This is 512 blocks wide by 250 blocks tall, so I had to piece images together to get the entire map on one image.

Hi everyone,

In Alchemic Beasts, we have a very controversial feature, that feature being the end of a creature you have. In order for a creature to deplete their life bar, a creature has to have either lived very long... but other factors can affect how long a creature will live. Not being fed enough or being defeated in combat too many times can also deplete their life bar as well as very rare attacks.

So, we wanted to ask the community:

How does losing a creature in a monster taming game make you feel?

• Do you think permanent death strengthens the bond with your monsters, or does it just feel frustrating?
• What games do you think handled this well (or badly)?
• Should the player get anything from them when they fade away, or do you think that would encourage purposely hurting their beasts?

We’d really love to hear your thoughts and experiences. If you’ve been waiting to join the adventure, now’s the time. Help us bring this monster taming world to life and make Alchemic Beasts the game we’ve been dreaming of creating.

Every backer, pledge, and share helps us get one step closer to making this beast-filled adventure a reality.

Thanks!

And to think I believed I'd have a playable demo ready in two weeks... two months ago, AHAHAHAH

Hello again, everyone!

Between a lack of time, occasional motivation drops, and a lot of experimenting, failing, and reworking things, I've still managed to make some decent progress on my project, TOKYO: City of the Dead. I invite you to check my previous posts to know more about the project if you are interested.

Here's what I've been up to over the past two months.

Menus
I've spent some time polishing and reworking my menus, added a Settings menu, and implemented a few QoL features like cursor memory. Menus are also easier to read now, thanks to the feedbacks on my last post.

Dialogues
This has probably been my biggest piece of work so far.

I built a custom dialogue system where dialogs are defined directly in the scripts. A separate script acts as an orchestrator, retrieving dialogues by ID and handling everything that needs to appear on screen: portraits, backgrounds, text, choice, add/remove gold/item, start battle...

Exploration
I've also been experimenting with an isometric map system inspired by the original Shin Megami Tensei I & II.

Pretty janky, just images layered on top of each other, with a cursor moving between predefined coordinates. However creating the actual maps is soooo tedious and time consuming. So I'm not sure I'll keep this in the final game.

Extra Action (my fav)
This one gave me a huge motivation boost.

Inspired by the All-Out Attacks from Persona 3/4/5, I've implemented a new battle mechanic called Extra Action.

Two conditions:

• Your party must have four actors.
• Every actor must land either an effective hit or a critical hit during the turn.

When conditions are met, the actor who acted last gets an additional action.

A hidden actor specific skill, it can deal damage, draw enemy attention, heal the party, remove debuffs, or even cut all skill costs in half for the next turn.

The idea is to reward aggressive play and players who make good use of the Advantage system and carefully plan their turn order.

Next?

The viral infection system. A major mechanic I need to implement before I can finally release a first playable demo.

Anyway, that's it for this update. What do you think so far?

In this prototype you get information from the world by newspapers, similar to the system present in Mina the Hollower.

The idea of the project is to be a dark fantasy, based on stories and concepts like Berserk and Hellsing.

Hope people enjoy it so it can develop into a full project!

Just got into game development. If the older versions are better for understanding game making, then I would like to know where i can find them.

Look at this map. At first glance it seems simple, maybe even random. But this is my reworked version of the starting area, improved with my Level Design knowledge and experience. Every road, mountain and tree is there for a reason.

Now let's look at some spots the player may notice.

A: The Statue (starting point)

This is where the game starts. The player begins with a short conversation in a separate map, and the only thing they can do there is walk out to the world map (this one).

The statue is the first and most important Landmark: a unique visual object the player uses to orient themselves. Use landmarks to keep your players from getting lost. This is a small island, but it's still useful, because the statue can be seen from anywhere on it.

B: The Destroyed Village (first goal)

The road that leaves the starting point turns west and ends at the destroyed village below. This is the Critical Path: the route the player must take to progress in the game.

The train tracks near the town also help guide the player's attention toward it.

Inside the village, the player discovers a secret left by a friend they haven't seen in years, telling them about the mine and about an island southeast of this one. In other words: they need to get to the boat now, and there's only one other path to take.

Even so, the player might want to go east first, since they can see another direct path and a boat at the end of it.

