This past weekend, I spent a good bit of time tweaking the flow of the Digger battle and finally finishing that scenario! In the middle of all this, I changed the graphics for the battle Digger creature, found and built new animations for the battle to spruce it up some, and finally got all the pieces to come together for the scene.
Yet Another Digger
First off, I decided I still wasn’t happy with the Digger creature we had. It was mostly a random monster I pulled from Google somewhere as a stand-in, and not something I was sanctioned to use. That’s when I started looking more closely at the artwork provided by Ækashics.
This is not only amazing-looking enemy art, but it’s free to use in RPG Maker games, free to edit, and more or less fits the style we want to go for. Plus, if we can pull from a library from the same artist, we can hopefully keep a consistent look across the battles we do include.
So, I took and altered one of her large insect creatures to remake our Digger again.
I also discovered a way to resize the monster sprites in battle, so in the final project, the Digger is a bit smaller than he shows in these pictures!
New Animations
I’m not quite sure how I stumbled upon Bubble Blog — I think I was looking for a Protect animation for the battle sequence. I’m not a pro on making animations in RPG Maker, but I did learn a lot about it this weekend.
I discovered that the one thing RPG Maker hasn’t changed much over the years is the battle animation system. This is good. This means that animation sheets made for previous versions of the game can still work for RPG Maker MV.
So when I saw some of the amazing animation sheets on that blog, I knew I needed to put them to use, rather than just settle for the default animations that came with the Maker.
I mean, just look at how awesome this fire animation is!
Anyhow, next up, I’m hoping to finish out the end of Chapter 2 this weekend. Syn and I then need to actually WRITE Chapter 3! How exciting — we’re working towards new content!
I’ll also work on getting a video of Chapter 1 out there soon. I’m still messing with video settings and things like that, hoping to get a higher quality output. I made a demo video to show Syn the battle sequence last weekend and wasn’t happy with the quality of the video output at all. I’m sure this is probably rookie user error, though, and I can figure it out.
Until then, Protect Clansman!
