Game Dev Blog

Development blog for multiple RPG Maker video game projects

Game Dev Blog

Development blog for multiple RPG Maker video game projects

Fine Print

I’m trying to get my ducks in a row in terms of legal documentation for my games. I’m not a lawyer, so I’m not going to be able to produce perfect legal jargon. Instead, I’d like to try to avoid problems by making it as human-readable, clear and unambiguous as possible.

Below is what I’ve got so far, plucked and remixed from a few major software providers. Keep in mind this is a work-in-progress draft and is not definitive. The documentation that ships with the final game will supersede anything written here.

Health & Safety

Please pay attention to your health while playing, and respect your limits.

Seizures

Some portion of the population may experience seizures or blackouts triggered by flashing lights or patterns. Full-screen light flashes may be disabled in the in-game Options menu, but doing so cannot guarantee you will not experience symptoms. If you have an epileptic condition, consult a doctor before playing.

For more information about seizures, contact your doctor or local health authority.

Repetitive motion injuries and eyestrain

Interacting with video games may cause discomfort in the hands, wrists, arms, or eyes. To reduce your chance of injury, consider taking frequent breaks. If you have symptoms of a repetitive motion injury or eyestrain, don’t play until you’re feeling better. If symptoms persist, contact a doctor.

For more information about repetitive motion injuries and eyestrain, contact your doctor or local health authority.

Motion sickness

Some people may experience motion sickness while playing. Several motion-related effects may be disabled in the in-game Options menu, but doing so cannot guarantee you will not experience symptoms. If you become sick, stop playing and refrain from strenuous activity until you have recovered.

Privacy Statement

This game periodically collects and sends analytics data to a remote server. This data is used to measure interest in the game, and inform changes to improve the game (such as difficulty balance.) No effort is made to uniquely identify players of the game.

What Device Data is Collected

  • Your IP address (the last two bytes are masked)
    • Your location based on IP address: country, region, city, approximate latitude and longitude
  • Date and time of the request
  • Screen resolution being used
  • Main Language of the browser being used (Accept-Language header)
  • User Agent of the browser being used (User-Agent header)
    • From the User-Agent, we detect the browser, operating system, device used (desktop, tablet, mobile, tv, cars, console, etc.), brand and model.

What Game Data is Collected

  • Version ID of the game
  • If the game is in play test mode
  • Current game play time
  • Window resolution of the game
  • The name of the troop being fought when battles are started, fled, won, or lost
  • The ID of the map being loaded
  • The stack trace when an error occurs
  • The actors in your party, their levels, classes, and equipment
  • Your count of some in-game resources, such as hours remaining

How is Data Anonymized?

  • The last 2 bytes of your IP address are masked. Geolocation will be inaccurate.
  • No information is sent about individual installs and no effort is made to differentiate individual users.

Data Retention

  • all visits and actions raw data are deleted after 24 months 10 days.
  • all aggregated reports are deleted after 2 years.

Data Erasure Requests

Because all data recorded is anonymized, it cannot be attributed to an individual person. Therefore, there is no way to request download or deletion of an individual person’s data.

EULA

By purchasing and/or downloading and using this Game, you agree, without reservation to be bound by the terms of this EULA. If you do not agree with the terms of this EULA, please do not purchase and/or download and use this Game.

Definitions

In this EULA the expressions below shall have the meaning assigned to them in this clause, unless the context requires otherwise:

  • This “Game”: the software application and/or all of the contents of the files and/or other media, including software setup files, licensed to You by the Creator.
  • The Game’s “Creator”: Nathan Bolton.
  • “Use”: the access, download, install, copy or benefit from using this Game.
  • “You”: you, the final and ultimate user of this Game or the authorized representative of a company or other legal entity that will be the final and ultimate user of this Game, and the company or other legal entity that will be the final and ultimate user of this Game, if applicable.

License

  1. The Game’s Creator grants You a non-exclusive, non-transferable, limited, revocable license to Use this Game in accordance with this EULA. The Game’s Creator reserves all rights not expressly granted to You.
  2. This Game’s Creator is and remains the owner of any intellectual property rights with respect to this Game. You shall not acquire any ownership to this Game as result of Your purchase of or Your Use of this Game.

Disclaimer

  1. You Use this Game at Your own risk and the entire risk as to satisfactory quality, performance and accuracy is with You.
  2. This Game and accompanying documentation are provided on an “as is” and “as available” basis without warranty – express or implied – of any kind, and the Creator specifically disclaims the warranty of fitness for a particular purpose. No oral or written advice given by the Game’s Creator, its dealers, distributors, agents or employees shall create a warranty or in any way increase the scope of this warranty and You may not rely upon such information or advice.

