Progress Report: Train Story Event, Updated Status Image, and More

I spent the few couple weeks using the time I had to sprite and progress through the current story event. Continuing from where the bonus content from the Prologue Demo ends, I have been able to include some battles and managed to get up to where a boss fight occurs, while introducing various characters that will be showing up again later on. I've also been attempting more sprite animations, which I know I said I should be doing later and getting things set up, and yet...I can't help myself.


While I'm not quite at the end of the current story event (I have a few more cutscenes to do, which means making one or two more maps), I decided I would go back to the start of the game and start working on the revamped Title and Passive Skill mechanics, and in the meantime, I received the first revised status image for the party.

The top-most image of Aki was the first piece of character art I ever commissioned for the game, roughly seven years ago and before I started getting fully involved in developing the game. The one below was completed recently, as I wanted the character art to better reflect the cover art. This will also be more consistent with the skit portraits, once those are started on. I will be having these done one character at a time, and steadily implementing them into the game. Skits will also undergo testing once Aki has enough base portraits to work with, but that won't be for another month at least.

On the subject of plugins, I finally got the Equip Passive Skill plugin to work! The way it works will be much like how it was before, where you can only equip a set amount of passive skills based on the amount of points a character has. However, all the skills take the form of States, which would have already existed through Fomar's plugin, but this one is more compatible with the other VisuStella plugins. This also means that anything that would grant a skill or state that would act as a proxy, will only exist when equipped and should disappear without needing to do some extra tinkering. In addition, passive skills that grant stat changes are reflected immediately, rather than refreshing or re-equipping it rapidly to see the changes. I'm also on the fence about having the unlearned skills be listed from the start or just leaving it blank because I don't know what sort of help descriptions I can even put in, since they get added in as you unlock titles. Speaking of which...

For Titles, I am using the Equip Medal System plugin; which utilizes the Armor database. Characters will be able to obtain 'titles' through commands, and when equipped they can earn experience towards mastering that title. When mastered, any bonuses they grant when equipped will be boosted. They can also obtain titles by doing various things, including built-in features like taking damage, receiving ailments, etc. This will give me plenty of ways to play around with titles and how one can obtain them. Unfortunately, I have yet to make it where equipping appropriate titles grants skills that you can learn to keep. So, what I'll do is have it where passive skills become available to learn after a title is obtained, and will even include an indicator that this happened. I'll also need to spruce up the menu (like for all them really) to try and not have as much empty space, but my priority right now is just getting the damn things to work.

Lastly, while I wanted to finally try the Equip Battle Skills plugin (since now I would have no issue with Passive Skills showing up when they shouldn't), it seems to still be acting up. Whenever I try to open the arte menu, or even just add in certain characters, the game would crash. I don't know what is causing the issue exactly, I thought it was the passive skills or medal plugins, but testing this in a fresh file does nothing to trigger the crash. With how much VS has been working to fix their recent plugins, I'm hoping that this will be resolved. In all honesty, I can probably go without needing this one plugin for a long time; but it would really be good for gauging reactions. Not that I have that many artes for characters yet, but I would like to try emulating Tales a bit by limiting how many artes a character can take into battle.

In summary, these changes will be helpful in coming up with new titles and passive skills to add more to the experience. I would like to eventually ask for proper testing of various aspects, and maybe help with grammar and spelling, even if it's only voluntary at this time. I am aiming to release an updated demo later this month, most likely the Prologue Demo since I really want to get back to where I am in the story before resuming. And that should give me time to find more resources to properly finish the scene. I can sprite characters at least, but tilesets? Ohhhh noooo...

Art References

• Status Images  by Chu (https://twitter.com/sdamned)