#fnrrf ygm schnish

[fnrrfygmschnish]

So, I've started covering my new notebook in stickers.

The DBZ characters and "Fnrrf Ygm Schnish" went on first the other day, then a couple random ones got added last night, and this morning I remembered that I had a big book of Pokémon stickers I'd never used and stuck a few of my favorites on there.

[fys-ohrrpgce]

Not too much to see, as I've just been adding more to the Notebook menu's Items section... but I figured since I have gotten a lot of those done, it'd be a good time to post another update here.

The menu is really filling out with equipment-type items now that I've got all of the accessories and most of the head/neck equipment added in (only skipping the Dodgy Cape because it'll need a bigger sprite, and a few others that you can't actually get yet.)

Currently I have it arranged so that healing items are first, then weapons, then items that can be used in battle (like Stink Bombs, Chiba Balls, and other things you throw at enemies), then armor and other equipment, and finally miscellaneous things like books and keys.

This one's a bit of an inside joke that I doubt anyone will actually get!

One of my teachers made a janky zero-budget/zero-editing movie with our class as the "actors" during my senior year, and the credits of the movie mentioned that it had won the "Avery Award"... which doesn't actually exist, the teacher made up a fake award name on the spot just to put that in there as a goof.

As far as I can find, there doesn't seem to be an actual thing just called an "Avery Award" -- especially not one that would make sense for a movie to win, since the only exact matches seem to be an "Avery Scholarship" which is sometimes also referred to as an "Avery Award."

One of many upgraded pieces of equipment that Jay can cobble together for the party out of scraps and other items found lying around.

The idea for this item description has been bouncing around in my head ever since 2007 or so.

[fys-ohrrpgce]

Picking up where I left off last week, today I was working on adding pages describing even more items to the Notebook menu.

With this, every currently available weapon equippable by Joguo and Bridget has an entry in the Notebook's "Items" section!

I've been saving Eddie and Damuru-J's weapons for last, since most of them are longer stick/staff type things which will probably need a bigger sprite to look even sorta-kinda to scale with the other items.

I've also started adding in other equippable items besides weapons. Since body-armor-type items (mostly jackets, though there are a few that would count as actual "armor") will all need a bigger sprite, I figured I'd start with the smallest equipment items -- rings and other miscellaneous little things.

So far the only way to get a Class Ring in the game is to unequip the one that Adam Nebozu starts out with during the brief time he tags along with you. There will be other ways to get one later, though it's a really weak item by that point in the game. The best use for it is, of course, selling it to the Yagziknian jeweler's shop for extra cash.

Along with the rings (all very ordinary and pretty much only worth equipping if you have nothing else to put in that slot), I've started filling out these pages for the much more useful elemental resistance items.

These items aren't found in boxes or for sale anywhere in the game. The only way to get them is by either having Joguo snag them from certain enemies using the Steal command, or by being lucky enough that they happen to drop one when defeated.

[fys-ohrrpgce]

This has been a fairly slow week, due to how busy I've been with a few real-lifey things (such as a dentist's appointment and getting entirely too many phone calls and some paperwork done so that I can get a new car), but I have added a bit more to FYS:AHS.

The Notebook menu's "Items" section has been implemented for a while, but until today it was pretty incomplete.

It had entries for pretty much all of the consumable items (food, drinks, single use throwables like Stink Bombs and in-battle power boosts like Hamster Scrolls) and a few other miscellaneous things like keys and books, but no equipment at all.

Today, I finally went in and started adding entries for some weapons! The Ruler is the first weapon you can find for Eddie, lying there on a classroom desk just waiting for you to walk up and take it.

Previously it was just a very weak bashing weapon with the upside of a slight increase to Accuracy, but today I fiddled with it a bit so that now it sometimes lands a second hit (unlike all of Eddie's other weapons, which are built for delivering a single heavy blow.)

For most of the game, new equipment is either found lying around somewhere or dropped by enemies. These are Bridget's and Joguo's first weapon upgrades (replacing the Fake Nails and Pocketknife that they start with), occasionally dropped by enemies in the Cafeteria Dungeon and the caves below.

