nothing makes sense im going to cry] (Patreon)

what if you wanted to make a video game
but god said
YEP_OptionsCore.js:975 TypeError: Cannot set property 'bitmap' of undefined at Array.StarCore.PU (StarCore.js:1533) at eval (eval at Game_Interpreter.command355 (YEP_CoreEngine.js:1882), <anonymous>:1:10)

<anonymous>:1:10 is our favorite verse of the bible.

okay fuck it hi im ame and welcome to the continued chronicle of my less than gradual descent into madness. i'm here with my host, f̶̡̧̢̤̲̥͙̫̼͎̗͔̻̳̅͒͗́͊͐̾̃͌͒̐̚ü̵̡̡̞͉̖̫̯̞̭̐͒̓͂̌̓͊́͋c̸͚̗̭̘̏̽̈́̆̄͗͂̊̎́̄̓̎͛̕͘k̶͙͚̣̺̼͕͉̑̉̈́̈́̓̌̿̒̈̇̈́͛̃͘͜͝į̸̢̧̨̪͖̮̣͎͚̝̝̗͗̒̀͊͆̋͆̂͌̿̕͜m̶̡̬̗̖̲͍̀̍ͅp̶̙̱͎͍̺̘̘͖̖̱̳̼̯̼͔͓̏̏̈́̓̀͒͆̅̂͜o̵̞̹̙͎̣̣̥̟͕͙͚͔͚̅̔̊͋̋̎̽̽͌͊̌s̷̨̱̝̼̭̣̙̝̖͔̤̑͋̉͛̉͛̐̔͝g̷̡̛̜̪̥̀̉̇͒͑͊͗͂̌̆͊̚̚ỏ̷͔̈́̆͠d̶̨̙̗̲͔͖̩͕̝͓̤̳̭̰͋̔̋̑̌̒͂̉̄͆̕͘͝ͅd̶̦̏͝ͅa̴͓̓̈́̅̐m̴͖͎̼̰̬̩͉͖̀͐̍̅̋̔̍͝n̴̢̡̛̛̼͈̦̼̯͉̯͚̞͓̈̋̊͂̈́́́̀͆͛̍͐̓̏͝ḯ̸̹̭͔̗͈̥̈́̓̊̓̐̄͛̄̚͜t̵̙͈̥̮̥͙̟͈̦̭̻͓͖͓͔͙̦̔̍̃͑̂̂͝ and we've got a great post for you tonight
just kidding, no we don't !!!!

its been two weeks since i last posted and although im entirely confident im the only person in the universe who has the expectation for me to post more frequently than that during the holiday, F̶̛̲̀U̴̦͚̱̦̩̐̓̆C̸̨͉̲̈̄̀̒K̶̗̊̕ -- in my defense i have been doing this weird thing i read about in cosmo called "taking a break" and i think it was "trying to half a twerk-life balance"??? idk i dont actually read the articles just the ads they tuck in every other page, but more than that

i have stuff to post, but i didn't want to post it yet because i'm like,
oh there's a minor cat in the new feature i don't want to talk about something that we haven't actually finished and polished up yet that would be dishonest hoitytoityto im a prissy princess hooooo
and so we'd fix the minor issue but then some other minor issue would show up and i'd do it all over and and then the next thing you know i've 32-hit combo'd a string of, mind you, not very significant cats into a ka-powpow of procrastination and i feel the pressing need to move to senegal stick my head in the sand and pluck all of my feathers out until the universe decides to rebirth me as an ostrich

by the way i had to check what actual countries ostriches live in because obviously i know the continent but not the specific country anyway google--

google
that is not a country
cmon get your shit together

fuck. okay. look. so stuff keeps breaking and so i've decided the responsible thing to do is to stop trying to be responsible ajnd just talk about shit anyway, so here we go, we're flying by the seat of our pants out here only im wearing sweat pants and we're bracing for a crash landing

so we're making a tRPG, you know that, but did you know there is actually other parts of the video game other than the tRPG part of it? it's true. there is the part where you talk to people and the part where you walk around. and if both of those sound really boring, then you're correct! still, a focus in our development has been adding """features"""* to help those parts flow and work better based on experience in reborn and other VNs so that they don't feel comparatively clumsy and i can event story scenes with those improvements in place.

* look i need a better word than features because that sounds like an advertisement and i even hate the habitual advertisement of "features" for games because it just becomes a laundry list of things that are either genre-standard or else padding out to try and sell a point, this isn't about advertising this is about making an enjoyable experience which itself requires a variety of implementations, but even then is that really cause to overthink the semantics?
shirtballs.

so we have two such posts. for today, let's talk about the VN/message system improvements because... haha........ nervous laughter.

