealing but it's gonna look like I don't give a shit while I in fact give a lot of shit but I'm afraid I'll burn out)

Cave in and redo all the animations (bruhhhhh)

Cave in and redo the animations but by just cutting out the part with the lighting (Is it gonna work? who knows. will update in an hour maybe)

Cave in and redo the lighting in the game itself except it will make it look shittier cuz in the game itself it looks good

Stop caring because it isn't college finals and is my first attempt at game ever and probably no one except me will care about the lighting fuck up

[iamsobrave-dev]

Was playtesting recently and found out that I fucked up with the animations because the lighting in the animation frames is way different from the lighting in the actual game itself and I didn't catch it in the in-rpgmaker playstests because it's all covered up with the red event rectangles.

Options to fix it:

Don't (very appealing but it's gonna look like I don't give a shit while I in fact give a lot of shit but I'm afraid I'll burn out)

Cave in and redo all the animations (bruhhhhh)

Cave in and redo the animations but by just cutting out the part with the lighting (Is it gonna work? who knows. will update in an hour maybe)

Cave in and redo the lighting in the game itself except it will make it look shittier cuz in the game itself it looks good

Stop caring because it isn't college finals and is my first attempt at game ever and probably no one except me will care about the lighting fuck up

[iamsobrave-dev]

I got to the part where I have to figure out the dialogues between two characters and IT'S SO COMPLICATED TO MAKE PRETTY. LIKE OH MY GOD. THE CODE FOR ONE INTERACTION IS LIKE A KILOMETER LONG AND I STILL DIDN'T FULLY POLISH IT

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAIIIII'LLL BE FINE. IT'S VERY HARD TO WRANGLE ALL THE PICTURES. BUT I'LL FUCKING WIN IT

it would be easier if the "Show picture / Erase picture" didn't make the pic disappear entirely for split second before another one appears, but in order to get rid of that I'm trying to roll it with changing the picture opacity in "Move picture". Which as you can see uhhhhh I think wasn't the best solution.

And then there's also the name tags that I have to juggle manually because I didn't manage to make plugins for that work.

I wish i could change colors of the lines myself. it would make it so much easier. I literally get lost in the sauce

[iamsobrave-dev]

Audio fuckups

Spend like an hour yesterday figuring out how to make the background music fade out when the player enters an ending sequence. Was able to make the audio fade out for ONE ending only, but not for the other one (that isn't an actual immediate ending, it is a Sequence of actions that the player needs to perform afterwards, but it needs the music Gone)

But due to my coding inexperience, I couldn't figure out what the fuck was wrong (game freaked out and crashed when I made it try to play the music that was already playing) -> SO what I ended up having to do was nestle three IF statements into each other, like this:

>IF [Switch 1] is OFF >>IF [Switch 2] is OFF >>>Play [MUSIC] >>>IF [Switch 1] is ON >>>>Fadeout BGM (5 sec) >>>END >>>ELSE Fadeout BGM (5 sec) >>END >END

Insane. But now it works.

[iamsobrave-dev]

Owwww aoughhhh I realized that if I want the game to be more interactive I need to make another map. Eughhhhh okay......... I hope it won't become a nightmare, with the way i suck at rpgmaker map and picture sizes....

[iamsobrave-dev]

BONKERS

Drew and coded the entering cutscene for the game, so the game is now at least 5% officially finished!

Meet Kit - the secondary character, a total sweetheart and our main character's life support.

Unrelated to the game, I got (kinda) recommended a song called Edamame by Bbno$ and it slaps and I wanna animate Kit dancing to it because he 100% would. But i suck at animating and it's making my balls itch. We'll see if i snap

[iamsobrave-dev]

Sizing adventures

When i started making the game i couldn't find the proper sizes for pictures and for maps. It was probably due to me phrasing it weird, but the fact remains.

Yesterday i was figuring out the character portraits, and i drew my girl Eugene

I drew her on a canvas 1920 x 1080 px, 300 dpi, like i saw in some youtube tutorial that i can't find anymore, or maybe i just remembered it that way, and since it was a 'tutorial' i didn't bother to check.

So i drew all the expressions for her on that size, exported many of them to the game, then applied it to the dialogue....

Hmmmmmmm. That does not look right, does it.

So then i tried sizing it down with the inbuilt function of rpg maker - got to the specific number of 58%, was happy about it until i noticed that it was still in the middle of the screen and not to the left like i hoped, but the worst part is that it started becoming blurry.

And i wanted my game to be pixely, not blurry, so i was quite upset and didn't know wtf to do about it, because i didn't want to redraw the whole sprite. Obviously.

Then i found a youtube tutorial from a guy with a very shitty mic (because the most useful youtube tutorials come from shitty mics)

Which told not only about how to make the game have a fullscreen option, but also explained how to make it actually pixely.

Added two more plugins, and BAM

LOOK AT THAT CRISPNESS. It even made the bg crisper, so that was easily the highlight of the day. I also found out that another built-in function of rpgmaker works into negative numbers, so i was able to move the picture to the left. yipee!

UPD lol. I then found that you need to make pictures 816 x 624 pixels or something specific af like that. picture of that size fit okay, but i didn't want to export everything again since i already found a way to regain the Crisp (tm)

[iamsobrave-dev]

At the moment of starting this blog

I waited a while until I had some volume of work done, so that I don't just chicken out randomly halfway through, so right now I have done:

Base illustrations for the maps of every room

Almost every illustration for almost every in-map item that you can interact with

Icons for every item

Some amount of portraits needed for the main character

Figured out the 'coding' and added multiple endings, but they're extremely unfinished

What's important to remember (for myself and for others) is that this is my first attempt at games ever, and I'm basically just trying my hand at it. Like, how much I can do with RPG maker's instruments (except i have like 10 plugins in there now) combined with my skill level.

But it's fun, so.