Journal

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 ...

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 ...

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brought classic RPGs into the modern era, keeping the things that made them great and upgrading things that were outdated.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 ...

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

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 ...

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

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 ...