Old Topic - Please Don't Post

[broken_angel]

Click here for the new Memoirs of an Angel WIP thread.

[Aleema]

However, I was looking at some other games, like "Rock Robin," and I suddenly felt like my game was crap because I don't even know how to /begin/ creating some of the awesome-looking menus and such featured there. ^^;;

You made me smile and cry at the same time. Humanly possible!? Apparently.

If you want help with your menus: just ask me! I'm known to offer help to GxB projects like mad crazy. I see absolutely no reason to not help you. In fact, PLEASE LET ME HELP YOU. Your game looks so awesome. I'm serious. You know what I thought when I was reading this thread? ("Damn ... this looks so much cooler than my game [Seraphine].") So there ya go: circle of life. =P

When you post your game's demo, I will happily give you feedback. For the general GxB questions:

How important is being able to enter your own name for the character?

Least important thing evar. I've always picked the default name, always.

What other types of customizations would you like to see?

Clothes, because I'm a raging female. I ... really like hair styles.

If the only thing keeping you from doing multiple outfits/etc is "managing their images" in an init block, I can tell you right now that that's bullocks and it's easier than you think. I can show you how when it comes time to code it, but until then, don't limit your art on that alone. Sure, limit your grandiose RPG battles systems because of your coding knowledge, but people are always willing to help you code when more art is at stake.

I guess my question is...if I can't make fancy graphics myself, should I spend the money to hire someone to design them for me? Or are simple graphics okay?

I charge $10 an hour.

I'm kidding. GxB developers need to stick together, and more importantly: FREE GxB games deserve quality treatment.

In general, though, I would play this game without super fancy graphics. That's not a dealbreaker for me, unless you were completely blind and MS Paint'd it (oh, sorry). Things like not having the proper padding/margin for dialogue is irritating, but from what I see, that's fine, so I would play your game with no complaints towards its interface. The art for the characters is way more important to me, and you've already blown my mind with the quality of those. So, you're good. You don't NEED a graphic artist to come in and help you. But like I said, I'm here if you want me.

Edit: Also, 417 for an hour's worth of game is a lot. Please look at your game resources and see if there is a lot of stuff you don't need to be packing with your game, like extra music that's not in the demo, etc. Backgrounds and full sprite character art (and most definitely music) take up a LOT of space. You can't help the background issue, but you can trim down your character art space by doing LiveComposite for expressions and clothes. In fact, I recommend re-processing all your character art because of the jagged lines around their edges. If you don't have Photoshop, I can process your sprites for you and show you what I mean by layering them to save space. If you're not sure what's taking up 400mb, I use a nifty program called SpaceMonger that tells me that sort of stuff.

[VenusEclipse]

Looks like my type of game. I look forward to the release. AND you're just about done.
The last screen shot reminds me of Dance Dance Revolution.
And it's 417 MB? That's a huge game! O_O I would like to answer your game's feedback questions too but I guess I can speak about the cliches.

If cliches are written well with your own twist and story, they can still be appealing.

For GxB dating sims in general...

* How important is being able to enter your own name for the character?

If the character's name is too important to change, then I'll understand. If you can add it, then it's nice. For a sim, it makes more sense to enter your own name.

* What other types of customizations would you like to see? Would they substantially increase your enjoyment of the game?

Customization like the clothing one you mention is great. Any extra customization will be great if they fit the game. They'll make the game unique too.
My dream game would have the option to enter your personality and the game play changes depending on it, and so does the endings. That's a bit much to ask for and I never met a game like that yet. I'm not asking anyone to do this because I know it's going to be a chore to code. That's just an example from me.

* How important are fancy graphics (i.e. custom game menus, buttons, image maps, etc.)? What attracts you the most to a new game - the game graphics, the character art, or the storyline/character descriptions?

The graphics will always attract the user, and I'll continue playing only if I like the story.
And if the story description is really appealing, then I will play it despite graphics. I can't speak for everyone, and there's a bunch of survey related threads in the Game Maker's Corner.

And I like your text box.

I guess my question is...if I can't make fancy graphics myself, should I spend the money to hire someone to design them for me? Or are simple graphics okay?

There are some people here who would help you for free with a free game. If your project is appealing and if you show signs of finishing anything, people will be glad to help. Some people can do really neat things here.
If you can't find what you're looking for, you can always commission someone if you really want to (and have the money to).

(Ah man, someone posted before me, XD.)

[broken_angel]

To Aleema:
1. I'll keep that in mind.

And I think your Seraphine game looks cool, too, from what I saw on the website.

As for the demo...it was on 99% uploaded when I accidentally closed out of the little box. -____-;
I'll have it up tomorrow morning, though.

