u/WhalesDev

I was heavily inspired by Vermis, but especially Vermis 2. Growing up, I used to use old Prima Games guidebooks as a way to play through the game. Even now, as an adult, I play a lot of games with a wiki.

I'm working on my own project, with the manual and guidebook built into the game. Here are a few pages.

Plugins Used:
Galv's Layer's
Galv's Extra Frames
Galv's Bust

Font is a bit small so I'll need to manually adjust some of it.

Hello,

I've been working on my game for a little while now as my fist project and I've learned some stuff that hopefully others can use. Without going into a super long ramble about my game I'll just jump into it but the itch io demo is here if anyone wants to try it out (It has supreme levels of jank be warned)

https://whalesdev.itch.io/end-the-endless

1. HUDmaker + Moghunter's Battle HUD compatability

These two play quite nice with each other. So I'll explain each and how they work independently.

HUDmaker

This is your graphics and conditional input. It is extremely easy to use and is very much a case of setting up conditions.

Eg: Only show Portraits in Slot 2 if I Party Member #2 even exists in the party. You can get very creative with this. I have a candle system for my Stamina that exists for no other reason than I think it looks cool.

I have 10 different Candle images that are stacked on top of each other with display conditions.

It also works for your Menu as well as it has a different canvas for your main menu.

Simply assign a switch to your main menu and you're good to go.

Eg: If Switch #400 Menu = On

From there you can build your controllers and such but that's a lot more detail and quite frankly mine still has some minor flickering and display bugs from button mashing so I'm not totally qualified to speak on that one.

Moghunter's BattleHud

I do not know if another plugin exists that can edit menus the same way this one does.

This is the one that edits the size and placement of your input menus.

You can also attach layout images for each such as Actor_Skill etc to get a more cohesive theme with your HUDmaker menu.

I am very much of the mindset of it isn't broken don't fix it so I haven't touched too much of this one in a while.

Isometric Mapping

I'm 90% my old old old test files exist in my current project but I didn't wait long before trying isometric mapping. I've never been a fan of drawing top down assets so I chose this perspective.

This is just glorified 8 directional movements and I'm sure a lot of people are are familiar with this but this is how I approached it.

Movement

There are a ton of 8 directional movement plug ins out there such as Galv's or Visustella's but they work great. You'll need to amend the sprite sheets to make sure they walk equally.

Unfortunately for the people who are more visual I didn't include a sprite sheet but a common size I use for mine is 4 x 6 tiles (48 x 48 tiles).

Collision

I screwed up on the image but I'm using an MV plugin despite being on MZ. I had some issues with the collisions not working with the version iterations at the time.

So this one is a little more complex. Isometric sprites, by their nature will have janky detection for collision unless you are using some sort of custom plugin for that (I think I saw one? Maybe?)

How I create my maps is is I first create a base.

This is the entire map with all assets, props and everything.

This is then used as a Parallax map for me to place my colour coded tiles that RegionRestrict allows the player to pass through.

Once this collision work is done, I use Galv's Layers.

I have 3 simple layers for sorting but basically

1. The base (Same as the Parallax file usually)

2. What displays over the player

3. The fog

From here, I delete the parallax image from the map because it creates scrolling issues.

The events are effectively duplicated or even quadrupled in order to make it easier for the player to contact things and have their inputs be recognized on things like loot.

Art Stuff

I mostly included this stuff for the artists who are struggling with background stuff. It currently has the old UI overlaid in my example file (I've actually removed the directional inputs due to the clunkiness of it) but I think the two big take aways for me were.

1. Perspective - You can convey a lot with your environments in terms of scale. You can have two identical sized sprites of a mouse and a dragon but if you have two different backgrounds, it conveys vastly different sizes.

This sounds obvious but its something I had to learn (Praise Thomas Romain)

2. Designing around your UI - This one bit me in the ass a lot. I have a TON of concept sketches I was hoping to paint over before bringing into pixel art but the amount of space taken up by the foreground and UI alone made it nearly impossible to fit more than one sprite.

Anyway, I can't animate for shit so I won't make a tutorial on that but if anyone wants any advice on colours or something let me know.

Hi everyone, a little while back I made a post about a project I was working on inspired by Miro's work.

I messaged the mods first to make sure this is okay but if its not please let me know.