I might tweak the description of the knives/claws' chance to land a second hit so it doesn't take up quite so much space. Maybe a similar format to the Ruler's version that only filled one line, rather than the current version that explicitly spells out that it's a chance that scales with the user's Shiznit stat?

Last but definitely not least...

Compare this one to the previous weapons for an idea of how much of an upgrade the Yagziknian equipment is, especially if you missed some optional items and are still using weaker early-game stuff.

For example, in my current playtesting save file... I never went back to get the Deluxe Knife and wasn't lucky enough to have #728 drop a Sabre, so Joguo was still using a Poison Knife (same attack power as the Steak Knife but with a chance of poisoning enemies.) Switching to a Crystal Knife made a huge difference!

[fys-ohrrpgce]

Didn't post yesterday, but still got a little bit of work on the game done. And then a little more tonight! Lower Yagziknia's indoor areas are gradually starting to fill out more and more.

In addition to the Armory which I already showed off, now there's...

...another shop named "Jewels and Junk" (rough translation from the original Khurbyish name, of course.)

Here you can buy a variety of miscellaneous shiny accessories like necklaces, rings, and circlets.

As for the "...and Junk" half of the name, that's because at the second counter here you can sell them your old items for extra cash... which helps a lot with actually being able to afford Yagziknian equipment.

Such as the Darkclaw weapon for Bridget!

Of the Yagziknian weapons, the Darkclaw stands out among them as the most unusual. It's the only cutting weapon in the game that does normal damage against blobs and other rapidly-regenerating enemies... because it cancels their regeneration upon contact! In the case of these Yuckworms, it's guaranteed to kill them in a single hit, so they can't split into two like they usually do when cut.

There's also a restaurant, "Marujai's Cafe," where you can buy food items that are much more effective than the stuff you'll find in the school vending machines.

Because only lunatics knock on locked bathroom doors... instead, you only give the handle a try, stopping when you realize it's locked and occupied.

And of course, just like with the signs, Bridget translates... 😅

[fys-ohrrpgce]

Today I added in walkabout and portrait sprites for a Stage 4 Burijeoo wearing armor, intended to be used primarily as guards patrolling Yagziknia's streets (and possibly a few other places later on.)

The transition from Stage 3 into Stage 4 involves an increase in height and, more importantly, the growth of a tail. You can see this guard's tail in these screenshots if you look really close.

Oh, and... I finally started on mapping some indoor areas! Shown here is the Armory, where you can buy a variety of equipment.

All four of the new weapons available here are actually depicted here, hanging on the racks against the back wall. There's the Xoozum Staff for Damuru-J, the Yagziknian Mace for Eddie, the Crystal Knife for Joguo, and the Darkclaw for Bridget. All of these have some unique attributes rather than just being "plain" weapon upgrades that only increase physical attack power.

The Darkclaw is definitely the most unusual of the bunch -- it also increases Accuracy slightly, does more damage than usual on critical hits, and counteracts enemy regeneration (stopping enemies like Zos and Yukkohs from gradually restoring their own HP, bypassing some of the resistance amorphous enemies usually have to cutting attacks, and instantly killing Yuckworms rather than causing them to split and multiply like most cutting attacks would.)

The Burijeoo Robe is the first new armor that Damuru-J gets, since she can't equip the various "heavy-duty" armor items (things like a bulletproof vest, haz-mat suit, and so on.)

Lower Yagziknia also has a restaurant (Marujai's Cafe) where you can buy various food and drink items, a jeweler's shop that also has a secondary shop counter where they'll buy your old junk (the idea being that they use any salvageable scrap to make assorted bling and such), the hot springs where you can go to rest (recovering HP/EP), and finally a Snuzzoo Pit, which is a sort of communal daycare for larval Burijeoo.

Contrary to the name, the operation of a "Snuzzoo Pit" doesn't consist of actually chucking them all together into a pit and giving them food and water every now and then. Well, not anymore, anyway. That was how it was done when the name "Snuzzoo Pit" was first coined centuries (or longer) ago, back on the Burijeoo homeworld.

[fys-ohrrpgce]

Finally got around to adding walkabout and portrait sprites for a Snuzzoo -- the larval stage of the Burijeoo lifecycle, where they are slug-like and unintelligent.

