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~September Update~

quick updatey thing for those of you still following us:

Conquest isn’t dead lol, but it’s ok if you’ve come to that conclusion if you’ve followed for a while and are wondering where we disappeared to. Long story short: this is my last semester of uni so focus has been elsewhere for a little bit, but we’ll pick the game back up again when we can.

In the meantime if you like platformers we’ve got another game we’re developing right now for a uni project called Birdened - you can find some of the development progress here if you want to check it out. Otherwise cheers for all the encouraging words and note and follows so far, it’s been really rad.

- Nathan 

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Mysterious room of mysteryyyyyy hmmmmmm What could this be...?

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Little doodle of our main character Darcy (in default outfit) done last night in between map work. For something a little bit different

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More work on the city! Entrance to the park map done and fixed a few minor details. It looks a bit bare without NPCs though, oh well!

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First pass of animating a fountain for outside the con center. Pretty... hmm so far tbh but I think should be able to keep working on it. I’ve since added some tiles around the base too.

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Following up from concept sketches from yesterday, WIP of the convention center for the map. Or at least the ground floor part of it. Still a lot to go, but we’ll get there eventually

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Some concept sketches in different stages trying to come up with a look for the convention center of the game. Have already started working on the con map, but needed to get down a good look for the building first. Probably obvious, but the design was inspired by thread and needle

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Ah how far we’ve come. Top pic the original sketch/idea for the city and building designs. Bottom two where I’m at now. Basically spent today doing some details for the streets and editing the roads and pavement. Added alleyways etc. This map is still a long way from done ack

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Hey there, it’s been a while! We’ve been pretty busy with real life stuff lately so Conquest took a bit of a back seat for a while, but have started getting into working on it again lately and have a few things to show. I’ve been working on this town map on and off for a while as it’s pretty time-consuming. Top picture was one of the first passes, with the colour palette I originally picked out for it. After discussing it Nathan we decided the blues were too calming and mellow and chill for what is suppose to be an exciting arrival at the city the convention is being held at. The bottom screen is with re-worked colours and also giving the buildings more depth. There’s still a lot to do on this map so it’s far from finished, but it’s progress so enjoy a sneaky WIP - Carly

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Small update today. My final assignments are all due in the next week, so I’m looking forward to getting back into development properly. In the meantime I decided to break my coding drought with this small fix this evening. The above screenshot is a bug caught in the process.

Last week we decided the message system was a little annoying. On one hand, the regular speed was too slow. UMS provides a skip option called “WRITE_ALL” which will display the entire message, but this makes it easy for players to miss dialogue when trying to make things go a little faster.

All I wanted was a way to write dialogue a little faster. To do so I quickly found that you can’t just multiply or add to the current text_speed - text speed in RPG Maker denotes the amount of frames between writing each character. Since you can’t just bump up the framerate, the solution is to output multiple characters for each frame -- as long as you check the next character is not nil. Else you’ll get weird formatting errors like the screenshot above.

I then had to update text sound effects according to text speed, but that was a little easier since I wasn’t playing them every frame to begin with. Either way, progress is progress. 

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Decided we needed a breath of fresh air from working on trains every day, so knocked out the bulk of this map over the last day in between assignments. Kudos to Carly for whipping most of these sprites up in the last two days.

Maps are a very iterative process, but the gif above is basically how I work. I start with the function of the map, with careful thought put into where I want players to move and the kind of journey they’ll take to get there. 

Then I add sprites gradually and shift things around as I see fit. Sometimes during this period I might find places where it feels natural to place secrets or extra paths, so I’ll add them in if it feels right. I think it’s good to plan your maps 90% of the time, but leaving a bit of wriggle room for these edits is good too.

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Made a few small changes over the last couple of days in between assignments. Here’s a shot of one of the train’s hallways. There’s still a few things that will get fixed up later, but for now managed to

fix up the sprite sheet so that the halls look a little less monotonous. 

added animated sliding doors for each cabin

added sound effects for the doors and some other interact-able items.

There’s also a few things we’ve been cleaning up behind the scenes that don’t really lend themselves to formal update posts like these, but whatever. Point is: progress. Hopefully more of that soon.

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Slowly been iterating the train station -- here’s the train Carly sprited a while ago in amongst the rest of the scenery. 

Getting it to move properly has been a real pain so far since it’s such a large sprite, but hopefully we’ll find a way that doesn’t look too janky soon enough.

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Managed to meet up yesterday and sort out a few things in the game for the first time in a couple of weeks. We’ll update more on the other stuff over the next few days/weeks, but for now here’s a lossy gif of some turnstiles we finally implemented for the train station.

Hopefully we’ll be able to include a bunch of little animations like this here and there. They can take a bit of time, but really seem to make a lot of difference in the end.

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Uni assignments continue to be shit and an almost complete timesink, but it’s okay because Carly continues to be rad with new game assets. She whipped these trees up the other day which I’m pretty dang happy with, just a matter of throwing them in the engine now.

I’ve added a few bits of dialogue here and there as baby steps, but I’m really looking forward to finishing the semester soon so I can get knee deep in code and eventing once more. Hopefully not too far away now...

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It’s come to my attention that we haven’t really posted many of these so... hey, here’s a sketch dump of some of the rough NPC concept art Carly’s worked on. Some from the past week, some from a fair while back.

I think it’s really important to do a lot of this rough kind of work while developing your game. Like any other kind of design, it’s very rare that you’ll end up with the perfect concept the first time you lay your pen down on the paper. Going through a bunch of concepts and scrapping the ones that you aren’t quite happy with is perfectly normal. Some of these might get used as NPCs or enemies later on. Some of them might get developed further, and some might get scrapped entirely. We’re not really sure, but we’ll figure it out soon enough. 

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So our last post was exactly a month ago today. Oops!

I’ve been pretty busy with university work still, and to be honest we both took a bit of time off for uh, “inspiration” by working on costumes for a couple of conventions. But we’ve settled down a bit now, and are slowly getting back into the gamedev routine. Working on the game is a lot cheaper than buying physical materials, at the very least.

Here’s a new train sprite Carly made yesterday. The next step is fitting it into the station and overlaying some door tiles. The challenge will be in creating a sprite we can move during transitions, but that the player can also interact with properly while moving around on the platform. Probably not the hardest thing we’ve tackled yet, but I’m still wary of the problems this might present later on.

I’ve got a couple of assignments due in the next two weeks, but we’re going to endeavor to get back to daily updates as soon as we can, promise. :)

- Nathan