Archive for 2020

NPCs in Last Dream II

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NPCs in Last Dream II

After a lot work creating all of the elements for our non-playable characters (NPCs), we’ve finally started creating them for the game and deploying them to specific locations in the Gray Mage’s prologue. You can see the Weapon and Armor shopkeepers in the Ashwood Equipment Shop in the screenshot below:

We’ve also started working on the dialogue display system as well as the battle system. We’ll be sharing more on these aspects of Last Dream II soon.

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Sprite Creator

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Sprite Creator

With the mapping of the Gray Mage prologue complete, we’ve switched our focus to the creation of unique non-playable character (NPC) sprites. Using Python, we’ve created a simple GUI that allows both manual selection of NPC elements as well as simple randomization.

There are still a few minor bugs to work out as well as areas where it is simply incomplete (such as missing shoes), but it’s in a state where we’re comfortable sharing it with you.

Nearly every element allows ...

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The Black Forest: Auto-tiles and Water Shaders

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The Black Forest: Auto-tiles and Water Shaders

Over the last two weeks, we’ve been working hard on two separate efforts:

1) Auto-tiling + Dynamic Water

2) Recreating menus in Godot

This post will focus on (1), but we’ll update you soon on our status on the Godot menus which are coming along nicely.

Auto-tiling has been a major time saver in terms of creating maps; however, it is sometimes challenging to create an auto-tile template. This was definitely the case for dirt walls that are on display in the second dungeon ...

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A Successful Transition to the Godot Engine

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A Successful Transition to the Godot Engine

We wanted to show off the transition to the Godot Engine. The screenshot shows the map for the Ashwood Equipment Shop as seen in the editor including the blue overlays for collisions. Godot autotiles have been a tremendous bonus that has significantly increased our development speed.

The same area can be seen as it will show “in-game”. 

At present, we have mapped the entirety of the initial town (Ashwood) and the initial dungeon (Moros Ruins). The screenshot below shows the fantastic ...

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New Engine for Last Dream II!

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We’re excited to announce that we’ve chosen a new engine for Last Dream II. After prototyping in Unity, EasyRPG, and Godot, we have chosen Godot!

Godot will enable some exciting new features such as dynamic lighting, location dependent sound effects, and realistic water effects (just to name a few). 

We’ve been utilizing the excellent autotile features in Godot to rapidly remap the Gray Mage prologue. While we did lose a bit of progress, we expect that the improved workflow in Godot will ...

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Evaluating Game Engines

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Hello all – this is a special post available to the public!

Last Dream and Last Dream: World Unknown were both created using the RPG Maker VX engine, but we believe that the time has come to cut the cord and move onto a new development engine.

We started this transition several years ago when we started developing unique graphic art. There have been significant improvements to RPG Maker MV such as support for mobile, etc.; however, it remains less performant than ...

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Customization: Message Boxes

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Last Dream 1 and World Unknown brought classic RPGs into the modern era, keeping the things that made them great and upgrading things that were outdated. Most of the polish went into the combat, classes, leveling, and storytelling. Graphically, we had plenty of custom costumes and some custom sprites. But one thing we did not have was our own “look and feel”. Here’s a screenshot of Last Dream 1’s message boxes. While serviceable, they are clearly from one of RPG ...

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Character-specific Sidequests

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 How should Last Dream II deal with character-specific sidequests?

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Exclusive Enemy Artwork

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A major decision our indie team made early on for Last Dream 2 was to exclusively feature custom graphic art. This was a substantial commitment that has involved hundreds of design decisions, mapping tweaks, hand-wringing over menu formats, and re-colorings of trees, walls, wine bottles, etc!

We were fortunate to befriend a pixel artist named Blade (https://twitter.com/UncleBladey). His dedicated, multi-year effort to newly create hundreds of unique NPCs, character profiles, blades of grass, and fierce enemies is ...

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Last Dream II Mini-Games

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Which mini-game sounds most interesting for inclusion into Last Dream II?

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