Erias Line: Script Demands

While writing the script for my demo, I only half paid attention to the technical/time limitations imposed by RPG Maker VX Ace. For example, I would freely write "he kneels to pick up the charge pack" without worrying all that hard about the fact that this simple action requires a "kneeling and picking up" animation.

At the level of quality I'm aiming for, even small inclusions and adjustments can be hugely time consuming to implement, so imagine my unease when I rediscovered the line:

"scene changes to short cutscene of train exiting tunnel"

Although by now I'm completely numb to what was once an ominous sense at the idea of significantly boosting my workload, the cutscene I'd imagined required creation entirely from scratch.

In the finished cutscene, the camera pans left, following the train as it emerges from the tunnel before finally fading out. The spectacle of which lasts for little more than a handful of seconds - but took five hours to create.

I had to create sprites of the train carriages (greatly reducing their scale), draw an entirely original parallax map and create a tileset to overlay so that the train could pass 'underneath' something before emerging. I'm at a stage now where huge work for small rewards no longer oppresses me, since I'm keener than ever to compile the final product.

Everything's looking the way I hoped it would and, now that the script is almost finished, the completed demo may not be more than a month or so from completion.

S.E