PRM Devlog #1

I have decided that I want to try and make a game by myself. I am by no means a programmer, so I have chosen to use RPG Maker MV to make my game. Although RPGM has some limitations, I am pretty confident that I can make the game I am imagining using this software only. I wanted to improve/practice pixel-art as well, so here we are. 

Title & concept

The title for my game "Post Ruin Mecha" is actually a term me and some of my instagram followers came up with to describe a very specific aesthetic in certain science fiction works. Think Laputa - castle in the sky, Legend of Zelda, Atlantis the lost empire etc; A universe where a modern civilization discovers ancient technology that uses unknown/forgotten/mysterious/magical power sources. Often times there will be robots that appear to be made of ceramics or rocks, and these machines are often powered by items like glowing crystals. That is the gist of what post ruin mecha means. It is my favorite subgenre of science fiction, especially because of the visuals which often feature overgrown ruins and moss-covered robots. I've been wanting to make a game with this kind of aesthetic for some time now, so when RPGM was on sale on steam, I thought: "now is the time". 

World building

The gameplay of PRM is inspired by old Zelda games and Pokémon Mystery Dungeon, which is one of my favorite pixel-RPGs. I really enjoyed the lack of humans in PMD, so I decided there would only be animals and robots in my own game. In this game you play as a cat archeologist who arrives at a small lakeside town, mostly inhabited by frogs living on giant lily pads. The frog town is a concept I made for a whole other project years ago, but I decided to reuse it since it never really got anywhere. And also because frogs are cute. 

Anyways, 

You (The player) arrives at this town to research some nearby ruins. These ruins turn out to be an entrance to be an entrance to a dungeon where the traces of a lost civilization can be found. You then explore the dungeon and collect ceramic shards that you then have to piece together to revive/rescue these ancient ceramic robots. That is the overall storyline so far. I don't have that many specifics in terms of plot yet, as I am starting out focusing only on sprite-creation for now.

Characters & sprite sizing

RPG Maker MV uses tiles that are 48x48 pixels. I really wanted to preserve that classic pixel-ly look, so I thought this was a bit too high-res for my game. Unfortunately there is no easy way to change the tile size in RPGM which is very annoying, even more annoying is the fact that characters can't be bigger than the tile size. This creates some restraints when creating diverse characters, since they all have to be the same height, give or take a couple of pixels. 

I have made the decision to make all sprites in half the standard tile size, and then I scale them 200% when putting them into the game. This means I create everything in 24x24 tile size, double the size to 48x48 when putting them onto the spritesheets, and then the final product  will still have that pixel-art look I was hoping to have.

With the resolution in order, I began to create my cat-sprite. It didn't take very long, as I already had a pretty clear image of how it should look in my head. The calico cat that you see in the middle of the image below is the first character I created. Originally I was thinking it should wear a little bag to carry the ancient shards and archeology tools in, but with so few pixels to work with, I felt it would look a little too cluttered. I might come back to work on this again though. Right now the cat doesn't look very much like an archeologist. 

I created some pattern/color variation for the cat as well, ideally I want the player to be able to choose their own character, however I don't know if that is possible in RPGM. I also want to create hats that you can customize your character with, but I'm also not sure how to do that in RPGM. I know you can equip items, but I don't know if those items will show up on your overworld character. Right now I am planning to only have the overworld characters, meaning no dialogue-portraits or other kinds of closeups. 

Next, I created two characters that resemble a raccoon and a red panda. The raccoon, named Klara, is a ceramic artist who will help you put the robots back together. She is based on my oldest sister Klara, who is also a ceramic artist haha. The red panda is based on my other sister, Anna, and she is the owner of the local restaurant in the game. Anna IRL is a really good cook, although not a professional one, but I thought it would be a fitting role for her. I decided on a raccoon for the ceramic artist because they have little hands, which is a pretty important tool when working with clay. Since I already knew these two characters were based on my sisters, I thought they should be similar looking, but not the same animal. Therefore, the red panda seemed like an obvious choice, especially since Anna mostly cooks Asian cuisine. I am planning on giving her a Japanese restaurant in the game. 

Tilesets

After I made a couple of characters I decided to start on creating some tilesets, since I couldn't stand looking at the default RPGM ones anymore. It is also a good thing to start with, since it's usually not that complex (compared to animations for example) and gives a nice foundation for creating maps and scenes (It is pretty time consuming however). I made some very simple grass tiles, a grass tile with sprouts, and a darker grass tile that can go on top of the lighter ones to create a look of tall grass or moss. (See image below, and ignore the placeholder characters pls) I then created a dirt path, and already the scene started to look like an actual game. I am not working on a specific map yet, I just have a scene open to test out my sprites. After looking at some references for pixel-art planks, I created another two tilesets to make wooden pathways with. These are supposed to go in the water, as a path in the lily pad-town. 

Then it was time to create a water-tile. Boy did I struggle with this one lol. Its already pretty difficult to create seamless water tiles in general, but these also had to be animated ;;o;;. Eventually I made something that looks pretty decent, but it took me a whole day just to make this tile. I want to thank photoshop and layer separation for this one.  In the big areas it looks pretty seamless, but when you create slim rivers it's not completely seamless. I don't think it matters that much though, and hopefully it's not so immersion-breaking that anyone will stop playing lol. With the animations running, it really starts to look like a real game ! I also finally switched the default character to my cat-sprite, which still isn't animated. This is only for screenshot purposes haha.

After making the water-tiles I went to sleep and the next day (today) I went ham on the foliage. Just kidding, but I did make quite a bit of foliage-sprites. Small flowers, lily-of-the-vallys, small shrooms, big shrooms and different variations of sprouts. Scale is pretty relative in this game, since all characters need to fit within 24x24 pixels. Therefore I think it looks cute if plants and mushrooms can grow to any size, making the world feel smaller. As mentioned earlier, I will have a town with houses built on top of giant lily-pads. I am also planning on making the player's house inside a hollow tree (tru cottagecore style), so scale is just whatever I feel like lol. 

At first I created the foliage without an outline (mostly because I forgot) but as the sprites got bigger, it felt like it was needed. After adding outlines on the biggest mushrooms and the large sprout I went back to add outlines on the lily-of-the-vally and the smaller sprouts. Going forward I am going to add outlines on every object that isn't part of the ground (Like the grass strands and very tiny flowers). I also spent some time debating on when to give objects drop-shadows. Right now the tiniest sprouts don't have shadow, but anything bigger than that will have a shadow. One of the greatest joys of pixel art is that you don't really need to be mindful of realistic shadows or perspective. 

I'm already really happy with the visuals for this game, even without any buildings or ruins, but I am also looking forward to adding those elements that will help tell the story and build the actual world ^^.  

End Notes

If you read all the way to here, thank you so much for your time! This first devlog was kind of a big one, but that is also because I needed to introduce everything. Everything in this log was created in maybe 4 days, going forward progress will probably be slower since I am going back to school soon. I think my next step will be walking animations for the cats, creating some lily pads and starting to build the town map. Also, in case it wasn't clear: I haven't looked into actually creating events etc in RPGM, I'm only focusing on sprites rn, and once I have made the maps I will start to actually create some gameplay. I hope I can make another update soon, and hopefully it will be shorter lol 0:-)

- Ida