Placeholders

okay first up i wouldn't call any of these things "features" but of all the things that are not a feature, this is the not-a-feature-est, i'm just tossing it out there for the sake of showing development process and not having distractions later, so art takes forever to make well, so in the mean time i've got a bunch of placeholder stuff. such as here, the map is a WIP, the overworld sprite is a solid black version of karus and the message art is just a formless blob silhouette because nothing is real and everything is in a constant state of flux

anyway the point of showing this is: don't get distracted by the placeholders when i then show other things below

ah i see that patreon has once again made their image uploading worse... exciting

Showing Items

a lot of VNs and RPGs do this, people are talking about a Thing so Show the Thing

dont worry about it
anyway ok that's easy we make another graphic, it's simple, gets the job done, make a function to show and whatever item graphic exists, hide it later, play a sound for it, badabingbadaboom, next

Dim Non-Speakers

Another common trait of VN/RPG message systems, and this one was originally requested based on feedback from the demo. Now in scenes, the person who is talking will have their art light up, and everyone else's is dimmed.

...This one has been kind of chief on the "okay just one more small issue" train. Right now even... It was important to me when implementing this that I did so in a way that would cause as little overhead to actually eventing scenes as possible. And indeed, because I correlate the file names shown with the Nametag shown of the person speaking, i was able to make this work for most scenes with 0 additional eventing work. However, that means right now if there is a character who's name we don't have yet, they show up as "???" which means I can't automatically correlate them. I still have to add a fix for that.

Bob's Yer Uncle

Very similar to the above (and in fact the above made it easy to implement) I also wanted to get in a very slight movement on speaking just to further help draw the reader's eye to the character speaking. We can see it below in contrast to the above. 

....this is also broken for the same reason as above :)

Be Still in the Darkness

Another difference that you might notice between the above two gifs is that in one of them, Aulyra's face animates when she is dimmed/inactive. I did this for the demo too, where each character updates their facial expressions even when they are not the one speaking, so as to react to other messages. One change we're making is to not  do that anymore, because it looks awkward with the dimming. Characters update when starting and finishing to speak and at no other time. This doesn't really matter except to say that that saves me some time in eventing scenes as well since I have to insert less expressions at each point.

 Other Devside QoL

Messages have certain settings by default in RPG Maker. I can show them with a different message frame, or I can make them solid, or give them our fancy background, or I can make them have no background at all. For the demo, I manually copy pasted or selected each message to choose a specific background and message frame. But one of my recent changes was to just edit the code to be more unique to Starlight so that regardless of settings, it will always show in our style with the currently set message frame. This saves me a lot of time in scene-eventing! You will never know or care. But I care. I will always care.

Smooth Movement

if i were good a person i'd take a contrast gif before and after the change. but i'm not a good person, i'm a broken person. so i'll repost my example from talking about slow-in/slow-out movement in animation:

so we have this for combat animation, but moving message art pictures around during VN scenes was still linear. I wanted to change that! Perry did some math to make it work better, and as I understand he suffered greatly in the process. And then it didn't work no good at first (the character would always end up moving too far) and so we had to revisit the math and people had to post graphs like this in the dev server:

icky. i didnt never take a calculus class just to have to look at this now! gross!

this one was also posted, i think it's more my speed:

see that's a graph i can look at and be comfortable. anyway it works better and characters move more smoothly now!

Multi Mini Messages

deep sigh.
okay, so this technically existed in the demo too. by mini-message i mean, you know when the like crowd chimes in and chats shit, right?

but the difference is that's just a normal message that's been shrinkified to fit over a character. you still have to progress through it like a normal message and only one can exist at a time. to help with chatter that doesn't interrupt the game's pace, i asked to be able to slap down multiple of those messages at a time and have them disappear on their own.

(more placeholder map + sprites)

Now you might look at this and think "oh the overlapping is the issue"
and like, maybe. i'm concerned about that but not too much because the timing staggering means you still have a chance to read it and i don't mind the feeling of people literally 'talking over' each other.

the problem here -- it's pretty indicative of how i feel in fact-- is that it, um,

it
um, it,
well, it--

oh god--

oh fuck, no wait--

oh gawwdd make it stop-----

...so yeah...

...that kind of thing is why i haven't posted much lately...

...even if we set this specific issue aside, right?

like... here's an excerpt from my dev channel today about something completely  unrelated to any of the above:

... so...
um, so, that's where development is at right now...

yeah...

oh by the way those of you in the patreon server might recognize Raven there. she has joined us on the team helping out, generally being a witness to the ongoing chaos while helping, and stymieing the continual collapse of my mental stability by taking on tiles, sprites, code, concept, and whatever else comes up. so big shout out to her for that. frankly i should've announced her sooner just for the ooc contributions alone.

unfortunately, the game is still broken.