Nobody's Home VCRPG + Project: Mania Updates (Tech demo download)

What's good ya'll, it's been a busy first two months of the new year but I've been cooking up quite a lot of stuff behind the scenes. 

I've also been abstaining from conventional updates and logs, but hopefully to compensate for that, I've been posting mostly weekly updates on Twitter about the WIP projects. At the moment, weekly twitter updates seem to be the best way to convey what's being worked most recently; and I do want thank you all for keeping engaged with my works so far!

So now on to the progress report:

Since No Delivery's release, I've been meaning to continue with developing other games in the same vein as the horror-exploration-rpg experience offered in No Delivery. "Internally" I'd refer to these as the 'VCRPG' line of pixel horror games I'd like to continue to develop, however beyond that I've also been experimenting with different genres, implementing and making use of new features in RPGMaker, basically stretching what the engine's capable of for other projects. 

If you'd like to download the tech demo/platforming alpha for Project: Mania, check out the download link below!  

The 2 projects that are being worked on now are, the recently named "Nobody's Home" the next pixel-horror rpg in the VCRPG line, and the retitled Project: Mania (formerly Pony Mania), a MLP fangame that picks up from my previous fangames and serves as a love letter to the recently concluded series. 

I'll be going into more detail below, but feel free to skip over to whichever project interests you.

Nobody's Home:

Nobody's Home is a survival horror exploration rpg, more akin to Resident Evil with an emphasis on exploration rather than combat. Compared to No Delivery, it will be a shorter experience but will once again explore unconventional storytelling and mechanics.

This project largely makes use of the same pipeline and implementation from No Delivery's development, as a result there was some cleaning up to do in the original project file to get a clean (and lightweight memory-wise) template for future development.

What we're left with is basically a debug/reference room with all implemented mechanics and interactables which can be used to build other rooms.

While much of the assets are mostly done, I'll still have to block out everything appropriately in the engine to get a final look to a scene.

(ignore the Manager)

It's my hope that creating the foundation of the pipeline now will help with facilitating shorter development cycles in the future.

Project Mania (Working Title):

Pony Mania has taken the backseat since No Delivery was in development, but since its release, I've been able to flesh out exactly what I wanted it to be, which is essentially something like Sonic Mega Collection with a story.

Project: Mania (retitled to avoid copyright trouble) is a collection of games with varying genres taking place all around the series continuity, including the previous fangames (The Spike Trilogy, Day Dreaming Derpy); that isn't to say they won't all be connected in some way or another. To quote someone else, "Fiction within fiction, but it still has meaning."

The first in this collection of games is "Daring Tales", a platforming adventure starring seasoned adventurer and famed childrens' book author, Daring Do.

As you can see, there are still plenty of things that remain to be developed, but to get the platforming right took quite a few iterations. The physics and platforming was made possible by the TM Jump Action plugin by Tomoaky.

Much of Daring Do's moveset is taken from Scrooge in Duck Tales NES, things like the pogo jump, analogue jumping, friction, item collection are mechanics that directly affect how the player moves across the screen. To fully illustrate this, Scrooge was recreated, physics, sprites, and all to see if the gameplay was possible. Despite getting most of the controls feeling right, certain aspects like slightly less than full stickiness, mid-air friction, and limits on collision detection still remain to be hammered out.

Alongside implementing controls, platformer design is an entirely new school of design I've had the pleasure of delving into; I've always wanted to make a platformer, but there's quite a lot of subtle details that can be overlooked while playing. This boiled down to me going frame by frame during playthroughs of other platformers (Ducktales 1 & 2, Shovel Knight, Shantae, just to name a few), seeing what causes players to die, what level geometry encourages players to learn different mechanics, etc.

This essentially led to a lot of stand-in assets and playground implementation in the early days.

Once the player's controls were somewhat secured, level design and gimmicks were played around with. Once reliably implemented, the rest of level would need to be built around them.

(chemical plant, anyone?)

One of the upsides of working with rpgmaker is retaining the core RPG mechanics that make turn-based battle possible; this will come in handy for the next games in the collection, however at the moment things are still being blocked out.

This brings us near the end of the update, but I'd like to get some feedback on the platforming with the tech demo below.

You can download it here! 

Everything in the tech demo/platforming alpha is a WIP and subject to change, and does not reflect the final product.
Things like effects/sounds/enemies are not fully implemented.
This is to test out both the look and feel of the platforming sections. 

Again, thanks for keeping engaged with my works and I hope to get these games to you all!