Archive for 'Blog'

Equipment Socketing System – Part I

Posted by:

Equipment Socketing System – Part I

We’re excited to announce that Last Dream 2 will allow the player to customize gear bonuses by utilizing a gem-socketing system! Gem socketing will replace the synthesized gear system of Last Dream and Last Dream: World Unknown. While the synthesized gear gave the player some level of choice in their gear bonuses, it didn’t quite fit with the level of player-driven character building (ability points) that we wanted. Thus, for Last Dream 2 we wanted a system that allowed more ...

Continue Reading →

Next Post Topic

Posted by:

What topic would you most like to see covered in our next post?

Continue Reading →

Battle System Updates

Posted by:

Hello all,

Sorry that it’s been several weeks since our last update. We’ve been hard at work developing the Last Dream II battle system from scratch and we’ve made some significant progress that we’d like to share with you.

The video above shows a battle with a Miasma Bubble in the Moros Ruins (the first dungeon of the Gray Mage’s prologue). We hope you like the animated enemy and Gray Mage as well as the special effects as the Gray Mage uses ...

Continue Reading →

NPCs in Last Dream II

Posted by:

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.

Continue Reading →

Sprite Creator

Posted by:

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 ...

Continue Reading →

The Black Forest: Auto-tiles and Water Shaders

Posted by:

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 ...

Continue Reading →

A Successful Transition to the Godot Engine

Posted by:

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 ...

Continue Reading →

New Engine for Last Dream II!

Posted by:

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 ...

Continue Reading →

Evaluating Game Engines

Posted by:

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 ...

Continue Reading →

Customization: Message Boxes

Posted by:

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 ...

Continue Reading →
Page 19 of 23 «...101718192021...»