28 march 2021
The night before last was pretty wild in terms of weather; We had a huge thunderstorm, then over the course of the night it changed into a blizzard. I've never seen anything like it.
I've decided I'm gonna make my RPG project using RPG Maker. As much as I'd love to make the whole thing from the ground up, I don't actually have much gamedev experience other than the fact that I've made a fairly basic, mostly finished roguelike several years ago. People give RPG Maker a hard time, but you can do some neat things with it; Just look at games like Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass, Hylics, OneShot, etc. Speaking of Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass, I really need to get back to that game. Maybe when I'm feeling a little better.
Oh yeah speaking of RPGs, I played a little bit of Lagrange Point, a Japan-exclusive NES/Famicom sci-fi RPG. I've only played about an hour and a half, but it's really cool so far! The music slaps, there are neat little cutscenes, and some of the mechanics seem kinda interesting. For example, instead of a traditional MP stat, you have BATTERY POINTS, which also get used up by basic weapon attacks in addition to special skills. I'm not 100% sure how I feel about that just yet, but I think it might be good for me, as I'm someone who tends to hoard their MP in RPGs. Characters have special, powerful abilities that can only be used when they are feeling HYPE, which reminds me of Dragon Quest XI. Or, I guess it would be the other way around, huh? Anyway, there also seems to be some sort of weapon combination system, but I haven't made it far enough to unlock it yet.
I really really wanna play through the classic Phantasy Star games. I've played the first one right up to the final boss, but I wanna replay it with the cool fan translation that got released not too long ago. Problem is, I haven't really had the energy to go through an 8-bit dungeon crawler without an automap. As silly as this sounds, maybe I could write an automap plugin for Bizhawk or something. I know writing an automap is probably more work, but I guess what I mean by "I haven't had the energy to map an 8-bit dungeon crawler" is "it doesn't interest me".