Only when they reach the point where their legs grow in do they begin to develop mentally, gaining the capacity to speak and understand language on at least a basic level. At this point, they are finally considered to be "true" Burijeoo, classified as Stage 1.

Before now, I've always drawn Stage 1 Burijeoo as having two pairs of clawed legs... but I'm thinking it would make a bit more sense to have them grow in their "front legs" (which later will be their arms when they start to stand upright) first, since it's already an established thing that many Stage 2 Burijeoo have a hard time keeping their legs (which would have started as a Stage 1 Burijeoo's "back legs") in solid form and tend to keep them in a half-goo state if they don't really need solid legs at the moment.

Also made it possible to actually check the signs in front of the various shops and such that you can find throughout Lower Yagziknia.

Since Bridget already knows the language, she translates them for you, as seen here!

[fys-ohrrpgce]

Since Yagziknia is totally separate from human society, of course the food and drink items you can find in their shops aren't going to be the standard vending-machine stuff that you've been relying on for most of the game (like bags of chips and bottles of soda.)

So today, I went into the game's item data and added some Yagziknian food items!

A bottle of Yagziknian spring water is much better than the standard bottled water you've been finding throughout the game (which only restores a measly 10 EP.)

It doesn't do the job quite as well as Mountain Dew (which restores 100 EP), but it's better than anything else you'll find in a drink machine, which is an accomplishment considering that it's... water. Just plain water.

And there's also, uh... grilled bug leg. Yum! 🤢🤣

Though it may seem a little icky, the Cricket Leg is the third-best item for restoring hit points in the game -- just a bit behind the Pizza (which restores 250 HP.)

Of course, the availability of Pizza in the game is pretty limited. You can buy some from the school cafeteria during lunchtime, but after that, the only way to find more is to get lucky enough to have a randomly-encountered enemy drop one. And speaking of random enemies dropping items... the Cricket Leg can, of course, sometimes be found as a dropped item when fighting Cave Ickets.

There's also a third new food item (Mushroom Stew, which restores both HP and EP by 150), though I haven't actually gone in and added its page to the Notebook menu just yet.

[fys-ohrrpgce]

As of tonight, Lower Yagziknia finally has some more NPCs to talk to!

I had already made walkabout sprites for Stage 2 and Stage 3 Burijeoo (these two stages make up ~75% of the adult population) with three different hairstyles, and three different palettes set up for them to use... so all I really needed to do graphics-wise is add the portrait sprites for those who didn't already have one.

This one, of course, is a palette-swap of the brown-haired Burijeoo who greets you at the entrance to the city and demonstrates the magic spell they use for taking on a human form.

Oh, and there's a few benches and tables around town now! Yagziknia and the surrounding caves are using a combination of two different tilesets, and they are both packed full as of tonight... I think I've only got room to add maybe another 5 or 6 tiles at most.

Another new addition: bioluminescent mushrooms, growing in two differently-sized patches. I might go back and add a single mushroom later if I end up with any empty space in the tileset by the time I finish Upper Yagziknia's map.

I also did a little bit of work on the game yesterday -- I filled out the next entry in the "Journal" section of the Notebook menu, which is unlocked after you reach Yagziknia for the first time.

The Journal basically summarizes the story so far, updating as you get further into the game.

As the fact that you find it in the "Notebook menu" suggests, it's also literally being written in Eddie's notebook with a pencil, hence the gray text... and the fact that sometimes a part will be erased and written over after some major discovery.

[fys-ohrrpgce]

To make up for the lack of in-game screenshots in the last post, here's some I took today while testing out a certain script and then roaming around the streets of Lower Yagziknia afterward.

As you may have been able to guess from the signs, this door will go to the Armory (where you can buy various equipment items -- robes, armor, jewelry, and new weapons for everyone) when I start working on the indoor maps.

The area definitely has a very different feel to it than... anywhere else in the game so far. Partly because the scenery is just so weird compared to the "standard American high school" hallways and grassy fields outside (and even the caves and sewers underneath), and partly because it's one of the only places in the game that is completely safe. It's the only "RPG town" type area in the whole game. There are no randomly encountered enemies anywhere in Yagziknia; the only other areas where that's the case are the classrooms and a few other special rooms like the nurse's office.