2. Thank you for the feedback. C:
For this game, the different outfit colors issue was also about getting that extra art, or having it recolored, etc.
However, for Starlit Dreams, I'm already having the artist draw a couple of different outfits and a couple of different hairstyles for the main character, so I may have an option where you can mix and match them.

3. Heh...I like to that I'm pretty skilled with MS Paint, at least enough so that it doesn't look like I made it in Paint. xP
For instance, here is an example of the status screen (without the numbers, obviously). It's not complex, but...I like to think it doesn't look too bad, either.

EDIT: To VenusEclipse:
1. The last screen shot is supposed to remind you of DDR because it's a dancing mini-game. C:
After all, princesses have to know how to ballroom dance!

It's 417MB because there are literally like...1,000 files. xD Over 900, at least.
Those are mostly images...all of the little arrows and bar levels and whatnot. I took the long way around to doing things most of the time because I was trying to create complex mini-games and such with very limited coding knowledge.

2. I would love to see personality customizations, too~
I tried to do that with this game, but then I got lazy and made most of the dialogue the same for each personality. xD The "personalities" do at least affect your stats, though. For instance, if you say that you're "a brilliant strategist" (or whatever the option is...), then your strength will be Intelligence (so you'll start off with twice as much of that stat) and your weakness will be Strength (so you'll start off with half as much of that stat, and you'll get different responses when you try to train).
EDIT2: Oh, and the personality you choose does impact a couple of the endings here, but I won't get too much into that.

3. I'm amazed by the kindness of people in this forum.
It kind of makes me sorry that I didn't bother to check it out until just a couple days ago, long after I finished developing this game. ^^;;

[Aleema]

No, you're right, it doesn't look bad AT ALL. You don't need my help, sweetie. =P I'd play this game happily and in a heartbeat.

[VenusEclipse]

Ballroom dance mini games? XD
Little personality customization like that make a game more unique. I didn't expect you to even include a bit of that.

And if you can do that in MSPaint, you are good enough. I'm not sure if you heard of Gimp but it's a free graphics program if you want to do more complex graphics.

[broken_angel]

Yep. >D
No princess fairytale is complete without a ball. C:

Anyway, the download link is finally up~

I've done pretty thorough testing, but if you run into any bugs, be sure to let me know.

EDIT: To Aleema:
Just saw your edit about the file size.
Um...what's LiveComposite? xD;; I'll look it up, I guess.
EDIT2: Ah, I see. I never thought about just replacing one little section of the sprite at a time. O.o I'll try that out.

And it would be great if you could re-process my sprites for me, if it's not too much trouble. The choppy border on them bothers me, too, but it was the best I could do when editing them in Paint. >.<;; The originals didn't have that, but I had to resize and crop them, and I couldn't figure out how to crop all of them exactly the same in GIMP so as to keep the transparency.

I'm pretty sure I know what's taking up a majority of the space, and I also know some new stuff now that I didn't before, so I can fix that. I think a majority of it is like...for the health bars during the battle mini-game, or for the arrows during the dancing mini-game, I actually made a whole-sized screen for each change because I didn't know how to specifically position them. But if I cropped those and, in the case of the arrows, just had the single set of arrow images that I just move around, then that alone would probably cut it down a lot.
A lot of that is also just all the frames I used for the "Anigrams Presents" animation at the beginning. xD I may end up just cutting that part out,...I spent forever making it frame by frame, but I'm not sure I like it in the end.
Anyway, the point is that if I take some time and do some editing, I'm sure I can bring that down at least a little bit. :3

[Aleema]

Ah, yeah, if you had a fullscreen image for each animation, that's like a new background art for each frame, so ... yeah XD In these cases, learning to manually place stuff isn't such a bad idea. I'm willing to work with you to reduce your file size -- frankly 400mb is too much for a 30-60 minute game. If I wasn't interested, I wouldn't be downloading, because it will take 3 hours for me to get your game.

If you want, you can PM/email me one of your sprites (original sizes, and all expressions) and I can show you how LiveComposite works and saves you space. And I would like to clean up the edges around your sprites, too. Because it's a glaringly unprofessional look for an otherwise promising game. It looks like you ripped the sprites from another game, but they're YOURS -- so we don't want that effect!!

[azureXtwilight]

Ummm, could you upload somewhere else, my country rejects that site...

[aya001]

First of all, I LOVED the art work, the story is interesting, but well, with only that information, I can't say if I'll like it or not. I'll have to play it and see if it get me interested until the end.

Well, the fact that is your first game.... O_O REALLY??? Doesn't seem like it, you really put a lot of work and effort in your first game, and is really complete. I hope to get soon the demo and see if it's really what I'm imagining, only with the infor you posted ^^.

