Author Archive

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brought classic RPGs into the modern era, keeping the things that made them great and upgrading things that were outdated.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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Lighting in Last Dream II

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The very first “dungeon” that the Gray Mage, Lucius, enters in Last Dream II is called the “Moros Ruins”. We had nearly finished this dungeon but realized we couldn’t really get the right feeling – it was supposed to be dank and dark but that simply wasn’t coming across.

We started with adding moss to age the stone tiles, but then for realism and immersion decided we needed some small puddles of water (with dripping animations) to explain the ubiquitous moss.

Maybe ...

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Realizing the Dream

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Realizing the Dream

 Working on video game development among talented friends is a dream realized, although our final fantasy remains in progress: multiple team members would love to quit their day jobs and focus exclusively on the Last Dream series full time.

Without our primary employment as programmers, scientists, engineers, and business managers, we could delve deeply into crafting thematic cultures, music, and graphic art within each section of LD2; we could challenge ourselves with mobile and arcade versions, compete in timed trials against ...

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Last Dream II Character Classes

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Last Dream II Character Classes

We thought we’d take this opportunity to introduce the Last Dream II character classes to you. One thing you’ll notice immediately is that we’ve transitioned to unique graphic art. We’ve hired a talented graphic artist ( https://twitter.com/UncleBladey) to create new character sprites (as well as enemy battlers that we’ll show you later).

 Leif: The Berserker (New Character Class in Last Dream II)

Leif was an aimless youth who found success as a member of a ...

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Last Dream II Status Update #1

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Hello everyone!

We’ve just finished up our annual retreat with the entire White Giant RPG Studios team including myself (Andrew), Josh, Mark, Seth, and Chris. We’ve worked hard over the last week to make substantial progress on Last Dream II. Over the last year, we’ve been developing unique graphic art and we’ve only recently developed the tools necessary to integrate our art into maps for Last Dream II.

The image above is the exterior of the first dungeon that the Gray Mage ...

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