Despite using Maids & Masters to do as much as possible with RPG Maker's core engine, it's impossible for me to include everything that the engine is capable of in a single game. In my ongoing journey to experiment and improve as a game developer, Love/Loss will include a handful of systems that I haven't used before.
The first I mentioned last week: you'll be able to choose the gender of the main character. Love/Loss is written with a female protagonist in mind, so the main game may not have the choice to play as a male character, but the demo is small enough in scope that it's easy to insert all of the appropriate changes; mostly in the form of new renders. Both of the main characters - the protagonist and the fiancee - are also player-named, which means I have to write dialogue around the fact that the name could be longer or shorter than the default name. Not really a challenge from a writing perspective, but it does affect some formatting within the game's script that I haven't had to think about before.
The second is New Game +. Love/Loss is based on media that has the character like Love/Loss's protagonist be very stoic and say very little, but (to me, at least) these characters always seemed to have more going on in their head than they ever said out loud. Love/Loss's New Game + will remove the protagonist's internal monologue, which I think provides a new perspective to the scenes. This feature requires a little more attention to detail in how dialogue is constructed, but will almost certainly be present in the full game, as it's relatively easy to work with. New Game + also gives me the opportunity to include a couple things in the demo to let you experiment with the next two systems using features that won't be present in the main game.
As an extra note: It should go without saying, but New Game + saves won't carry over to the main game if/when Love/Loss becomes a full game. Though unless I switch engines, I'll do my best to have normal saves from the demo carry over to the main game.
Next is the Affinity system. If you've played any of the Tales series of games, you're going to be familiar with this general idea. The more you use a certain element, the more your Affinity for that element grows. This growth comes with an incremental increase to your abilities associated with that element, as well as unlocking new ways to manifest your Affinities at certain thresholds, giving you more options in combat.
The last is the upgrade system. While normal leveling still exists and you can raise your Affinities through combat, you also have the option of spending your experience to raise your stats and Affinities. This is also how you'll unlock new Affinities after the choice to pick your first element. My initial intention was to only allow you to spend your current experience; the amount between your current level and your next level. However, the engine's back end only recognizes your maximum experience. This means that spending too much will cause your current level to drop. While I could figure out a way to check your level, how much experience would keep you in your current level, and prevent you from spending enough to level down, there's an intended metaphor within this system that I feel this level down consequence really helps drive home.
I've got the demo into it's final playtesting phase, so all that's really left to do is to create any necessary male MC renders (I'm not redoing all of them; sorry, but it is just a demo), make sure all the triggers are correct for that version, and decide how many bonus scenes I want to include and get all of those rendered out. I want to give my character preview post a chance to go public before I finalize the character's default names, so right now I think we'll set the release date for this demo as Friday the 12th.
As a reminder, this demo will only be available to my Patrons, so if you're interested in Love/Loss, please consider supporting me.
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