Consuming Ocean [Dead Game]

[Deathworks]

Hi!

It is so frustrating to see that you can't understand Japanese. If you could, there would be quite some options.

The best recommendation would be Wolf RPG Editor, in my opinion, as it very easily allows you to really strip it down to bare bones - and if I say bare bones, I mean it. I have reactivated an old RPG project of mine where I do everything from scratch (I know, far too ambitious), and the engine allows me to do that. It basically offers you the tools to create maps and allow for movement on those maps, and everything else is coded as events that you can take apart. There are also no hard-coded combat routines or character/enemy stats, so you can either take apart the default routines and data structures or design your very own.

Since you just about everything is up for grabs, making English language games on it is no problem - however using the engine requires to at least translate the manual and then remember the names of things (^_^;;

If you wish to take a look at it and think about it, this is the link:

http://www.silversecond.com/WolfRPGEditor/

Ah, it is genuine freeware, and they just had their second competition for games made with it:

http://www.silversecond.com/WolfRPGEditor/Contest/

The video you can watch on that page also includes scenes from the top ten of that contest (55 entries, all downloadable), and while I will probably never understand why "Gravity" got first place, that top ten gives you a good impression of how far you can twist that engine (^_^;;

EDIT: I just noticed another video where someone did some other experiments with the engine (not really useful, but interesting to watch):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IYA3fJ3 ... r_embedded

Deathworks

[slpowerhouse]

@slpowerhouse:
I may not have understood what you said correctly, but it did give me an idea. Unfortunately...

Well I am a programmer so let me try to explain what I said earlier. Basically when you said flag it made me think of a Boolean variable, this is a type of variable that has can only have one of two values either true or false. So If you set a Boolean variable for the monster to have the capturing or eating status which seems right now to be defaulted to true. In order to make it so that if the enemy uses the capture or devour attack but it doesn't target anybody you could set the Boolean for capturing or eating to false before your do the target checks this will make the enemy not enter that status unless the attack actually hit a valid target, this is when you set the Boolean to true.

On the subject of infinite loops in order to ensure that this never actually happens all you need to do is set a counter in the loop and when that counter hits a specific number you break out of the loop.

An easy way to ensure that ideal conditions are always met in the game is to force the player to always have Feyla and Amila (it's late where I am so I can't spell names right now) as characters in the party, basically these two can never be switched out or you can force the player to always have the maximum number of players in the group that they can fill. The later option is probably the best and makes it so that once you have four party members the player must have 4 party members participate in battle and then when a fifth member joins you can switch that person in and switch out another of the party at will but in order for the game to let you continue playing the party must have 4 people in it, with this method a KOd character counts as a party member that can fight since they can be revived.

[stiltzkinator]

@stiltzkinator:
I've changed up the targeting from what you probably know. Now it's a "guaranteed" hit, no option to miss. With the old version, it seemed like there was a small chance of missing, but when it looped if it couldn't target someone, there was a rather decent chance of missing.

I just checked the old stuff, and uh, I calculated that very badly. My bad. And what's worse is that I never realized it all this time.

Also, can you set the game up in such a way that you never encounter more enemies than the number of characters in your current party? Seems like that would also scale the dfficulty appropriately; even with a working system, 3 vs 3 would be fairly challenging since it's disasterous once all three are eaten with low stamina (which is probably as intended), but with 3 vs 2, or worse, it seems like that would be considerably problematic even in good conditions. Alternatively, another easy solution is to never have the party drop below three characters once you Celina joins...but that would hinge on any special events or antyhing you have planned (depending on the flow of the story, if all instances of >3 characters are scripted event battles, you can work around it anyway). Lots of RPGs are like this, in that when you have a standard party size, the game may not allow you to drop below it because it's...just not meant to be played that way, usually. This brings to mind a question that you probably don't want to consider because of the potential problems it could cause: is there going to be a feature for switching (non-eaten/captured) party members in combat? Because That's something I've always wanted to try out. :W

These rambling ideas may not be of any help at all, but I thought I'd throw them out there like always.