But I think it will be superb ^^.


The link is up O_O, I left it open to anwser later, meanwhile I was doing something else. And now the link is up XD. Well, I'll download it and see how it is ^^ (This is only a demo?????? I ask it for the huge file to download)

[broken_angel]

To azureXtwilight:
Hmm...yeah, I'll see if I can upload it somewhere else.
Do you have a particular site in mind that you know works for you?

A possible problem is the upload limit, though, so an alternate link may have to wait until I can trim down my .zip size.
Sorry. ^^;

EDIT: To aya001:
Oh, no, it's the whole game, with the exception of the CG scenes I still need.
...That would be one massive demo. xD
EDIT2: There, I edited the first post to reflect that information. C:

[aya001]

Ah!!! Ok, XDD that's why I asked, it was like O_O if this is the demo... then the game???

Well ^^ I finished downloading it. ^^ Let's see how it is. Bye

Still playing the game...
I love the music, really fits with the game (I really love the version of Toccata & Fugue (I'm correct?), of Bach, from the introduccion, I love classical music)
The story is good, but... I think is everything happening really fast. It's only the impression I get.
The personality of the characters (I only met two of them) and some interactions and talks, make the game entertaining and some funny comments in the conversations made me laugh ^^.

The status thing, it appears when you finish something, like a chapter or something like that, and you can save the game. But it have some relevance??? I mean, will it affect the interactions with some characters, or the ending or romance you'll get????? And if it's so, is possible to open the status menu while you are playing or it only appears, when a night, "chapter" (to call it someway) ends?

And the hearts that appears sometimes when talking with the romancable chara. The hearts appears when some interaction is made that grew his affection? or is irrelevant?. And only shows the color that means his "love points" (to call it something) with your character?

Well, I'll continue playing... I haven't found really anything bad, only the fact that is going to fast (like I said in my opinion, I still have a lot to play)

[aya001]

Ok, while I was playing, I got this, the thing is with my other 2 endings (6,8) I had no problem at all

I'm sorry, but an uncaught exception occurred.

NameError: name 'tournament3_done' is not defined

While running game code:
- script at line 4081 of C:\***\renpy-6.11.0\GardenGame/game/StrengthscriptA.rpy
- python at line 4090 of C:\***\renpy-6.11.0\GardenGame/game/StrengthscriptA.rpy.

-- Full Traceback ------------------------------------------------------------

File "C:\***\Desktop\Archivos varios\Visual Novels\MemoirsofanAngel-1.0-win32\renpy\bootstrap.py", line 254, in bootstrap
File "C:\***\Desktop\Archivos varios\Visual Novels\MemoirsofanAngel-1.0-win32\renpy\main.py", line 310, in main
File "C:\***\Desktop\Archivos varios\Visual Novels\MemoirsofanAngel-1.0-win32\renpy\main.py", line 93, in run
File "C:\***\Desktop\Archivos varios\Visual Novels\MemoirsofanAngel-1.0-win32\renpy\execution.py", line 259, in run
File "C:\***\Desktop\Archivos varios\Visual Novels\MemoirsofanAngel-1.0-win32\renpy\ast.py", line 1133, in execute
File "C:\***\Desktop\Archivos varios\Visual Novels\MemoirsofanAngel-1.0-win32\renpy\exports.py", line 371, in menu
File "C:\***\Archivos varios\Visual Novels\MemoirsofanAngel-1.0-win32\renpy\python.py", line 994, in py_eval
File "C:\***\renpy-6.11.0\GardenGame/game/StrengthscriptA.rpy", line 4090, in <module>
NameError: name 'tournament3_done' is not defined

While running game code:
- script at line 4081 of C:\***\renpy-6.11.0\GardenGame/game/StrengthscriptA.rpy
- python at line 4090 of C:\***\renpy-6.11.0\GardenGame/game/StrengthscriptA.rpy.

Ren'Py Version: Ren'Py 6.11.1b

[nefferinthia]

Oh wow, this looks gorgeous. The artwork is beautiful and it seems like an amazing project in general. You will release a Mac version, won't you? D:

[azureXtwilight]

To azureXtwilight:
Hmm...yeah, I'll see if I can upload it somewhere else.
Do you have a particular site in mind that you know works for you?

A possible problem is the upload limit, though, so an alternate link may have to wait until I can trim down my .zip size.
Sorry. ^^;

All right then, I will wait.
Although it would be nice if you decided to split the files and upload them one by one ^^;

The game looks very good, and tempting too. XD
The plot is not cliched, because I haven't played the demo I can't comment yet... But I am very intrigued to play!
The backgrounds look memorable because to tell you the truth,I've used them for my first game -shot-