I guess technically this qualifies as a magical girl transformation sequence... even though the "transformed" state is the weak and ordinary one, rather than the other way around. 😅

Burijeoo transformation magic is an actual transformation, not just an illusion. Their bodies actually, physically change to more closely resemble the species they're taking the form of. While they can still use their magic (to an extent) while in human form... they're also slower and weaker than they would be in their true forms, and they can't stretch or squish their bodies or melt into a puddle of goo to squeeze into small spaces like they can in their true forms.

This is also how half-Burijeoo are even possible. If the spell didn't physically change a Burijeoo's body to that of a human, it wouldn't be possible for a human to get them pregnant.

(There is a half-Burijeoo character in the game, by the way, so that mention of them wasn't totally out of nowhere.)

And there is, in fact, at least one Burijeoo in human form attending Alleghany High School during the time the game takes place. So... she's probably right!

[fys-ohrrpgce]

Just because I haven't posted any this week doesn't mean I haven't been working on the game!

I've gradually been filling out the map of Lower Yagziknia, and as of tonight it's just about done -- no more blank unfinished areas off to one side or the other!

In-editor minimap screenshot:

I'm thinking that all that's really left is some extra decoration tiles here and there (I started adding shop signs after taking this screenshot, and I had the idea of there being some extra little things like benches and fountains in a few places... maybe some fungi or weird subterranean plants?) After that, I can call the outside map of the city's lower half "finished enough for now" and start working on populating it with NPCs and starting on some indoor areas...

Indoors will require a new tileset, since making the Yagziknian homes and shops just look like bare-walled, bare-floored caves on the inside would feel a bit silly. Yagziknia has existed for at least centuries, possibly millennia (I haven't decided on its exact age yet -- definitely old enough that they were here well before the earliest European settlers, but not before the first human inhabitants of the region got here ~18,000ish years ago.) They've had plenty of time to spruce things up a bit! I'll at least need to make tiles for rugs, various pieces of furniture, possibly some magical alien equivalents of household appliances...

[fys-ohrrpgce]

...Yagziknia.

Finally! It's been a whopping twenty-one years since I came up with the concept of the "hidden city" deep beneath the surface of a cave system in southwest Virginia, populated by the descendants of alien refugees who landed on Earth centuries ago after fleeing their home planet, unknown to the human population of the small towns above.

And after all that time... this is the first time that one of my game ideas that would have included Yagziknia actually made it that far!

My plans for both the 2003 and 2006 versions of Fnrrf Ygm Schnish, as well as Legend of the Barfoo in 2007 or early 2008, included the city of Yagziknia as a location you'd eventually visit. 2003 FYS only ever had a few maps, 2006 FYS had a decent intro sequence and a few maps (mostly incomplete) leading up to a boss battle, and LotB... never really got beyond the planning stage.

Good thing I'm notoriously bad at giving up on anything, huh? Finally got it on the fourth try! 🤣

One of the local Burijeoo population notices some strangers hanging around and wanders over to say hi.

Translation: "Hello! ...Huh? You came in from this side? That's unusual. Very unusual..."

It's been so long since she went up to the surface that she forgot about the possibility of encountering humans, who wouldn't know her native language at all.

Most Burijeoo -- and pretty much all of those living on Earth -- can use their magic to change their form, disguising themselves as another species with a similar body shape and size (such as, of course, a human.) At first glance, she assumes that your party are Burijeoo taking on a human form... forgetting what male humans look like (there are no male Burijeoo), so she didn't put two and two together right away upon seeing Eddie and Joguo.

[fys-ohrrpgce]

Working on the maptiles for the city of Yagziknia now!

Haven't started on the actual map itself just yet, but I made these neat little streetlamps earlier today and I really like how they turned out, so I figured I'd share them on here as a bit of a preview.

The streetlamps of Yagziknia run on a larger version of the magical blue flames burning in the torches lining the walls of the caves leading up to this point.

Yagziknia's inhabitants are members of an alien species called the Burijeoo, and most are descendants of a group of refugees that fled their homeworld centuries ago when an oppressive regime came to power. Burijeoo are natural magic-users, and it seems that many (if not most) individuals of the species have a strong innate inclination toward a particular type of elemental magic -- fire, ice, wind, earth, lightning, and so on.

