Hey there and welcome to the first post everyone. It's Anchovy~ and man has this week been full of events created just to keep me away from getting much development finished. There's just been so much going on such as meeting up with people, and having the PC arrive back later than usual. Since I don't own the thing it's often moving every two weeks from place to place and with next week being the week I'll be heading out on a break with a friend of mine- the PC will most likely be moving by the time I return just for the weekend. (Though don't expect me to disappear during this week break!) Investing in a proper PC of my own is very costly mostly because of how heavy this engine can be on the PC when I am working... it is definitely something I'm looking forward to grabbing this year.
But enough about the future, let's talk about progress~!
The main focus this week has been the Mansion of Futility. Since all the maps in the demo have been finished up (excluding npcs, stores, battles and cutscenes...) I wanted to tackle the one of the bigger chunks of the game known as the Mansion of Futility.
The basic concept of this area of the game is that it is pretty much the HUB world. The player will be dumped into the mansion playing an unnamed girl. She has no memory of herself, nor even her name. In this place no matter what she chooses the result will always be created for her. As in if she chooses what she wants to eat, the maids will choose for her. Despite this she does not complain as she is a meek kind of person.
The only place she seems to have freedom is the library and she makes sure before the night ends she needs to read at least one chapter of the story known as 'The End of Azur' also known as 'Azur no Owari'.
Throughout the mansion the player can choose to interact with notable characters including the mansion's mistress in order to unlock other side stories which grant more insight to the whole of Azur no Owari's story. Of course I want this to be optional to the player since I'm not really a fan of being forced to do side stories and requests.
It's still nice to know that outside of the story there is a fully fleshed out world waiting to be explored.
Now what exactly is this mansion? Nobody seems to want to explain what it is or where they reside. Outside of the windows is just a blur of nothingness and the residents of the Mansion seem completely contempt with this. Just what exactly is this mansion? It's up to the player to learn why.
Maybe the questions will be answered during this game? Or maybe there will be more? Only time will tell.
Other than the mansion being complete we got some new battle animations but I'd rather not show since I want to revamp the battle system altogether so that the game doesn't look like just 'another RPG Maker' game. Figuring out what makes a good battle system has been the toughest part to come up with but hopefully in a future post I'll have my head screwed on for it. Speaking of RPG Maker, I'm planning on ordering a neat little program known as GENE Scene Builder. An add on to RPG Maker that will honestly make working on the game a lot faster and lessen the memory the game has (Since it's proven to be quite the fat boy). The program allows me to move sprites around during scenes rather than be anchored onto the right and left sides of the screen. Trust me, it's a pain. I hope to blur backgrounds some, allow the backgrounds to do many affects to make battle scenes much more dynamic; maybe dim the sprites that aren't speaking and give them great transitions such as fade-slide in. Even more stuff to work on battle scenes with! All in all, it's been a pretty slow week but it seems things are slowly coming together. I think March will be a great month for Azur. Oh and one last thing. The game has officially been in development for 3 Years now! I can say without a doubt that this year everyone will be receiving a demo of some kind so please do look forward to Azur's first debut upon the internet. I'm Anchovy and we're team Azur. Stay cool.