Development Journal 1/14

Greetings!

This was a fairly productive week as far as game work goes. I read a couple of relevant books, which helped sort out my own thoughts on plot and theme-related matters. There's still a lot of plot work to be done, but I now have a much clearer idea of where I want this game to end up and how - more or less - it's going to get there.

I also did work on mapping. There are a number of RPG Maker games out there with really pretty maps, and some folks had expressed hopes that maybe The Proteus Effect could be like that, too. If you see a map that looks drastically different from a stock map, chances are it was made through a technique known as parallax mapping. Basically, the technique involves making one or more images, usually in a program like Gimp or Photoshop, and then overlaying those onto a stripped-down RPG Maker map. The player then sees the pretty, sometimes handpainted map instead of the basic RPG Maker one.

I did a fair bit of investigation into parallax mapping this week, but I've decided I won't be using it, for two main reasons. First, it's very time intensive. There's no way I could stick to a more-or-less monthly release schedule if I used it. Even fairly basic sprucing-up of the stock maps takes quite a long time. Second, it impacts performance. Parallax maps take up thousands (!) of times more memory than the standard RPG Maker maps. This can cause a number of problems for folks playing the game on not-exactly-stellar hardware, particularly for larger maps. It can also cause lag when switching between zones, even if you do have good hardware. Maybe all this stuff is fine if all you're doing is turn-based combat, but if you're using a lot of action sequences - like I am - it just doesn't make sense.

If the project ever brings in a lot of money, I might think about hiring someone to do parallax mapping and trying to figure out a way to make it work. But as it is, if you like this game, I figure it's mostly because of the writing and the renders (and maybe the gameplay), so I want to devote most of my development time to those.

Having said that, I did investigate some other methods that will make the maps look better, but without the drawbacks of parallax mapping. They won't have as drastic an impact as parallax mapping, but I'm having good results with them so far, so hopefully you like it!

If everything goes as planned, I'll finish up the maps in the early part of the week, and then start scripting events and writing dialogue in the later part.

I hope you have a good week, and thank you for your support!