Nefol: Remaking the Game
Posted: 1-22-18
As I posted over the holidays, for various reasons, Syn and I have decided to go back to the drawing board and remake the Nefol game. We chose two new pieces of software to do this:
- GameMaker Studio 2
- Spriter Pro
However, unlike RPG Maker, GameMaker Studio gives you nothing but a blank slate to work with. No tilesets. No pre-created systems. You have to do everything from scratch.
This is really, truly, game development. And we’re having to learn everything from the ground up.
There are lots of tutorials out there on YouTube, however. And that’s where we started.
I learned a few basic things the very first week… such as how to create sprites, and assign them to objects. How to make rooms. How to put a background image in the room. How to give an object basic movement controls.
The height of my weekend was being able to re-create the Zeromus scene, moving background layers and all!
Spriter Time
Meanwhile, I was stuck trying to figure out how to make graphics for such an open-ended platform. Without RPG Maker’s built-in system (which is very nice in MV), we picked up Spriter and the RPG Heroes Pack.
While this was a good start at learning about making sprite animation (which I had very little exposure to), it didn’t exactly work out the way I thought it would. The idea is that you take the default Spriter Hero and either remove assets or replace assets with different ones using Character Maps. It sounded like a good idea, and it works to an extent.
The default Spriter Hero? He looks something like this:
Yeah, kinda scary.
Those Backgrounds Though…
Ok, so I thought I knew how I was going to make character graphics… but I needed a way to make backgrounds. Again, we didn’t have big lovely tilemaps like we did back in RPG Maker to draw backgrounds. And I knew that I don’t have the background drawing skill or time to make them by hand.
So, I began to explore our options.
In the end, I decided on picking up Unity. While this is in and of itself a full game making platform, it wasn’t the game-making aspects I wanted to use it for. I wanted the art assets.
In my mind, we could take Unity assets, build scenes there, take screenshots of those scenes, and use them as backgrounds. Like so:
The catch? We had to find Unity assets that matched the art style of Spriter.
And oh… did this quest send me on hours and hours of rabbit trails!
I’ll tell you all about that in the next post!