The spell to create these blue flames is pretty basic, despite the fact that the flames themselves defy the laws of physics by producing very little heat and being able to "burn" for extended periods without any further maintenance. Burijeoo who lean strongly toward fire magic will most likely learn how to create them at a very young age; those with more experience may learn to create many all at once, increase their size and brightness, or set them to only burn for a certain period of time before flickering out on their own.

[fys-ohrrpgce]

Finally opened up the game's massive script file and added an entry for the Muckdippe to the game's bestiary.

These bestiary entries are accessible by going to the "Notebook" option in the main menu. As the background and pencil-gray text suggests, Notebook entries are intended to be part of a literal notebook that you're carrying around and writing down information in as you go -- so, for example, the entry for the Muckdippe won't appear until you've actually encountered and defeated one.

Random fact about the Muckdippe sprite... it's actually older than the game itself!

Before I started working on Alleghany Hell School, I had been poking around with another project with an 8-bit graphic style (think NES Dragon Warrior for the world maps and NES Final Fantasy for the battles and you'll have about the right idea), and the Muckdippe was one of several enemies that I borrowed from that project when I started on this one.

Behold, the Muckdippe in its original NES-style "three colors plus transparent black background" form!

And while I'm on the topic of sprites reused from that never-finished 8-bit game project... I'd actually forgotten just how many enemy sprites I'd reused from that game until I looked into it just now!

I had thought it was just a few and that most of them (besides the Muckdippe) had been edited heavily enough since then that they're no longer recognizable as the same sprites, but...

...as you can see, a lot of FYS:AHS's first page of small enemies are exact copies of enemies from the other game. There's also two borrowed sprites among the medium enemies (the Chomp Fish and Centipede.)

And there used to be even more -- the Bonehead and Yuckworm sprites in FYS:AHS were originally sprites from the older game too, but I ended up re-drawing them sometime later. Looking at them now, the new Yuckworm is definitely better than the original but I'm thinking I might like the old Bonehead sprite a bit more than my "improved" one from 2012ish...

[fys-ohrrpgce]

Next stop... the hidden underground city of Yagziknia!

[fys-ohrrpgce]

After not getting anything done with the game over the weekend (due to, y'know... being out of town away from my computer for work!)... I managed to find some time to poke around with it a bit more tonight.

Now things are set up so that the party can climb down those little ladders into the water and slosh around to get further into the caves!

The "climb down into water, everyone's sprites change to their halfway submerged ones" script was already done, since the sewer map (optional, but accessible earlier than this area) already had that sort of thing going on. So setting it up for this one only took a couple seconds.

Currently those smaller piles of submerged rocks are set to be obstructions, but considering that they're not even high enough to poke up out of the water I'm thinking of changing that. It's fine for the ones on land to block you from walking over them, but when you're swimming? Nahhh.

Also added a new enemy, the dreaded Muckdippe. This is actually the only new enemy in this area that's exclusive to the water, though Chomp Fish (previously seen in the sewer's water areas) also make another appearance and can sometimes show up in larger numbers.

(The "cave water" battle background is also new.)

Going by my early test battles, the Muckdippe feels like it might be a tad too weak. But then, I'm fairly high leveled and have top-notch equipment in this save file, so maybe its current strength is fine? I don't want to repeat what I did with Okédoké and, by attempting to make the game not feel "too easy" for me, end up making the game feel a bit too hard for... most people who aren't me. Whoops! 😅

And I can always make it so you can encounter multiple Muckdippes later in the caves if it turns out that a solo Muckdippe really is just too weak.

If you explore the caves a bit and find a certain hidden-away little cavern, you can find a new piece of equipment for Eddie (which can also be worn by an optional party member you can find later, way off at the other end of this cave system.)

While I was roaming around fighting random encounters, Bridget leveled up and learned a new spell!

It's basically the same as her Firewave seen in one of the previous screenshots, but for a different element -- an upgrade over her basic lightning spell (Zap) that does more damage and hits all enemies at once. The animation, with a bunch of blue-white energy beams rising up from the ground, was inspired by an attack animation in RPG Maker 95 that I always thought was kinda neat back in the day.