In terms of RPGMaker, it really is finicky, and about the weirdest things. I use a lot of more classic approaches to working with it though, which is why it's kind of fun to troubleshoot the innovations you're trying to make it use, but I can understand the frustration of having to stop and reconstruct every time you want to add something that should not be quite so difficult.

[peteian]

Well, if RPGMaker is giving you that much trouble why not switch to Stencyl for Consuming Oceans as well as Unnamed Platformer Project ? Might work, worth trying? I think

[slpowerhouse]

@stiltzkinator: As far as I remember form my brief stint working with RPG gamemaker, the system is designed to allow you to have up to 4 party members fighting. it is possible in the later systems to limit the player to only having 2 or 3 characters in battle at a time but I don't know how to do that. Also There is an easy way to make it so that you only run into 3 monsters or less when you have 3 party members, just go into the database and set up troops so that the enemies that appear in the areas where you only have 3 party members only appear at the most with 3 of them. oh and if you want to try the switching party members in combat try the golden sun series, the second game had eight party members that you could switch between at any time during combat.

[stiltzkinator]

oh and if you want to try the switching party members in combat try the golden sun series, the second game had eight party members that you could switch between at any time during combat.

I actually meant I wanted to try coding it. That was one of the better features in the Atelier Iris series and rather helpful in parts of SO4 as well. And indeed, it was well-handled in Golden Sun. I just want to see what's involved in making it work.

[slpowerhouse]

oh and if you want to try the switching party members in combat try the golden sun series, the second game had eight party members that you could switch between at any time during combat.

I actually meant I wanted to try coding it. That was one of the better features in the Atelier Iris series and rather helpful in parts of SO4 as well. And indeed, it was well-handled in Golden Sun. I just want to see what's involved in making it work.

Theoretically it shouldn't be that hard but like I said before I haven't worked in RPG gamemaker since I could run 2000, though in theory all you would need to do is have a menu option that allows you to switch party members in combat, it might be useful for getting rid of KOed team mates from the battle partty when you don't have a revival item.

[Rayen]

@Deathworks:
That's an interesting engine. I'm still learning Japanese, but I do understand a bit, so I'll play around with it and see what I can do. I kinda doubt that I'll end up using it, but ye never know what could happen. :V Thanks for the suggestion!

@slpowerhouse:
You see, the problem is this. 3 enemies : 4 party members. 2 party members die. 3 enemies : 2 party members. Battle system gets blown to hell. Your suggestions, while they are nice though a pain in the butt to implement, aren't really going to help. Besides most of the time, you're only going to have 3-5 total party members.
Also, like I said earlier, I know how to fix it. I just need to get over myself and do it. :V

@stiltzkinator:
Again, the main problem isn't the starting number of player characters, but the fact that some can die in battle and screw it all up. So unless an enemy decides to leave when one of your characters goes down and keep the battle even, it won't really work.
I'm halfway trying to figure out a way to simplify the whole battle system. The only real special features I want are changing battlers, and the Devour and Capture skills. And the way I have it now, it's turning out to be way too much work for such a small change to the battle system.

@peteian:
I'm seriously considering that now. Though, it'll take me a while to figure out Stencyl. Though, it would be cool to just be able to embed the game in a webpage, cause then there'd be no download at all. :V Flash is awesome like that.


Update (Now with 50% less rage!):
Still trying to decide whether to keep beating on RPG Maker or switch to Stencyl. Pros and Cons of Moving:
Pros:
-Bypass all limitations of RPG Maker. (Huzzah!)
-Could build the battle system however I want. (I could add even more features that could make things more fun.)
-No more stupid downloads. (Yes, I'm looking at you, RTP. You bastard. :V)
Cons:
-Have to learn Stencyl first. (Not too hard, but will take time.)
-Have to build system from scratch. (Will take more time.)
-Can't have stiltzkinator help me quite as well anymore. (Sadness. ;_;)

Anyway, any suggestions? I mean, the final decision is mine, but I'd like to know what you guys think. :V

[tigercowboy]

if you do the switch that means we just have to downloud one thing and run that one thing right?

