Since last week, I began working on the Fairy Forest map for Tears of the King. I decided to make it a bunch of smaller maps like Secret of Mana’s Haunted Forest. I’ve built the main parts of the map, with a path that connects them all from the entrance (which connects to the Mountain Forest) right to the Fairy Grove. Beyond that though, I still have a lot of work to do on it. The map is going to have a whole bunch of teleports, and I need to figure out where the other paths will take you. I’m currently thinking most of them will just bring you back to the starting part of each mini-map, but some will take you to secret areas. Since none of that is in place right now I will not be sharing a screenshot with you; you’ll have to wait until it’s all done to see it.
So today I started thinking about some of the characters in the game, particularly in the starting village. I have an idea of what the two main characters of the game are like, but wanted to flesh out the minor ones a bit. I also ended up playing with Game Character Hub, a program a friend bought me on Steam for Christmas. I used it to build the main character for Tears. Here she is:
After using Game Character Hub, I did end up just using the character generator that comes built into RPG Maker VX Ace for most of the other characters I created today. I realized that, at least for the portraits, Game Character Hub basically just had the exact same graphics as the character generator, so it made more sense to just make everything within RPG Maker.
Here’s the other main character, who I ended up calling Eric because that’s the default first character that RPG Maker starts you off with (and it started to stick). Of course he looks nothing like the starting Eric character.
Over the course of the evening, I ended up making five other characters (and I used two pre-made characters as well). They’re all in the starting village. Because I was adding the characters, I wanted to make sure you could interact with them. So I added the starting functionality to everything, too. The dialogue will need some fixing up, but all the basics are now in place for the very beginning of the game!
I just realized I’ve never taken a screenshot of the starting village. Here it is, scaled at 1:2 because it’s a bit too big for 1:1.
I also added in functionality for one of my key items (one of the ingredients you need to collect), the mushroom. I’m not sure if I’ve ever actually mentioned it before, but the main story of Tears involves collecting a series of ingredients to create a potion. The ingredients are scattered around the island that Tears takes place on. Adding functionality to the mushroom was actually what started me on building characters and adding events to the game tonight. In the case of the mushroom, you can pick it up both before and after you talk to the witch. At this point the witch doesn’t say anything important though – she’s still got the same place-holder dialogue I gave her from two years ago.
Thinking of dialogue, I was planning on writing everything on Scrivener then transferring it over. But that’s seeming a bit unwieldy at the moment, especially since I’m already playing with switches and whatnot. So I’ll probably try to write everything in RPG Maker for now, and see how well that works. I’ll probably have to use Scrivener for Untitled StoryNexus Project, whenever I get back to it because that’s going to be much, much bigger, dialogue-wise, than Tears and I’ll want to make sure everything is perfect on it.
So I think the very next thing I need to do is fix the witch’s dialogue up so it actually works with the story to this point. Once that’s done, I’ll either get back to the Fairy Forest, or start work on another map. I’m rather excited – I’m almost at a point that I can get friends to start play testing a bit!
An Acquaintance with Letters 