/ig/ - RPGMaker / Gamedev

So I'm actually making a fan game for my first game, and I designed her back when I wasn't even sure how I wanted her to look. I couldn't find my fist draft of her but my character, Jiko, went through 5 different looks before getting to how she looks now. I love black, and I'm not very good at color combinations, so when I decided I didn't want to make her wear all black but instead I wanted her to be colorful and bright to oppose the games themes, I was at loss on how to make the colors I wanted work. I actually used a green tea can to make the color combination work (exact same colors as Jiko). It was really hard to decide on a personality so I went through a few different ones, where she started out shy and the theme of the dreams was going to be anxiety, but I changed her personality entirely to a quirky, sarcastic, fun girl who has insecurities but her powers help her come out of that and save a life. She's also not afraid to do what she has to. But yeah, since I decided to change the game direction and make it heavy on plot, I also incorporated ways to make the effects part of her abilities (she can walk through other people's dreams and collect figments, aka effects, of her own and others memories and perceptions.


Sorry if this is a jumbled mess, I hope that was what you were kind of asking for, but yeah~ that's a shortened, crammed version of my creation of Jiko

>>42
P.s. sorry for the grammar and punctuation errors, it was hard to type all of that since I'm on a cell phone

Everyone's so shy…

My dreamer's name is Tetsutsuki (lit. With iron)
I won't say much about her because I'm making her fangame. But she was made for the same purpose as the fangame: raising awareness about emotional abuse.
The game she appears in will be names Nickel, and it'll be metal-themed.
The girl in the drawing (which I made months ago) is named Doutsuki and is her twin sister who will ALSO be a dreamer for a sequel of Nickel (it will be named Copper)

So about the creation process.
I went with something to match her personality and the game's atmosphere.
At first her name was Karatsuki, and her hair was black.
But I chose having Karatsuki in another fangame more meaningful to me (like a self portrain YN fangame version).
I was going to name her Nickel in Japanese-tsuki but it sounded less esthetic than Tetsutsuki lmao

>>57
>(lit. With iron)
それが鉄でや鉄とってと思うだけど。
TetsutsukiちゃんとDoutsukiちゃんの名の書き方、教えてくれないのか

>>58
That's so cool, it seems fangame industry is not so dead after all

What I want to make is a YNalike that is approached more like an illustration project. I don't want there to be a lot of gameplay or puzzle solving outside of walking around and interacting with the environment. At best I want to include some animations, but ultimately I just want to produce the kind of immersive, surreal atmosphere that inspires me to do my work.

That said, I have no idea what to name my character, let alone my game. There probably isn't going to be a cohesive narrative since I'm poor at story telling, but I am going to put in some symbolism related to a lot of the dreams I've had that might indicate to the player character's personality and life. Otherwise, I just want them to serve as an avatar that the player uses to explore the world.

Right now they are basically just a sprite of me so they're pretty androgynous, so far so good I guess. Should I opt for a human name? I don't want to fall into the "-tsuki" trap, so are maybe there any English terms I could use similar to "Madotsuki" that would basically state "this is an avatar?" There was a translation of "Urotsuki" that read "sleepwalker," which I thought was pretty cool, but the literal "wanderer" in and of itself is nice.

Any advice?

>>63

>Not a lot of puzzle solving outside of walking around and interacting with the environment.
I like it already, I'm the kind of person who thinks moving chairs in the right order to make a door appear(which seems to be the kind of standard puzzle nowdays) is kind of ridiculous, maybe not so ridiculous, but when you have to do this kind of task in every game you play it starts to get stupid, I really don't know why most indie devs can't offer a challenge outside of crappy puzzles.

>Should I opt for a human name? I don't want to fall into the "-tsuki" trap, so are maybe there any English terms I could use similar to "Madotsuki" that would basically state "this is an avatar?"
Your choice, I lose interest when I see the tsuki meme, it was acceptable the first 50 games, but now I wonder why this exists…
I think leaving the name field empty is fine, just look at Miserere.
If I had to choose a name for a YNFG, I'd think in the environment first, for example, using a japanese name when my game looks too western can be kind of odd.
That's just my opinion, the advice I would give is, don't clone, make your imagination work, make your own ideas, a YNFG doesn't need to be:
>Memetsuki is locked in her room but then she can go to sleep and collect effects in her edgy dreams so we can get le sekrt endings lol
Or if you follow the formula, burn your brain and make it unique.
The best of luck.

>>63
>Any advice?

Yeah, first and foremost, avoid using RPGmaker. Nobody will take you seriously, and at most you will have 20 downloads.
About the names, don't fall into the japanese trap (Why should you use japanese in the first place?). I mean sure, YN is japanese, but you aren't, you aren't aiming specifically for a japanese fanbase, and it's highly probably you don't know japanese (I guess, if you do congratulations, we're three are most in this chan). Also, the -tsuki pun is just lame, and funnily enough, used like shit in the western fandom (Most of the times it's just a random word translated with google + tsuki, THAT DOESN'T MAKE ANY FUCKING SENSE IN JAPANESE. It's like attaching -have to random words. "Cancer-have", "Weekend-have", "Blood-have", "Fag-have", "Penis-have", this isn't english and sounds horrible).
If you don't want to give your MC a name, don't; owl did this and it worked fantastic.