It's a Monster Collector inspired by Blasphemous thematically with a lot of the overworld design elements of F&H (Limited healing, ways to optimize, multiple routes etc)

I've made a LOT of updates to it and I find it a lot more enjoyable to play now but I will let anyone who wishes to try to be the judge of that.

https://whalesdev.itch.io/end-the-endless (Testing Demo that is the most current info)

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3631050/End_the_Endless/ (If you just wanna watch my janky trailer or want to wait for a Steam demo) - This is page is under reconstruction however

I would like to keep this F&H Related so I want to talk about how I learned from Miro's work and what lessons I took away from it that make F&H and F&2 Termina such good games to learn from.

***BIG WALL OF DEVELOPER NERDING OUT ABOUT MIRO'S WORK AND STUFF I LEARNED***

The Difficulty Elephant in the Room

I've heard a lot of complaints from people playing F&H, 1 especially, that it is "Unfair." Unfortunately this is a design element I leaned far too hard into. A game can have elements of being "unfair" without straying into the "bullshit" territory". On my first iterations, I definitely found myself in the latter territory.

If you do not give the player a chance to learn the basics first, feeding them to the grinder immediately will make things difficult to discern between what is "unfair" vs what is simply just difficult.

Enemies have predictable strategies and, if you choose to learn, you have ample resources to overcome them.

By toning down moments of unfairness in my game at the start, I found it made a lot more enjoyable experience when the player was able to figure out when things went their way.

When things go your way - you feel good. And I think Miro did a really good job at making the player aware of WHEN things go their way.

Player Choice and Choosing your Obstacle Course

This is a short blurb but I'm sure everyone knows just how DENSE F&H2 is. I am certain it has more routes and choices than some AAA RPGs with teams of multiple writers.

If the player encounters the same obstacles every time, eventually, they may tire of them. What Miro did by allowing players to choose their paths and try to strategize with what tools they have may sound like very obvious information but this is something I was stubborn on.

It took me several iterations and routes to find ways to let the player determine how they wish to progress and what questlines they wish to continue. My solution to this was several different bosses the player could fight to progress. If you have a strong team, you can fight a stronger boss for more rewards or if your team is meek, you can explore deeper and try to find an easier solution.

External Information

Going through F&H2 the first time, I often had my self a map or the wiki up. I learned that having access to information made things not only more interesting but gave me something to look forward to.

Given how vast the game is, having a wiki or external resources can be seen as depriving oneself of the discovery that comes with seeing certain moments. However you cannot necessarily count on your players or even yourself to build a wiki for you so how exactly does this translate into learning for a small Itch IO project?

One of the common complaints I had was lack of information. Why can this guy use a spear but not a sword? Why does this guy turn into a weird rock monster thing?

This was something I had a lot of difficulty in making at first until I came up with my own solution. A "Pokedex" if you will for each Hollow you can recruit.

I didn't want to use a simple text menu so I opted for visual displays of what they can each equip but it also gave me an excuse to write a little lore blurb and show off their sprite.

But the important part was making a game with enough choices and options that warrants such information existing. And I think that is the key takeaway.

Quality of Life is Always Worth It

This is another short blurb but feeling the technical upgrades in the second game compared to the first really elevates it. My first iterations were broken, beyond broken even and janky. Its easy to write off jank as a developer and hope the players will figure it out.

Taking time to go through and spend the hours to add small things that are greater than the sum of its parts make for a far more enjoyable experience.

I do not know what Miro has in store for F&H3 (Which I'm sure is a long while away) but I hope he continues this tradition of technical iterations.

I wrote off jankiness and paid dearly for it.

Anyway, thanks for reading. Let me know if you have any questions

Hi everyone,

A while back I posted about a demo I made.

It is a monster collector inspired by the nuzlocke ruleset with some atmosphere from Fear and Hunger and overworld stuff although I don't quite have Miro's hatred for the player.

Obligatory Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3631050/End_the_Endless/

Itch IO link for demo: https://whalesdev.itch.io/end-the-endless

While it was super jank, completely broken it did give me the feedback I needed.

I would like to talk about what I learned here as its my first project and I would like to maybe share some things that help others.

1. First things first - Mechanics

Simply put, I think in their original state, they were interesting despite how broken the skills were but they lacked any kind of long term interest. To compensate for this, I basically remade the entire weapon system with some help from a guy I used to work with.