[stiltzkinator]

If Stencyl is as open as it sounds, then you can code anything, right? If thats the case, we could hope that one of two scenarios would arise:
A. You would no longer need any help at all and would be able to smash your way through coding the battle system no problem (ideal).
B. Something complicated comes up and it's just a matter of puzzling over it with different approaches at the logic of it, which is pretty much what I'm good at.

By the way, though, one can ultimately do as much custom coding in rpgm as they want, yes? It's very, er...Qbasic-y in the type of code it uses and I'm not super familiar with it anymore, but I used to just forcefully overwrite anything that didin't work for me. Events seem to be largely under control in rpgmaker; as for battles, all you need is to display images, and have calculations run that change the displayed images. I know, sounds simpler than it is, but I used to do it when I was more into programming, but I don't remember if it was XP or VX that was totally open in how you could code...

Getting more to the issue at hand, why exactly does it bug out again, and why only when there's less living characters than enemies? The built-in system usually doesn't freak out too much with dead characters, so I'm leaning toward this being in the targeting code...again?

[Deathworks]

HI!

O.o
In that case, Wolf RPG Editor comes a strong suggestion in my book.
The community is currently quite active and they seem to have a decent collection of routines people have shared.
In addition, if you switched to Wolf RPG Editor, I could help a bit with programming and debugging. (My projects usually come to a standstill because of the hard work of creating content, especially graphics - the programming is always the easiest bit for me :) :) :) )

And if people are wondering, Wolf RPG Editor games come as a single download, no RTP required (although I am still wondering why people claim to have problems with the RTP - I have successfully installed the Japanese RTPs on various computers and never had a problem (^_^;; ). However, the games are again Windows executables.

Deathworks

[Rayen]

I meant to post this a while ago, but I've been super busy.

Turns out my boss was super serious about making a game company. I'm now doing design and graphics for 3 different games. One of which is a really over-ambitious MMORPG. It's a good thing my boss is a better programmer than I could ever hope to be. :V (Seriously, he's bloody amazing. He got most of the framework for two of the games all set up this week. >.> )

But uh, what this means for this:
I'm taking a possibly permanent break from this. I'll admit, I'd rather work on things that I could potentially profit from. And from the looks of things, I'm gonna be busy for a while. Though, that's not the main reason. To be totally honest, I'm bloody sick of the whole thing. I'm sick of RPG Maker, and I can't seem to get into anything else. I can't even seem to get anything going in Stencyl. (Besides pre-built stuff, of course. But, that's not really "making a game".)

So yeah. Sorry that I've been disappointing you guys so much lately. I think I might just drop the whole game idea, and just become a normal vore artist. Er... Well, however "normal" a vore artist can be. :V

As a sort of apology, here's all the art I have done for this game. All versions, even the ancient one way back when. I included the spritesets for the "full" enemies from the first version of the game which anyone can use if they want. Though, there isn't a whole lot in it that you guys haven't seen. :/
Download Link: http://www.mediafire.com/file/vtzhy0w2m ... %20Art.rar [8.45 MB .RAR file]

[Deathworks]

Hi!

Thank you for releasing your material, Rayen. This way, someone might take up the baton, so you are doing really a lot for the community there.

You do not need to feel about this; you do not owe us anything and if you need to get real food for yourself and your family, your virtual friends should not stand in the way.

Perhaps we need more cooperative projects with different people doing different things ... Ah, just pondering.

Anyhow, good luck with the new developments in real life, and I hope you still find the time to visit us.

Deathworks

[The_Prof]

well best of luck to ya in your new job Rayen mah boi... Though a fair warning to your boss an MMORPG is a highly ambitious decision. If you try to commercially publish it most likely chances are it will just be completely trampled by WoW just like Tabula Rasa, APB, FFXI, Warhammer Online, Age of Conan, and the other mmo's that chose to try and face the giant of the industry.

