Hey everyone, how are you holding up amidst this pandemic? I haven’t been feeling well over the week and so have been staying home. I started reading through some old magazines I’ve had sitting around for awhile (more about that on Thursday!) And then I started thinking a little more about Memories.
I started with a bit of brainstorming for the ending on Wednesday. The ending has always been the #1 problem for Memories – how should the game end??? At one point I actually had the avatar character and antagonist saying “What now?” “I don’t know.” Lol, not exactly a good place to end up. Plus the final memory was just kind of there and didn’t really add anything to the story.
My first order of business was to tackle that last memory. I figured if I could make it a little more meaningful, that would help with the ending. So I started working on the game on Saturday afternoon. By the early evening, the final memory was cleaned up and functioning.
So that left the ending. I kept working with the dialogue a bit (I also had to laugh – some of the stuff I brainstormed earlier in the week were already implemented into the game when I last worked on it – I guess they were really good ideas!). For a lot of this I had kind of a vague idea of where to take things. Then by about 10pm I had it: an actual workable idea for an ending implemented into the game! 🙂
From there it took me about two hours to get everything working. I thought everything was okay until I ran through the game and the ending seemed to just freeze with nothing happening. I tried everything to get the new end stuff to trigger. Just when I was about to give up for the night, I realized what was wrong: I had the new events set to “Action Button” (meaning the player had to walk up to them and click on them to activate them) instead of them playing automatically with “Autorun.” Once I switched them to autorun, everything started working properly (which let me run through it a few times to make sure everything actually was running as I intended). From there, I built a short movie for the end credits, and Memories was ready for playtesting!
A friend of mine (who also likes to make games with RPG Maker) agreed to test it on Sunday. So now I’m waiting on his feedback before doing anything more (…although in the meantime I may go back over the dialogue to make sure all the characters sound right…)
An Acquaintance with Letters 