Hey there loyal followers! I've been working on a new blog layout, that I hope to finish tonight. It's a significant upgrade this time around since it's going to be done in Wordpress rather than this primitive/buggy PHP template. The content is pretty much the same at the moment, but I'll be adding more stuff as the weeks go on.

The biggest change is that it will be integrated into my online graphic design portfolio.

Actual EJ news will be available once the new blog is live.

After 2 weeks of constant work, "Part One" is finished!!

DOWNLOAD HERE

Mediafire Mirror

in case RMN goes down randomly.

I hope it lives up to everyone's expectations! Feel free to leave me feedback any way you can!

Next on my EJ to do list:
Make a new trailer
Redesign site
Put up a donation box

I've been consistently working on the demo/beta for the past couple of months, and it's finally nearing completion. Based on how much I can get done this week and over the long Thanksgiving weekend, December 1st is very plausible.

This demo will be considered "Part 1" and will contain everything I've done thus far.

My "To Do" list before then:

*Rewrite final plot scene, setup the ending.
*Finish houses in Sriole, "day" houses in Borland
*Add some extra NPCs for kicks (almost done)
*Change item collect messages to one line
*Make dungeons visitable after getting an airship, so treasure chests can always be picked up.
*Add a few more weapons
*Fixed sign formatting
*Finish sidequests:
-Borland Tunnels
-Flogle/Ancient's Nest
-Gnome Village revisit
-Isis Trade Organization/Isis Tower revisit
*Do a final playthrough and tweak balance of battles/items:
-Add "Bersrk" "Blind" and "Mute" condition spells to enemies, include healing items
-Remove some overpowering healing items/spells
-Tweak fights in the last area/add another monster or two
*Create final title screen
*Condition animations for every character

Overall, it's about 66% complete. The ending of the demo will be similar to Magus' castle in CT. I'll probably take a break for a month or so after it's done to collect feedback, make a new trailer, probably convert this site to wordpress! I've got some cool stuff planned for the last chunk of the game.



UPDATE: Dec 4 - updated checklist. Coming up with tiny things as I go along, but it should be ready to playtest by tomorrow evening.

Dec 5 - Added/checked off a few more things.
Dec 7 - Worked on this again last night and tonight, almost done with the Borland Tunnels sidequest. Most of the other work was bugfixes and tweaks.
Dec 12 - Was hoping to have the playtest done by today, but I won't be able to start on it until tomorrow. Added a few other items in the checklist.
Dec 14 - Final playthrough is almost done. I did a lot of bugfixing and battle tweaking. Nothing game-breaking thankfully.

Alright so I finished the maps that needed to be remapped, and right now I"m working on a new tower, and extending some plot elements.

I've also been working on a couple new monster designs, and tweaking around the battle system a bit.

I announced on RPG Maker Network that I'm aiming for a November 1st "public beta/demo" release date. I'm still trying to meet it, but it might get pushed back a few weeks as I'm adding a handful of new things.

As I mentioned briefly in my last post, I changed the faceset of Sparrow, the main character. This one looks infinitely better than the last one, although I think for a while I was trying to avoid using the same faceset as one of the Legend of the Philosopher's Stone characters, but meh. They were all originally done by roco anyway.

As you can see, it's been edited to match the "Brian" rm2k charset. All of the facial expressions I've been using since the previous faceset has been made as well.



I've been working on remapping the last of the maps that need remapping. I also started on "Sriole," one of the cities on Isis. No screenshots this time for either though.

Alright so lately I've been working on airship stuff and sidequests. There's a couple custom menus I created for airship interaction.

Last Sunday I spent pretty much the whole day polishing up dialogue and removing unnecessary bits.

I also started on the first sidequest. The setting is good, and I have a general idea of how it's going to be set up, but I'm struggling to keep it at the same comedic pace as the rest of the game. I don't want it to stand out.

I'm definitely going to post a huge demo online within the next month or two. I've been thinking about how the story is going to lead into the second half of the game, and today I finally realized how I can tie what I have planned with what's already been established. I'm going to get started on it this weekend, but basically it's going to be a parallel narrative taking place directly after the Firam chapter, that puts you in the point of view of one of the characters that gets separated. It's going to introduce one of the main cities planned, as well as the 7th playable character, and also develop the main villain more. At the right point, it'll jump back to the main narrative. It's important for the development of the villain, as well as the character that takes a back seat for most of the game. It's gonna be a little tricky, but I promise it'll be sweet!

Oh... I guess the other significant thing I did was change Sparrow's faceset completely last weekend. It's awesome now. I'll post it later.



Oh, on a completely unrelated note, I designed the title screen/logo the other day for CHRONO TRIGGER 2: TIME'S ECLIPSE. I'm skeptical about how the game will be, because it's trying to add onto Chrono Trigger, but check it out here: http://rpgmaker.net/games/1899/

I think these screenshots speak for themselves:


(Main deck)


(Engine Room)


(Rec Room)

I pulled the jukebox from my ALEX III map, because I love it. In game, it was found as a "relic."

And to quote Nate's absurdly vague remark when I showed him these screenshots, "more things need airships."

So as you can tell, I took a brief hiatus. I was busy with a lot of things, but the creative juices are finally flowing again lately. One thing I actually did recently was play and beat Final Fantasy VI for the first time! What a game!

In EJ though, I've accomplished several things I didn't expect to get done so quickly over the past few days. I finished up the work I was doing in Hiram. A new mini area called the "Blue Marshes" has been added. I finished a number of dialogue rewrites in that area & changed the look of the Krakken boss (pictured below).



In about 2-3 evenings, I have already rewrote the dialogue in the Crystali chapter, and redone the tilesets. There's only a few changes to the outer town set, but the inner has been completely reworked to stay consistent with the other inner tilesets.



The only thing I have left to do is rewrite some of the final dialogue before the party gets an airship, and then work on these things:

-Rework airship inner & Paul's mansion inner tilesets.
-Minor dialogue edits in Paul's mansion chapter.
-Ruined capitol of Sriole, which will be an area you can visit prior to Paul's mansion, but the sidequest won't start until much later.
-Make sure areas you can revisit via airship all make sense with continuity. I'll need to write a couple things for the gnome village, but I think the other areas are all set.

After that will be the second round of beta testing. My goal is to get that stuff done within the next month, but we'll see.

I finished a couple tilesets. The inner tileset for the Hiram castle town has been modified to match the style of the other ones. I've pretty much finished the inner tileset to the castle itself. It's a tad similar to Firam Palace, but I'm going for more of a serene, peaceful style.

See, look! This guard doesn't know what to do with himself!



Basically, the castle has never been truly mapped before. I made one room originally that had the King & Queen in it, mainly because I was lazy and I didn't want to map another castle. What's happening now is that because of the way the outside of the castle is shaped, it's going to be split up into 3 parts-- the main audience chamber in the center, the east wing (which includes a pub, the armory, and royal chambers), and the west wing (which will include the main dining hall, some bedrooms, and the other half of the royal chambers). I'll keep the royal chambers off limits to the player in both wings because there will be enough to explore already, and there wouldn't be much I want to put there for the player to interact with. The east wing rooms are mostly done at the moment, so I'll be working on the west wing over the next couple of days.

These are some old screenshots of the outside of the castle, and part of the town. The outside mapping hasn't really changed.

The mines are officially finished. I haven't done a full playthrough so I don't know how long exactly it is, but I'm guessing it'll take an average player between 30 to 45 mins.

Here's a peak at one of the maps!



The last map and the boss fight turned out really really great. I'm really excited to find out what people will think!

On to Hiram!