This week has been very eventful for Reel Dream. Having looked back into the project I noticed a tangled web of mechanics that were tested and dropped as well as what I had decided to keep. All this mess and confusion brought me to the conclusion of creating a new MV project and copying over everything that I was keeping, and cleaning up how I would do things.

This created a new project that was very clean, with little mess and I knew what was what. One major thing I did do away with was Luna Engine for custom menus/battle screens. Using Luna was just slowing production as I would have to think of a design and then work it out in Luna. It was becoming a mess and was not quick to use for this stage of production. Maybe when I get near the end I will go back and use Luna Engine, but until I know exactly what information I’m going to show in menus/etc, there is no need to use a fancy customizer.

So back to SRD’s Menu Editor and HUD Maker. A bit clunkier but gets the job done faster.

Another major change has been the Time System. The way the game was going a full on day/month/year system as MOG’s Time System provided was just too much. I still wanted to use some day/night system, but really only wanted to work with the days of the week and didn’t find counting weeks/months necessary. I wanted events to react to it being a new day, or a certain day of the week. The game is supposed to feel like an endless summer, so months were never needed, and as the game takes place in one summer, seasons never needed changed and the year should never change.

So I’ve changed to an evented time system ran in a parallel common event. Hopefully this won’t cause too much issue in the long run. I can event and have only the data I want.

One thing that I did keep that I thought I was going to toss was the use of the TileD plugin. At first I thought I was going to do away with all fancy systems such as Luna and TileD, but looking at my quick mapping vs how I knew TileD worked, I realized I could still work in TileD and it wouldn’t make production that much more difficult the way Luna was.

Now, one change that had been on my mind for a while now was changing the battle system to front view, where we see the player from the back holding the fishing reel, and the fish taking up more of the screen. What I ended up making is actually still a side-vew system, but appears more like front-view:

This feels way more immersive to me. The art is all currently placeholder art, kinda like a concept sketch, but everything is going much better. I’ve also been simplifying the battle system and while I need to design the skill sets and balance the enemy fish, the plan for the battle system is much more solid and working on it should go a lot faster now.

The battle system has honestly been a big hurdle from the beginning as I was trying to make a fishing RPG. At first I think I tried to make the battle system too realistic with trying to replicate concepts from real life (line weight, drag, realistic fish attacks) and that was difficult to put into an rpg turn-based system, by now it’s a bit of a mix between the two and I’m happy with where I’m at.

The last major thing that happened this week with the project was as I was sorting out moving the working pieces into a new MV project, I also needed to go over my game’s plot and the development docs…

That I lost.

I couldn’t find them anywhere on my hard drive that wasn’t a old version that would be missing all the information I had put into it earlier this year. Checked hard drive and google drive where it should have been as well as my laptop and found nothing.

I was at the point where I thought I would have to write everything over again and try and remember all the NPC characters and plot point I had written down to free up my own memory. It made me wonder if I should just give up on Reel Dream but I was determined to try and figure everything out again.

The next day, still distraught over the loss of my Scrivener doc file, I realized that Scrivener always did a backup when I closed the program.

Where did that backup go to?

A quick googling and I found the backups. And sure enough, there was a backup with my current notes in it. I could almost cry. Praise Jesus I found it.

Now the files are saved with the GitHub repository with Reel Dream, as well as Scrivener still backing up my project. I’ll throw a copy from time to time into Google Drive too but I’m not going to rely just on Google Drive anymore, because somehow…

I found my scrivener docs in Drive’s trash.

I’m not sure how I did that, but I didn’t like Drive’s sync program running in the background all the time anywho, so I’m not going to rely just on that anymore.

Anywho, that’s all that is going on with Reel Dream. I’ll be working on the skill sets and Battle System, as well as doing mapping now.

I’m just glad I found those docs.

Anywho, God bless ya’ll,
Meike Kima