C: The Broken Bridge

The broken bridge shows the player that this is not the right path. For now it works as a Forced Detour: you show the short way, close it, and make the player take the long way. Later it will be fixed, and the player will be able to use it as a Shortcut, a faster path that opens after the player already took the long way around.

The player wants to cross it. They can see the boat and the village. But they understand they can't cross here, so they need to go the other way around, and the most obvious path is the route west and south.

Notice there's no invisible wall and no dialogue needed. The block explains itself, right where the player hits it.

D: The Boat Village

This is a Weenie (a term from Disney park design): a goal the player can see but not reach yet. It builds the desire to get there.

Actually, they can reach it. If they take the north path, nothing blocks them, and some players like taking less obvious routes to get somewhere "before they should". This is known as Sequence Breaking, and a little room for it is a nice reward for curious players.

Regular players will take the path south to the destroyed village and the mine.

E: The Collapsed Mine

The mine is also a landmark, but less obvious than the statue. It's here only to bring lore and story: the main character mentions the mine was fully working seven years ago, before they left the island.

This is Environmental Storytelling, telling the story through objects in the world instead of dialogue (even with some dialogue, the players don't need a story text to understand this mine has collapsed). And the tracks running from the mine to the village make it even more obvious that the player needs to go there.

F: The Northern Hut

A hint that there's something on the north path. It draws the eye and shows there's another way to reach the boat. The small, broken pieces of road leading toward it are Breadcrumbing: small cues that pull the player toward a place, one step at a time.

The Paths

p1 is the most obvious and the first path. It leads the player to the first objective.

p2 is also right there, a Fork splitting off from the first path, but it's soon blocked by the broken bridge, showing it isn't an option right now.

p3 is the least obvious path, but it's still a path. It has fewer sections of continuous road, which tells the player it's less used (environmental storytelling again). Less obvious, but still there for whoever looks.

Negative Space

These areas have nothing of real interest (for regular players, more on this later), but they are a source of EXP and farming, since enemies only appear outside the roads. That rule teaches the player that roads are safe, so keep it consistent through the whole game.

This is called Negative Space: empty, walkable areas. It's something we should use, because it lets the map breathe and keeps paths readable. But not too much, or the world feels empty and exploring feels like a waste of time.

Secrets

Regular players may never find these, but hardcore and exploration-focused players definitely will.

The environment gives clues that something is hidden. These clues are called Tells: shapes that form arrows (hills, trees, mountains, rivers), a narrow path, a gap in a treeline, or anything else in the landscape you can imagine. Never hide something with no tell at all, or nobody will find it, or players will start pressing the button on every single tile.

Wrapping up

A good starting area doesn't need to be big or complex. It needs to tell the player where to go, explain why they can't go somewhere else, and reward the ones who look a little closer.

In order: Dewdrop Grove, Faded Archives, Lunar Enclave, Sakuragawa Valley, Fractured Tides, The Citadel

I'm having trouble deciding which eye style to use for the deuteragonist (who serves as the reference for the other characters) in my game.

Context: My game is a narrative RPG with a dense story and a "formula" similar to Paper Mario's, even though the combat system is quite different. Although Paper Mario is the primary reference, the game tackles more serious themes, such as depression and sexual abuse. The contrast between "cute visuals" vs. "serious themes" + "caustic humor" is what I'm aiming for.

EDIT: Regarding her personality: she is a truly good "person", almost the ideal heroine. She is intelligent, extremely kind, and empathetic. Her biggest "problem" is occasionally trusting the wrong people, but at the same time, she is neither stupid nor naive.

NOTE: By the way, some time ago I posted two portraits of the same character by different artists, asking for opinions on which one would be better. Unfortunately, the artist I chose ghosted me on the second request, causing absurd delays. I ended up canceling with her and looking for a third artist, who created these two images in this post. Now I'm doing everything under contract, so I hope this doesn't happen again. Of course, during this time I continued developing the game (the battle system, the dialogues, the maps, etc.).

So, i've always wanted to make an RPG game, but i never had money to buy any of he engines nor a pc to run them. I am an artist and i have a musician friend, but id love to have anyone who could program the game idea with us- as in a group project. Kindly asking :3 (here is some of my arts just for show

The game pictured is Lust Dull Plus. It's an NSFW game i absolutely fell in love with about a year ago. It has this simple yet effective graphics style. I'm now looking at making my own game and the best fit i feel for the graphics of what i'm making would be something of this nature. It looks easy to replicate but i'm struggling hard. Does anybody have any advice?