Liability limitation

This Game’s Creator and any third party that has been involved in the creation, production, or delivery of this Game are under no circumstances liable for consequential or indirect damages (including damage for loss of profit, business interruption, loss of data, and the like arising out of the use or inability to use this Game).

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.

The Mountain pre-Alpha 0.0.2a

Not much fun to play yet. But plenty of the technical underpinnings are complete.

  • Randomly shuffling maps. 36 maps are created for each area, but only 6 will be chosen per run.
  • 3 initial character classes: knight, archer, mage
  • You can walk through the game and get to the end (but only the bad ending is available since the goal item isn’t obtainable)

The major thing to work on now is content: giving you something to do on the maps. Enemy encounters, treasure, events to interact with that could give positive or negative outcomes depending on your stats, possibly traps that could either damage you or give you an advantage if you lead enemies into them.

A few other technical points:

  • The resolution is now 960 (20 tiles wide) x 528 (11 tiles high) – similar to modern indie games like Binding of Isaac Rebirth
  • For the web version, I’ve added a preloader service worker. It will download and cache all of the assets for the game in the background.
  • The engine is now my custom fork of the MV core scripts
    • Working on changes to text and gauges, which is why they currently look worse than the Battle Test

Play the Game

The Club 0.9.4a

This update is largely focused on the behind-the-scenes part of the game. I spent some time fiddling with the engine for other projects, so The Club gets a backport of that progress.

Play the Game

Content changes since 0.9.3

  • New title art
  • Some menus now have rotation applied – so swanky!
  • Incidental dialog added when you check background objects
  • New gradient-based transition between scenes
  • Now using a separate font for displaying numbers in “combat”
  • Volume lowered for most GUI sounds

Technical changes since 0.9.3

  • Added skip cutscene plugin
  • Now using WOFF-based fonts instead of TTF (smaller file size)
  • Added a toggle-able fullscreen button to the title scene
  • Title music now loops at the appropriate point
  • On-screen buttons can now be enabled or disabled in the menu
    • Enabled by default on mobile devices
  • Mouse mode can now be enabled or disabled in the menu
    • Enabled by default on desktop devices
  • The synchronize monitor FPS setting now attempts to guess if you have a monitor refresh rate over 60hz
  • There is now a preloader that shows progress as the game’s main engine files load
  • Switched from lz-string to pako (deflate) save game compression (faster and smaller)
  • Saving the game is now done on its own thread using a web worker
  • Text colours are now chosen from a list of static values instead of looking up colours in an image file – this fixes a Firefox bug that would scramble text colours
  • Using a new preloader script that attempts to download necessary files in advance
  • Upgrade PixiJS from 4.8.9 to 5.3.3

The Mountain Battle Test 1.0.0

My goal was to create a system with a little added tactical depth, without too much unnecessary complexity.

  • This combat system uses a 1-dimensional row system. You can be in the bottom row, the middle row, or the top row.
  • You have 4 action points per turn that you can use for movement (to transfer between the 3 rows) or battle skills.
  • Sword-users can only hit targets on the same row as them, but they’ve got the muscle to push targets into other rows, or pin them in place.
  • Bow-users benefit from the high ground, gaining a significant bonus to damage and accuracy from being above their targets.
  • Staff-users are your crowd-control specialists–their skills can hit entire rows. But watch out for friendly fire.
Swordsman pushes an enemy down with a short-ranged attack.
Archer moves an enemy with an arrow.
Wizard casts spell on row of enemies.

The demo takes around 5-10 minutes to experience. There’s 1 map with a tutorial battle. Then you exit to a field that has 4 battles with random opponents.

Graphics, music, sounds, animations, etc. are placeholders that will not be used in the final game. The only thing I’ll probably keep are the enemy battle sprites (courtesy of Vibrato).

Play the Game

The Club 0.9.3

Testing this game on my phone made me realize the default UI needs a lot of work. So the last few days of work was primarily spent on that.

Play the Game

Changes since 0.9.1

  • Much improved the mobile UI, with bigger line heights and a persistent menu/back button at the top-right
  • Added rotation to the menu animations – this sounds like a small change, but the personality it adds is huge
  • More fun version of the loading graphic
  • Added voice-like sound clip when you introduce a topic to an NPC; and to their response
  • “Quit game” command on the title screen is now hidden from the web version of the game
  • Gamepad options can now be configured on mobile devices (if the game detects a gamepad input)
  • You can swipe vertically to move up and down most lists
  • You can swipe horizontally on the equipment/skills menus to swap between characters
  • Followers are gathered up when you talk to NPCs much more quickly
  • Fixed incorrect map name showing up