Completed

• Title Screen and Main Menu
• In-Game Menu
• Base Spritework for Charis and Main NPCs
• Most Map spritework!
• Portraits for Main NPCs
• Music and SFX Assignment
• Base Mechanics and codework!
• Base story planning

WIP

• Portraits for Other NPCs
• Map for a certain level
• The actual eventing….
• Spritework for item icons and moves and etc.
• Spritework for non-main NPCs

Low Priority

• Potentially replace default FX

Overall, I’ve done most of the “base” work to varying degrees of headaches. I’m not that much of a coder, but I know just enough to edit and revise already existing scripts to what I need! Not everything is script-reliant as RPGMaker specifically is known for its unique eventing system, so I was quite happy to be able to pull off specific stuff such as the custom Title Screen and Menus through eventing. I am doing my best to minimize the scopework to something workable, which I feel as though I’m doing alright aside from a few ambitious things that spawn from me purely having a lot of gumption. There’s one battle scene planned where I didn’t have to exactly make a whole animated spritesheet for everything in it, but I did so anyway. My compromise is that I am using the default FX and sounds provided by RPGMaker RTP, but who knows if I’ll actually let that slide or not later.

Which goes to say, there’s a lot of work that goes into RPGMaker compared to a visual novel… I’ve already tried to circumvent a good portion of this through parallax mapping to avoid making tilesets and getting more control over how the map looks! It’s why I never got to commit too hard into making one because of how many assets are required, but I figured that this story is enough for me to give it a whirl. I do enjoy the process so far, and it is cool seeing how many things I can “customize” within an older RPGMaker engine. The age of the engine also provides some unique challenges when googling for solutions, given that the newer engines (MV/MZ) are the most prevelant with its various plugins.

At this point, I am mostly in the eventing stage, making it very difficult to actually show much progress visually anymore. Still, I’ve recently finished hammering out the one, singular, battle that will be in the game. I’m not very good at the RPGMaker Math or anything, so rather than be stuck on the math, I wanted to design the battle encounter more around the characters’ vibe themselves. Charis is a very mundane, normal person, so their toolkit in the battle is very minimal and pathetic. Don’t worry. They’ll have a buddy that’ll help turn the tides! It might be a little tough because of how much damage that can go out, but it’ll be doable, hopefully.

There are other aspects I have to do, such as making the NPCs of the world also match the in-game style, but for the time being, I’ve been using the default guys as placeholders. I also almost broke my game trying to implement Message Core to give the dialogue boxes the ability to show an NPC’s name to avoid making portraits for everything that isn’t relevant. So, if there are portraits, they may be important people!

I’ll also post two screenshots below to show off the title screen and a little bit of in-game stuff!