NEPETAQUEST 2011 Thread 5: Journey through Black Endless Despair

[kgy121]

Not really; I did a little bit of outlining since last post, but I've been a bit busy trying to get over travel sickness.

Have at!

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[RunDoubleRun]

Hello! I haven't really been following this much, but I saw it recently and wanted to offer my help, I can write things if there are still things that need to be written. Flavour text or dialogue, those sorts of things, which is what seemed to still need doing.
Let me know if I can be of any help (:

[VeritasUnae]

oh hey rdr. haha.

[SilentWanderer]

So I'm assuming majhost isn't just down for me as of now... right? This is a slight problem, as half our wiki images are now borked. Hopefully they recover soon, as I really don't feel like hunting for all of our images and relocating them somewhere else.

EDIT: http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/majhost.com

[VeritasUnae]

Majhost goes down every so often, I believe. It's a common occurrence.

[-Benedict]

Right now Majhost is doing some restructuring- rebuilding their site and stuff, doing a whole lot of maintenance and having extended downtime. It's been a problem, but everything should be back up as soon as they're done.
I guess I owe you guys an explanation for where I've been at for the month of January- between trying to get the Trolleater overworld to work (hint: it doesn't and trying will waste two weeks of your life), getting into the new semester of college, and doing the thing I'm about to show you along with

MY SUPER RADICAL NEW TUMBLR OF AWESOME,

I've been pretty busy. But I don't have nuffink to show for it- here's what I've been doing with Clubs.

I've talked with Zero about how we'd do the hulls- consensus seems to be that we'll just place the deck on top of an individually drawn object for each boat. Boat hulls will be modularly designed but not by standard 24x24 tiles, and we'll add them after we add the decks and stuff. I made a little placeholder texture for any upper decks- although it should usually just take the form of a single cabin area. Colors will also probably be redone, and a nicer-looking wooden wall texture will be coming in the future.

As for Frost's status...

Still pretty much exactly as fucked as I was last time. Maybe somewhat better? Eh. Basically, two different meds did more harm than good, and the NHS just loves to keep you waiting for months before you get to talk to a psychiatrist instead of some half-assed GP.

Trust me, I know exactly how old this is getting. I'll let you know if my head gets fixed.

Zero's pretty much moved on to work on his totally sweet forum adventure, so... sads, I guess, but I can probably guilt trip him with that one time I bought him Minecraft if we need anything from him, gehehehe.

[SilentWanderer]

*actually opens and skims tumblr*
shit new Kan Gao game? /peace internet

Quintessence was easily one of my favourite RPGMaker series creations, and it wasn't even completed (and still isn't I see). If he's produced something he feels is worth charging money for, I've got to at least give it a try and sometime.
Totally recommend the freebird games lineup to anyone a fan of RPG's with immersive stories.

ANYWAYS couple of things:

Rough layout of planned Hearts level. I designed it to have lots of open interconnected areas, in contrast to the wilderness, which was a straight line from start to finish for the most part. Thought about having to collect a certain number of items to progress from one area to the next, or just one key item. Annotations:

• Green area I imagined to be designed around the conventions for Terezi's forest that we've already seen setup in Homestuck. Thick forest with large trees basically with trails and other foresty features. Like in these 2 panels:
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• Blue area could be an area full of treehouses and platforms linked by bridges between the giant trees. Probably swampy underneath. Got the idea from a tree platform/bridge thing that Zero posted earlier:
  
  Could be similar to the Channelwood Age from Myst.

• Orange areas are transitional. They could have features of both major areas, or neither.

Also decided to go with dropbox as far as file hosting goes. Mainly because github is too complex for what we need and Ubuntu One just doesn't work for me most of the time. Dropbox is simple and it does what it promises, even if 2gb is somewhat limited. If anyone here wants to get reffered for a Dropbox account for 250mb bonus storage you can use this link: http://db.tt/3cU7U5nU. Also if people want to get a shared Nepetaquest folder setup let me know your email via PM.

EDIT: Added Zero's tree bridge thingy

[VeritasUnae]

channelwood age from myst yes good!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

My Dropbox is mainly filled with music files, but if anyone runs out I can happily host images on mine if need be.
On the topic of music, I'm thinking of looking back over the music, and coming up with some new tracks. But I've got a couple of other projects I'm working on and uni starts back up on the 27th.

[ardentApathy]

Guys. Guys. Guuuuuuys.

I was listening to Rex Duodecim Angelus at 1.33 Speed. And I had an idea. (also, before anyone says anything, the guy who commented with this idea on the Rex Duodecim Angelus video is me)

What if each character's theme crept into the battle music each time they attacked?