Your style looks pretty nice and it seems like you have nice ideas. I wish you the best luck.

>>66
>"Fag-have", "Penis-have"
Must use.

>>65

Thank you for the encouragement.

What I liked about Yume Nikki was that the "puzzles" like putting out the fire were subtle enough that they didn't really interfere too much with the flow of the exploration aspect. For all that I love it, one of the things that frustrates me most about Y2 is that there are interesting areas that are literally inaccessible unless you find this one specific item, and several of those items are dependent on other items you have to have. By the time I've pulled up a guide and found several other things first, I'm so far away from the original place that going all the way back is a chore. The game is very beautiful and I like that you can find new ways to interact with the areas you might have already been in, but it comes at the cost of having huge blocks that I have no real interest in exploring.

I liked the snow effect because you could become a cute snowman. You could also melt in front of the fire if you thought of trying it. Plus, you could also use the hat and scarf to hide from chasers, which is a nice added bonus. I don't want to spoon feed the players, but I don't want to create something so tedious that it would discourage people from playing. This is also why I'm seriously considering avoiding a maze unless there is a really compelling cosmetic purpose for it like Hell did.

Sorry for the blog post. I've been working on this tentatively for about a year and a half so I'm really excited about it. :')

>>66

I think I'm going to go with an empty name field, and I will definitely stick with a Western name for the game title when I come up with it. What should I opt for in place of RPGmaker, though? I have absolutely no coding abilities and I've already created a bit of the content that I intend to put into the game already, but I guess it wouldn't be the end of the world to start from scratch.

That said, I will do my best to try to put out something fresh and inspiring. Thank you two for your encouragement.

>>70
>you could also use the hat and scarf to hide from chasers
Wait, are you serious?

>>71
Oh shit, I was actually thinking of how Mafurako becomes invisible when you use the Stoplight effect. Disregard, cocks, etc.

>>63
>What I want to make is a YNalike that is approached more like an illustration project.

Have you thought about maybe doing it as a point-and-click style of game? It might be fitting since it may allow a more Illustrative feel.

As for the name, I like Wanderer.

>What should I opt for in place of RPGmaker, though?

I’m also interested in knowing opinions on this, please.

>>73
From what you suggest, ren'py sounds fine.

The player character for a game that relies a lot in exploration and collecting different stuff. I wasn’t sure what I’d want as a protagonist in this game and tried many different ideas, till eventually I liked the design of one drawing I did while brainstorming. Some of the guidelines I had in mind that influenced it was to keep the protagonist a bit vague in appearance; just something simple but still characteristic; it had to give me a feel like something that is ready to explore the game’s world; it had to make sense in context; the garment choice seemed useful for what he does; and because I have a thing for capes, cloaks, and big coats.

I’m developing him as something between an avatar but with a personality of his own. I’m not sure about the concepts I have for him, and as such I’m still trying around what works and fits to my liking, so he’ll probably change. Not even what’s in the image is definitive, it’s just sketch studies. Right now I’m more worried about worldbuilding. Something that I’m unsure is whether to draw him in my usual style, or to come up with a cutesy style and use that instead.

I’m sorry for the awfulness of the images. I’m still trying to get better at drawing, and to get used to the tablet and the graphic software.

>>75
wow! that tim burtons charisma shining

>>76
Thank you. It’s interesting that you’re not the first one to tell me that although I’ve never studied the author’s style. Maybe I should.

>>74
I’ve never used ren’py. One of the games I had in mind when I wrote my suggestion was Fran Bow, which is point-and-click and has stunning illustrative-like visuals. How complicated would be to do something similar in ren’py?

>>154
>How complicated would be to do something similar in ren’py?
Depends, I consider it piss easy because I know python. The engine is just wonderful for that kind of stuff. But if you never touched code in your life it will seem sightly hard at the start, however there are thousand of python guides and books around the net, and it isn't that hard either honestly.

An alternative would be to download the source of a game which had this feature and see what the dev wrote there. UAB is the only game that comes to my mind right now.

>>154
It looks complicated at first but it's actually very easy to learn, Renpy rocks.

>>156
Ren'Py is stupid simple to use and makes creating CYOA type games and visual novels a breeze… but it's really heavy on needing art assets. If you can't draw for crap, hopefully you can find someone who can. Crunchy pixels aren't really its style.

It's an abandoned project for now, but here are images featuring badly edited RPG Makever VX assets. I would say it's "intentional", "deliberate", or maybe even "parodic" but the truth is, I have 0 art skills, and couldn't make decent pieces even if I tried.

Basically, the idea is that this character– the MAIN character, is a generic guard, and has an unspeakable horror behind his mask that kills anyone if they see it. Nobody has any clue to what really lies there, but the character himself and the narrator speculates that it may be that his face is just so hideous that it's functionally a sort of "information basilisk"*.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/information_basilisk

There's another sprite I used somewhere in a video, but I can't find it. I'm pretty sure I featured it in one of my youtube uploads, so I'll try to dig around for that later.

ah, looks like that article's gone missing