There is a new update to the machinist project! Check it out !! https://gueepo.itch.io/machinist-story
Upon “releasing” my little game project idea out in the wild, my goal shifted to having semi-frequent updates. I’m calling the first update the “iteration milestone” because the goal is to work only on quality of life improvements.
A lot of things about this videogame still suck, and I would like to address as many of those things I can before moving into actually designing more battles, writing more chapters, and making more music.
I like to think of this game in three different areas: Cutscenes, Battles, and Dialogue.
Cutscenes
Most of the work on cutscenes happens on a sheet of paper where I need to write, rewrite, and add notes on top of the game script. Translating all this into a cutscene isn’t that difficult, honestly. It just looks very ugly.
I like to think that… This is a cutscene. A cutscene is just a bunch of scripted commands, but I hate this so much, but it works. So I probably won’t be overthinking this too much until it stops working! When that happens, I will be mad at myself for not thinking about this earlier.
Battles
The big question here, beyond quality of life, is how to make combat interesting.
Maybe if “Machinist Story” (Working Title) ever make it across the finish line, I can add traditional RPG elements to the game, like items, skills, party members, or any form of customization that changes how the battles play out. But these things are definitely not making it into this one. So, how *do* I make battles more interesting?
The first step was improving quality of life. The new update feature things such as:
- Being able to see how far your character can move/attack while navigating through the UI;
- Graying out options that you are not able to use anymore in this turn;
- Showing how much damage was dealt; and
- Being able to navigate the map when it’s your turn so you can see how far the enemies can move and attack.
A big challenge here is the AI. There’s just so many variables to account for. What’s the shortest path to the enemy? Which of the four positions around them I want to be at? How can I not obstruct my mates and let them kill the enemy too? What is the best path to get to the enemy if I can’t get to it this turn?
The good thing is that I don’t need to worry about none of that right now. So I won’t. Moving on.
Dialogue
My biggest issue with how dialogues are portrayed is that it isn’t clear who is speaking, and the dialogue boxes are ugly and always in the same place. I wanted to add names, portraits, and make the dialogues come out of the character.
I would like something more like this.
But unfortunately, I have spent way too much time on making the battle a little bit prettier, and making the cutscene code a little less ugly.
What’s Next?
Working on monthly iterations has been an interesting idea. And although I really want to add more stuff into this game, so the game has more battles, more cutscenes, more, more, more! I am faced with a sad reality: That intro cutscenes *SUCKS.*
So, the next iteration is simply working on the script, incorporating the pages of notes I have into the actual script, and, who knows, if time allows, I can start writing the script for the rest of the game, and not just Act I.
I will probably tackle some quality of life and small improvements here and there as well. And I expect to do *A LOT* of work on the cutscene system to improve it, but the overall goal here is simply to tell a better story in a better way. (:
gueepo 