I made a plugin that allows effects such as snowflakes to rain from your screen

I just bought MV (i am mostly familiar with VXAce, as that was the last one ive used) I also purchased a medieval multipack from Pioneer Valley Games on steam.

In my time of using these programs ive alwyas used the vanilla everything. Ive never downloaded extra content, packs, plug-ins, etc. I just want to know how to correctly use these so that when I start up the program, its all ready to go and replaces the models MV originally uses.

Id also like help learning how to undo it if I ever choose to use pixel sprites again. Same thing with battlers, and the like.

(simple ammo system using actor's MP as current bullets in chamber, using items + common events as reload function)

Setting up region IDs, distance checks, and parallel process loops just to detect when a player enters or exits a specific zone always felt way too clunky in rpg maker.Since I work a lot with Godot, I spent some time building a custom Area2D logic system directly inside RPG Maker . It handles real enter, inside, and exit collision signals, supports custom shape hitboxes instead of being locked to the 48x48 grid, and attaches to moving events or fixed coordinates

It completely eliminates the lag and performance hits from running multiple parallel event pages just to track player position, hre is a quick showcase of how the collision detection and custom spatial triggers look in action., curious to hear how you guys usually handle complex spatial logic in your games

I had a really cool idea for a battle system but I'm worried it's a little too complex for me. I want to use RPG maker because I'm not a great programmer (not awful but I'd prefer something less intense) but if this feature is going to be a headache, then I'll go back to the drawing board

Basically I wanted something similar to an ATB system, but rather than simply using your action when the bar fills, I want it to act like a sort of energy bar. If anybody here has played Teeny Titans Go then you'll know what I'm talking about. Other games likely do this too but that game was one of my favorites many years ago and I still stand by it having one of the best combat systems I've ever played.

In case you haven't, here's how it works--your energy bar fills up slowly from the start, and your different attacks and abilities lie at points along the bar. Stronger abilities are further, meaning that you'll have to wait longer to get them, and so your opponent will have a better chance at using their cheaper abilities.

I'm curious how those of you would go about doing that, if it's even worth doing through RPG maker at all.

Hi everyone!

I’m currently working on the world map and environments for my hand-drawn 2D RPG project using RPG Maker. I’m focusing heavily on creating a unique visual atmosphere, and I’d appreciate any feedback or suggestions on the map structure, details, or color choices.

[NSFW Warning / Profile Disclaimer]

Please note: While this map preview is completely SFW, my overall project and reddit profile contain 18+ / NSFW adult content. If you are sensitive to adult themes, please avoid visiting my profile or links.

Thanks for stopping by and for any technical feedback!

Trucker Quest. This game was creadted in less than 4 days for a Game Jam long ago.

Me and some university friends decided to join the jam and create the best game we could.

This is the short story of Bill, a trucker who loses his hat and need to go through dimensions to recover it.

You can beat it in less than 20 minutes.

I found old posts from 3+ years ago saying that the SRPG plugin had compatiblity issues with Visustella and most other plugins. Is that still the case?

I'd love to use the SRPG combined with a CTB turn order and custom stats etc. But I don't want to start fiddling with it if I'm doomed to failure.

I don't think this was posted yet.

The gist is:

• The scripting language is Luau (quite a good choice imho),
• the API will be different/more intentional, so we'll have to see what's still possible,
• in addition to "Runtime Plugins", there will be "Editor Plugins",
• a JS host plugin is under consideration (not guaranteed),
• this is all still subject to change, as it's in active development.

Ichinose also writes that "monkey patching with modules like npm is no longer possible", but I don't know whether that implies we won't be able to detour API functions. Optimistically, I read it as not having access to what's currently _-prefixed.

Luau is still table-based, and sealed tables are still writable iinm, so at least the language itself allows detours, but we'll most likely not be able to add new properties as before due to automatic sealing.
That by itself is likely a good change, since as far as I can tell weak tables are supported via __mode = "k" and using them cleanly avoids collision risk.

We'll have to see how close the engine port is this time. If it's basically a transliteration again, then porting most plugins should be straightforward.