#wizkens

[shalmonsgamedev]

Starting a 3D draft of henri's room this is honestly pretty fun  :') enjoying cutting corners & milking the egg shape as much as possible lol (weirdly I've settled on keeping paper stuff like posters & cards rectangular; still want those to be reasonably practical.  Plus what if I wanted to do mock cards as merch someday; who's gonna print egg-shaped cards)

will be using various placeholders for little toys & such, but I nearly forgot about a wizard model I had made for some experiment lol--design is outdated though, so it'll still be replaced

[merchant-wizard-and-jerry]

do you take wizcoin? it's basically a different type of money called wiztocurrency. it's just like any other currency, but it's all stored in the wizternet. and you can use the wizcoins to buy NFWs (or non-fungible wizkens). these NFWs are very valuable, and i happen to have many in the famous NFWs line; Bored Wizard Money Gang. anyway, wizcoin is a very valuable wiztocurrency and i think it's the future of wizard shopping. will you accept wizcoin as a payment?

“Welcome to the the new segment.”

“currency time”

“Let’s see what we have here today. Oh it’s a NFW, yes these things are all the rage. Let me tell you what they would convert to in currency and why.”

*jerry the book looks you dead in the eyes*

“Approximately 10,000 wizcoins would equal 1 currency and those zero is being pushed back further and further. The reason for such prices is the instability of said currency.”

“- Jerry”

[ramazo]

WIZKEN

[shalmonsgamedev]

lmao swordsman

Anyway here are simple but significant screencaps as this marks the first time I've actually dropped some of my own assets into RPGmaker MZ

a goal is for that menu to look entirely different by the time I'm done, since I would like this to be an RPGmaker game that leaves no trace of original stock assets (not that there's even anything wrong with that, but I would like every visual asset to be my own since I know I can do it 😤) these assets are still very wip of course, but it's kind of exciting to see them in there~

I realize it might be unwise to jump into plugins straight away, but next I'll be messing with some to see if I can get my parallax test map working to some extent  o: (I also forgot that MZ has click-to-move, so I wonder if I should be keeping that in mind?)

[shalmonsgamedev]

Went ahead and tested out a wildly unfinished room render (still various things w/no texture at all lol) but I'm actually kind of encouraged by it?? namely because, that li'l henri wasn't originally part of it! I dropped them in from the test sprite I had previously made a while back and they fit in relatively well!  :0

I am pretty tickled by the gaudy chunkiness of the maps at this size this is quite close to the exact vibe i was wanting, so i'm surprised i'm already figuring it out? that ugly-but-nostalgic prerendered gba/playstation vibe so I guess the next bit of anxiety is seeing whether it will play nice in RPGmaker

Ideally I would like the game to run the way it looks at 2x or maybe even 3x size I'm pretty sure I came across a way to do that somewhere in my research, so hopefully not a big deal but yea, gotta have that chonk in the graphics

[shalmonsgamedev]

Ok test texture-paint render at 48x weirdly relieved to see that it's actually a bit worse lol imho texture-paint does look better on the full-size model, but yea it does not shrink super well so maybe lighting will be the better, shorter way to go

(and in that moment, total dev time for wizkens was sliced in half)

[shalmonsgamedev]

(going back to pens on these sketchpages; I tried mechanical pencil last time, but I just don't like how light it is--also possible that this type of sketchbook paper is just not good for it) I guess this is actually my 2nd attempt at sketching a layout for henri's room, but various ideas have gotten a bit more developed since then  (round walls due to the egg-shaped house, for instance) so this is a more earnest draft for a demo map 0:

plan is for most of this to be a 'parallax' image rendered in blender (will probably end up at a more regular top-down angle; need to make sure the sprites look more or less correct walking around on it) I guess I'll probably have to do a weird "sitcom set" kinda thing with walls missing lol wondering if figuring out some kind of fade effect on the wall will sell that better, altho I guess that's not necessary on most regular 2D/tiled maps? once I've got all the objects ready, I'll definitely be playing around with the layout/scale until I get something I like (nice advantage of 3D) so this was more for getting a feel of what all I want to include ("hatchkets" is a lore thing I'm not 100% settled on, so won't explain yet lol) 

Also yea I guess that door must just open to the outside?? 🤔🤔 probably need to design some of these egg-houses w/little wraparound stairs or maybe there's a secret hatch(hatch) under the rug firefighter pole-slide into the kitchen

[shalmonsgamedev]

Occurred to me that I never did a digital concept for the "Keeper" from a while back so here's that I decided to make them canonically grayscale & not just a sprite thing

no solid reason for the moment, but may retroactively lore-ify it at some point

Considering eyes that change color?  But should figure out why 🤔

May have something to do with the wizards' color stuff I was pondering over no back-view since it shouldn't be too hard to figure out for the tinier 2D walksprite

[shalmonsgamedev]

Spriting the wizard pokemon-style is trickier than expected;; going for the same size as the original Ho-oh sprite, so 56x56

Somehow I am only just now noticing how less 'shaded' the Gen2 sprites are compared to Gen1 and am now a bit torn on which style to mimic 🤔

Which I guess means I will need to try both, or come up with something different lol

[shalmonsgamedev]

I've actually been making some progress but have hit a weird devlogging wall in which I feel too embarrassed to keep doing so? I think because it's getting less & less likely that I'll meet my december goal for the demo but it's really not a big deal the blog is tiny and no one has put money towards the project (except me lol)

Also, the reality is I prob got way more done this year than I would have, just by setting the goal

[shalmonsgamedev]

Messing w/changing the main font today first attempt did not work? I know .woff is default, but I thought it still accepted .tff hmm 2nd attempt also not working …. oh the problem was I am sleepy & kept typing .tff instead of .ttf 🙃

[shalmonsgamedev]

Dialog & flavor text is significantly trickier in the Geney Wizards half of the demo still fun, but more of a puzzle since there's a lot of very gimmicky stuff (flavor/wizards speak in highly inauthentic goofy old english; rune keepers speak as alliteratively as possible)

[shalmonsgamedev]

Finally sketching out a proper side-view base for chickn concepting since I rly want to get henri figured out a side view would be good for modeling

So my goal is to maybe start that this week 😤

Inevitably not having as much to show for Wizkens by the end of 2023 as I would have liked but officially having some pre-rendered henri sprites to use in a demo is a reasonable goal imho

and will feel like a nice li'l milestone since I've thus far not shown any actual graphic assets lol

[shalmonsgamedev]

I'll have you know I did very important wizkens work 2day feverishly typed away at key elements of the lore….. (I came up with a soda brand that the chickens like & all the silly combinable flavor names)

Maybe I'll do something where you can ask any given NPC what their fave flavor is (there are….a lot of combinations)

[shalmonsgamedev]

A potentially important music update;; I have found a composer pls welcome the new composer for wizkens: (me)

But in all seriousness, I have decided to Go For It what was especially motivating was the discovery of Plogue's chipsounds plugin which has the amiga vibes;;; that I so dearly wanted for the "real world" parts of Wizkens ("real world" in the sense of the parts that aren't in the Geney Wizards game, which should feel more gameboyish)   

[shalmonsgamedev]

y'all 🥺🥺🥺 <3 behold, the first wizkens "fanart", courtesy of a lovely penpal letter i received from @aludrakijurorin ! <3 <3 i still cannot get over the little details like the carpet & wallpaper!! :')