I don't know how exactly, but I know it's possible. See: Phantom Ganon battle in Wind Waker. I think what I'm envisioning would require five different variations on the battle theme, one for each playable character. Question is, is it worth it for the amount of effort it would involve for the composers?

I haven't been keeping up with this project at all, so I'm sorry if this has been brought up before.

EDIT: Looking at the wiki, there are a LOT of battle themes, and my idea would multiply the amount by 5. Yikes. HOWEVER! Can we at least do this for the final battle? C'mon, you can't deny it would be perfect! Rex Duodecim Angelus, man!

[VeritasUnae]

The coding the engine would require for that, I believe, would be beyond the limitations set up. Basically, to do what you're suggesting would mean completely rewriting the battle music so that we can have a secondary track over the top that fades in as the player attacks (which could be ANY POINT IN THE SONG) and then fades out afterwards. It basically doubles the amount of tracks we have to write.
Not to mention I am certain the engine can't do it.

[ardentApathy]

The coding the engine would require for that, I believe, would be beyond the limitations set up. Basically, to do what you're suggesting would mean completely rewriting the battle music so that we can have a secondary track over the top that fades in as the player attacks (which could be ANY POINT IN THE SONG) and then fades out afterwards. It basically doubles the amount of tracks we have to write.
Not to mention I am certain the engine can't do it.

A definite no then. Fiddlesticks. I guess my dream will have to wait.

[tom cruise]

It'd be worth doing for a final battle type deal, and wouldn't really be terribly hard to code (glossed the OP and couldn't tell what engine you're using, but most ones with a decent feature set should be capable of it really). It'd boil down to just having the main track, plus a version for each character you have in the battle. Each track would need to be near identical save for the character themes overlayed, at the same length, tempo etc. Then all you really do is trigger it to crossfade into the appropriate character song at the right time, making it so that the new song lines up with the previous (providing they're all done with the same tempo and underlying music it'd be pretty easy to achieve that). Then just crossfade back when the attack is done.

[VeritasUnae]

I don't think Frost is using an engine. I was under the impression he was hard coding everything from scratch.

[Logman1]

Well, you have to have an engine, it's just that he made this one. Someone would have to ask him about the possibility of it playing more than one track at once.

[VeritasUnae]

Sorry. I should've specified 'pre-built engine'.

[tom cruise]

Well, you have to have an engine, it's just that he made this one. Someone would have to ask him about the possibility of it playing more than one track at once.

Any decent scripting environment will definetly allow this. Otherwise how would sound effects work?

[VeritasUnae]

So then we need three tracks able to play at once, and we're effectively multiplying the amount of songs we need to make.
The final battle can have any one of the partners we've used before. That gives a total of 6 overlay songs, if one includes Nepeta.
I just think it's a lot of work for a little gimmick.

[Triggs]

Simple,
Battle theme.
Layered ontop of that, a brief excerpt of (for example) Nepeta's theme or w/e.
Ontop of that, sound effects you'll have anyway.
Adding soundeffects ontop of music doesn't increase the number of tracks you use.

but then I haven't even bothered to check what the fuck this is being programmed in. So I could be talking out of my ass.

[Dudemaster47]

Well, it'd be a pretty cool idea to layer it onto the sound effects. I can kind of imagine it going on with the attack.

[adno]

Hey guys. Saw this thread and decided to try and help. Despite my laughable art skills, I decided to try to add heads to some of those Nepetas on the attack sprite sheet. Tell me what you think.


EDIT: I added some shading on the face. I hope it looks a bit better.

[Dudemaster47]

wooo new heads!

[SilentWanderer]

Looking much better with the shading.

[-Benedict]

Squiggly text parade: rained on! Liking the initiative, but... she looked a little like a monkey? I moved the jaw in and added some hair and stuff.

feelin' super bad about not activity-izing around here- "having too much homework" is becoming an increasingly valid excuse for things (DIE, PHYSICS 205N POSTLABS). It's hard to keep going when there's nothing playable in sight, so I've been just sort of waiting for Frost to recover so that we can move forward with development. I guess I'll take a look at what's been done with Nepeta- kgy's done a lot of good work, but a lot of tweaking needs to be done since most of the outlining was just the addition of the black borders to the raw sketch. I'll see what I can do.

[Emeraldis]

crap why is everyone faster than me

Whoops I was working on the sprites, too? But I agree with you on the head, the jaw jutted out too much. I actually started some sprite edits of both the attack sheet and her new head (sounds so weird) and I'll try to post what i did to them when I next get on a computer (maybe 15-16 hours? 6 if I'm lucky (which I am usually)).

[Emeraldis]

laugh at how much i suck right now

i command you



also if anyone has GIMP and wants to see the edits i made to her head, here's the mediafire link

http://www.mediafire.com/?3mb0677do1nb96a