This will be a long update.
I am working on CS Scenario #2 again, in earnest. I anticipate that I will be able to move right along now, however...
I am experiencing some major frustrations in my work.
Before I say more, let me preface by adding that I believe the following is true about Chaos Seed:
(1) This may be the most difficult English patch we have done or ever will do. (2) This may be the best job we'll ever do on a patch. (3) This may be the best game we have ever translated or tried to translate. (4) This may be the most difficult game I, personally, have ever tried to play!
Now, all of us have pride and many people have difficulty admitting struggles with something they're supposed to be good at doing, but I will honestly admit the following: This game is still kicking my tail!
It's challenging enough to navigate through numerous files and put a game story together while playing the game - even when everything goes smoothly. Most of the games we do have text or script blocks that run through chapters and scenes in fairly sequential order. And some of the basic storyline scenes in CS do indeed fall in logical string order. But CS is by far the most randomized game I have yet written. Bits and pieces of scenario scenes call strings from all over creation! I'm keeping a log of which blocks I've worked inside and what the subject matter of a given block is, but oftentimes when I back up in my game to check what I've written and continue the rewrite/polish process, I end up pulling a different scene and sequence of strings - even from inside a different block on occasion.
Also, a player may build a cave in an infinite variety of configurations. Depending on what the cave builder does or doesn't do, The Senju will talk to the hero and make suggestions - pulling strings from a variety of blocks - making it clear that some of what I'm polishing in scenario #2 may very well pop up again in all future scenarios. On top of that, the script is massive.
Finally, while I was working on building my fourth of fifth cave room in scenario #2 - a number of different times last week - humans invaded the rooms and wiped me slick before I could hardly strike a counter-blow! The hero possesses probably a dozen offensive movements in this action RPG. Even though I'm using a real SNES game pad converted to USB and have super control, concentrating on the "buttonology" while trying to remember and look up all of the Feng Shui intricacies, along with trying to craft the story is just flat overloading and frustrating my brain and fingers! I was really proceeding well toward the "egg scenario" yesterday - almost to finding Dragon Furnace room - when the humans invaded, wiped me slick, and caused me to lose all I had built! When I started the scenario over, events took a different course with different strings being called up. I got bogged down writing yet another alternative set of scenes, then the humans invaded once more and wiped me out again!
Yet, I am making good progress because I took the opportunity to completely polish and fix a few blocks, whether or not I saw all of its strings during game play. The biggest glitches I have seen in the story strings thus far is omission of [newl] codes. This causes following lines to concatenate with previous lines and run off the edge of dialogue boxes. My job would be much easier if Bongo` would rewrite the code to treat all typed-in (natural) line breaks as [newl], as he has done in most insertion systems other than CS and Aretha-II.
So, here is what I'm proposing to the team. Unless someone can write me a cheat that makes my character invincible to attack without crashing certain parts of the game, I plan to take a new approach to my job and just start working on blocks in the blind without playing the game as I go along. Then, I will pass my text/script files progress back to Draken and the beta team and let them clean up the formatting, typos, and the other customary glitches.
I haven't touched the misc files, but many of the battle messages, room god's, and other messages that flash up from time to time are glitched in ZSNES. Maybe they work fine in BSNES, etc., but I don't know that for a fact.
I'll try to build a few more dungeons, but unless I can figure out why my character who I thought was fairly leveled up from Scenario #1 is so weak, I won't be driving away the humans successfully. They hit me really hard before I can barely get anyone assembled from the Summoning Room!
Finally, to Red Soul: The four manual pages look fantastic. I guess we need to leave the fonts small to fit the info. My only suggestion thus far is to standardize the room names with the game. I believe we call metal "Gold" and the Digging Room an "Excavation" Room. Just double check all of those - if you will. Also, I haven't seen but a few of the possible room upgrades. It would be good to check those upgrade names in the manual against their counterparts in one of the misc lists - or wherever the game calls them from.
Now that I've returned to game production work on a regular basis, I'll mention here that I'm also working on Burning Heroes whenever Ritchie sends new blocks, and I've allotted about 20% of my writing time daily to Aretha-II. With A-II, I've progressed to about a V0.12 beta, and I already have a small A-II bug report (in my head) for Bongo`'s edification.
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