Resolution

I’ve made The Club 960×540 resolution. This is exactly half the common resolution 1920×1080.

I’ve made The Mountain 960×528. The game is made up of 48×48 tiles, so I’ve chosen a resolution that is a multiple of 48.

The earliest screenshots in this blog show a much larger 1024×624 resolution. I decided to switch to a smaller size because:

  1. 1024×624 isn’t a standard resolution
  2. It’s less performance-intensive to push fewer pixels
  3. RPG Maker MV doesn’t have a native way of setting a larger resolution (it must be done through 3rd-party plugins), which is a good indication that it was never designed for that use case
  4. A smaller resolution is a better fit for each of my game’s chunky, pixelated looks
  5. It’s a more interesting challenge to work around the restraint of having a small resolution, rather than increasing the size and cramming more information onto the screen to fill the space

Mountain – Battle UI

Updated battle UI. It’s been challenging to fit everything into the small space while keeping the menus tidy and unobtrusive. It’s not totally polished yet, but it’s coming along.

Mountain – Menu UI

The HP numbers in the screenshot are a bit squished. I should fix that.

The menus in the game now feature 2 separate fonts:

Originally I went with this solution for technical reasons; resizing 1 font multiple times was either too ugly, or too costly in performance, depending on the implementation. So I chose different fonts for large and small text.

But it turned out to offer a better user experience as well. The separate fonts offer better visual separation. And using a font designed for small text gives it better clarity.

Tooltips

I also added pop-up tooltips when you mouse-over an icon.

The game only has 4 character stats, so it’s simplified compared to most RPGs that offer 6-10. But I haven’t been able to find a place to explain the benefits of each stat to the player, without dragging down the flow of the game. For now, tooltips are a good solution.

Mountain – Event Interaction

I now have a standard event interaction UI.

  • Description of the event in the bottom window.
  • Responses in the middle.
  • Tooltip for each response – with chance of success and costs – at the top.

Simpler battle interface revamp

I bought and added two premium plugins to the project: Side Status Battle UI and Weakness Display.

Together, they simplify the game’s battle interface. The re-positioned windows keep the player’s focus closer to the relevant actors.

  • Actor’s actions appear right next to their sprite.
  • Actor’s health and mana is located just to the right of them.

Targeting an actor will cause their status window to slide forward slightly. By a happy coincidence, their character portrait in the timeline display also bobs upward. It makes the interface feel cohesive.

But it’s not flawless. As you can see, when the 4th party member chooses their action, their status is partially obscured.

An enemy’s name, health, and status ailments are shown when you target them.

The plugin also adds new functionality, showing an icon for each of the enemy’s potential weaknesses. Strike the weakness, and it’s revealed so you can remember for next time. Without this type of interface, enemy weaknesses are not signaled clearly enough to be viable.

Simple equipment

I’ve cut the number of equipment slots down to 3.

The game’s systems have plenty of complexity in other areas, so cutting down the variety of equipment is a way to keep the game from feeling unnecessarily complex.

I’ve also made it so bows no longer require quivers to work. It was a cool idea, but the complexity it adds is not necessary, and it would have been a challenge to elegantly communicate to the player that quivers and bows can only work together.

Equipment menu showing 3 items equipped

Assigning Items

I’ve added Galv’s Equip Item script. By default, all actors share the same inventory, and can use as many items as they want from the inventory. This script makes it so actors can only use items that have been manually assigned to them.

With only 6 items available per character, it could add depth to each combat. Or if could add a painful amount of time spent in the menu re-equipping items between battles.

To mitigate the latter issue, I’ve made a script that automatically re-equips items to a character after battle, if the party’s inventory has extra copies of the item.

I’ve also been playing around with making items that are not consumed permanently, but can only be used once in battle. This makes healing functionally unlimited, but the player can’t heal indefinitely each encounter. It’s inspired by the estus system in Dark Souls, but it remains to be seen if my execution is nearly as elegant.

Menu for assigning items to a character

Bestiary

I’m planning to give players access to a bestiary that keeps track of the enemy monsters in the game.

Random mobs might have to be fought before they’re added to the bestiary. But I think it might be useful to add upcoming bosses to the bestiary before the player encounters them. This scheme will give players an optional heads-up of the next big foe and will let them prepare for it.

Bestiary showing phantom boat boss monster, items it drops and its stats

Interface tweaks

Playing with interface tweaks!

Battle scene showing skill being chosen from a menu. Character names, HP and MP values are also shown.
  • New battle order tracker (changed from DreamX ITB to Yanfly STB)
  • Multi-tier skill choices for a few select situations
  • Wider MP bar, can show max/min with higher values
  • New base character names – all 4 letter
  • States moved from status bar to above character and foe’s heads