Its nothing fancy, its just a common event that reassigns classes based on an actor ID depending on what weapon is equipped.

Each Hollow has its own 3 core skills and 1 additional skill that relies on the weapon equipped.

In some cases this offers a very bland skill simply meant as a filler, other times not having a weapon at all will completely handicap your stamina management (Forlorn Knight) and other times there is an objective clear best weapon you want to have.

If your Hollow dies, you will lose them on death.

I think this is a lot of fun and offers a lot of options for the player.

2. Clarity

While I think I made a decent very short little path for my demo, it lacked a lot of clarity in terms of how the features interact with each other, lore and even just how the game works.

For example - Why can a guy who holds a literal flagpole not equip a spear? Why does the pistol guy get swords but my skull lady can't do anything? Are these just stat sticks?

Anyway I needed a really good solution for this one and I think I found it. I'm a visual person so I pivoted towards a layered image for each actor simply displaying what they can have equipped, a little bit of lore and what they look like.

I think the last part is important because to be frank, I like how some of these look and I'm happy I can show them more than just in battle.

3. More runs = more Feedback

My original demo was very short and missing a lot of what I think makes an interesting tutorial dungeon. It had little in the way of lore, there was little visual indication of what made an encounter pop up and there was the same outcome every time.

To counter this, I greatly expanded on the whole sewer system, adding some secret tunnels too akin to the F&H1's side door but maybe hidden too well in my case because of the way layer mapping and collisions work.

I added multiple ways for the player to go farther in the demo. For example.

i. Player can kill the first NPC they meet to simply just go right to the boss.i

ii. Player can kill a much harder mini boss to get an additional healing chance while keeping the first NPC alive. That way they are fresh before the boss.

iii. Player can explore deeper, get a quest from the second NPC to kill the first NPC and get a key to fight an entirely different boss.

iv. Player can completely ignore the mini boss and get the same item by killing the second NPC to give to the first one.

4. Plugins are weird - Database errors

Sometimes plugins cause conflicts you have no idea how to fix due to lack of documentation on forums or the wiki. For example, Visustella's HP cost on some skills does not work and I had to pull scripts from the forum megasheet to alleviate this. I'm certain this is simply a database error for a skill that needs to be simply rebuilt.

For example - I had a skill that would completely lock up the game. Quite literally just a basic damage formula skill. I even took a day off work to fix this because of how annoyed it made me.

I found an old thread saying that a fix was to simply just delete the skill, and rebuild it from scratch.

This worked!

5. Speed

People don't like going slow. I run 300% speed minimum on most ROMhacks I nuzlocke except in trainer fights. My game was slow so I added speed to the player, removed unncessary wait commands etc.

6. Polish

Sometimes you just need more animations and more stuff. I added a ton of assets. My demo was very sparse on even basic things like Skill animations. I am still using a couple RTP placeholder skill animations but I will get around to fixing them. I also added more content near the end to give the player incentives to see all the "evolution" lines by getting more items required by adding these items to additional enemies.

7. All bugs are bad but not all bugs are doomsday. But doomsday bugs exist.

My game still has a few audio or visual bugs. Probably way more than I could ever find on my own. But it is in a FAR better state. 90 hours of playtesting over 2 weeks to fix all I could find and I'm sure there's more of them.

My first demo had so many gamecrashing bugs it was UNREAL.

Some exist that I simply don't know how to fix (Eg: Damage Offsets being broken despite) but I didn't have any crashes in my last 9 runs.

8. What you want to make vs What people like

I think deep down I knew what I wanted to make but wasn't quite there yet on my first prototype.

This version is far closer to what I enjoy but is not always fun. Sometimes, it is straight up bullshit and I will admit I need to tweak things.

This game is not for everyone. It was made for the kind of person that enjoys running face first in Roxanne on Emerald Kaizo 9 without a calc times in a row before they finally get past her before being stumped at Brawly.

Anyway, I can show some images for how I made things like maps and such and how I made my menu tomorrow if people I want. Sorry this is so long. Too much coffee.

Thanks for everyone who gave feedback on my demo.
I hope to release a much more user friendly and polished one very soon.

If the game is too dark, please let me know! I'm trying to feedback on lots of monitors, especially OLEDs.

Wishlists are neat but I'm not really trying to make any money from this except hopefully the cost of MZ and CSP and MAYBE my sound package.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3631050/End_the_Endless/