When Zentos Attack
Posted: 3-29-17
Yesterday, we released our first video for the Nefol play through — the Introduction. Hopefully you’ll get a chance to look at that and let us know what you think so far! Again, the video doesn’t match the experience and quality of actually playing the game, so we hope to release the game files eventually to allow you all to play through it yourself.
Chapter 1 finally came to a close for development last weekend. As I noted the week before, my big challenge was figuring out how to make a fight scene between the existing party (Jin, Zhi and Yuu) and another character (Zento). I thought there might be some custom way to code it, but as I did research, I discovered I’d need a whole big JavaScript plugin to do that job.
There’s no simple way to create a battle between SV (Side View) battlers baked into RPG Maker. My research first led me to a plugin called Animated Enemies by Rexal. Now, I got this to work for me for the most part, with one exception. No matter what I did, I couldn’t get the plugin to display Zento’s scythe during his attacks in battle.
Since the story focused on his weapon, and the use of a magic weapon, it was super important that the scythe was seen during his attacks. Looking further on that plugin’s forum thread, I see this is an existing issue with other creators using this plugin, too. The plugin hasn’t been updated in a while, and the author isn’t responding… so I knew I needed to look elsewhere for a solution.
I did some more research and found Yanfly’s Animated Sideview Enemies plugin. I tried that out, and it worked exactly the way I wanted it to. Yay! I shoulda known to look for a Yanfly solution from the outset.
In order to get the sideview enemies plugin to work, I also had to install Yanfly’s Battle Core. This changed some minor things about how battles look and feel. For example, you can now see the skills being used displayed at the top of the battle in the following image:
I haven’t explored all the changes this includes, but up until now, Nefol has focused on telling a story rather than battle. Battles have only been scripted and put there to show a part of the story. I don’t know if that’ll change in the future or not — Syn and I are still thinking about the overall flow, systems and design of the game.
This week, I get to look forward to working on a part of the script that’s never been seen before — Chapter 2! I’m excited that we’ve finally got through a full Introduction and Chapter, as short as they actually are to play through. It’s all good, though. As I said, the idea is that this game is to tell a story, not so much to be a sprawling epic 50+ hour RPG.
Not to mention that it’s our first try at something like this. So, we’re still learning and I’m just having fun.