[peteian]

I really liked your game but I can't change your decision :3 It's okay though I'mma still follow you around hehehe XDDD You're not shaking me off THAT easily =w=

Least you'll still be around :3

[stiltzkinator]

I'm taking a possibly permanent break from this. I'll admit, I'd rather work on things that I could potentially profit from. And from the looks of things, I'm gonna be busy for a while. Though, that's not the main reason. To be totally honest, I'm bloody sick of the whole thing. I'm sick of RPG Maker, and I can't seem to get into anything else. I can't even seem to get anything going in Stencyl. (Besides pre-built stuff, of course. But, that's not really "making a game".)

So yeah. Sorry that I've been disappointing you guys so much lately. I think I might just drop the whole game idea, and just become a normal vore artist. Er... Well, however "normal" a vore artist can be. :V

As a sort of apology, here's all the art I have done for this game. All versions, even the ancient one way back when. I included the spritesets for the "full" enemies from the first version of the game which anyone can use if they want. Though, there isn't a whole lot in it that you guys haven't seen. :/

Rayen, I have to ask if you are seriously dropping this project, and if you are, if you mind someone taking it from here. I got a different job recently, so I have a lot more free time on m hands now, and if you're okay with it, I would love to see to the continuation of what you started. This is, of course, only under the condition that you are okay with it. I can understand things coming up that would prevent you from being able to work on this, but I don't want to see it die either. If you have any requests, conditions, instructions, or if you would rather not have your work so far used in its entirety and then continued, please do say. We can discuss the finer details if necessary as well.

[Rayen]

Thank ye all for understanding. I was a bit hesitant in posting that.

@Deathworks: It's not so much "feeding myself" or anything. It's just that I have little free time anymore, and I'd like to use that toward things other than this. :V Like Phantasy Star Portable 2. (I love Phantasy Star so much. ;w; )

@Prof: That MMO idea is kinda a future plan. We won't actually start developing it until we get a few other games out. Right now, we're just doing some planning.

@stalker peteian: Yeah, I still plan to be around, but it won't be terribly often. Mostly just on weekends.

@stiltzkinator: If you think you can handle it, feel free to continue it. I have no issues with that. If you want to discuss things, feel free to do that as well.

[stiltzkinator]

Thank you for releasing your material, Rayen. This way, someone might take up the baton, so you are doing really a lot for the community there.

Perhaps we need more cooperative projects with different people doing different things ... Ah, just pondering.

So I discussed it with Rayen, and I will, for the time being, be overseeing this project. My priorities for how the game will be developed from here on out will be:
1st: Anything Rayen himself believes should be in the game (which I will honor to the best of my ability)
2nd: Working toward completing the game in a manner and style that fits in with what Rayen has already provided
3rd: Including new elements that do not clash with the existing state of the game

Coding is my strong point, art is my weak point. If anyone wants to help me as I work on this, what I could use most is art. In the pack Rayen provided, there were some uncolored battlers for Celina and Amelia; if anyone wants to color those, it would help for polishing what is already present in the game. I'm currently looking to make a very polished and hopefully bug free 'demo' for the first two chapters, and then start pushing on with the human path of the story. If anyone else wants to make a serious effort in helping me further this game, PM me with details of what you can or are willing to do, and we'll see what we can work out. To those of you who are eagerly awaiting the future of Consuming Ocean, fret not, as I am so inspired by the work that Rayen has done thus far that I am more than willing to carry this through, at least as long as I can.

@Rayen: Though may post may make it seem like you had an unfortunate accident or somesuch out of context, you're still encouraged to stay as active as you wish with the project. But you know that :V

[peteian]

Hey, I helped Rayen with his Frog problem before, maybe I could help out with the art too :p Although I haven't done coloring in a while now, I could give it a shot.

[Rayen]

Aye, peteian. Dunno if ye noticed, but if ye look in that picture pack I uploaded, ye can see the halfway colored version of one of your frogs. :V