OMNIS - the erias line: FINAL LOGO CHOICE

After a lot of tweaking and adjusting and submitting it here and there for feedback, I've settled on a "main" logo design. I plan to use the better examples of its variations for other things (official strategy guide, anyone?) but for now, this is the iteration that will be used in-game.

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Video Footage 2

Using my paid-for version of FRAPS, I made another video. This one tests the (admittedly primitive) stealth mechanic and also showcases the first piece of custom music by James Wilson: the battle theme, "To Survive".

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OMNIS - the erias line LOGO CONCEPTS

I've been tinkering with this on and off throughout the entire process of making this demo. I've done logos, redone them, settled on them and then, later, decided they needed entirely redoing.

The latest iteration comes in multiple forms; since every tweak I made seemed to produce something I liked, I decided to keep a copy of every version.

Though each of these is the product of two days worth of design, I don't feel that much closer to decided which one will be "the one".

There's also an element of "promotional" presentation to the second image, I was trying to apply the basics I've picked up from FZD's youtube videos.

Not that I'd compare my artistic talent to Feng or the students showcased here: I'm merely taking examples from the methods of presentation he commends in this video.

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RPG Maker VX Ace dot net Profile Banner

Project renaming underway...

After having another look back through the older files in my "RPG resources" folder, I was lead to recall the project's original title. This game, before it was revised into a "creative demo", was going to be the prequel/prelude to a novel I was writing at the time, namely: Omnis. All this time later, with high hopes and ambitions for the demo firmly settled, I've decided to rekindle that connection with a view to, perhaps, making Omnis into a game itself down the line.

And so "Erias Line" is now a subtitle and the splash screens will need to be redone (a small task).

This whole episode came about, by the way, because I had fancied attempting some promotional concept art. And while I had high hopes for the finished piece, concept art is just a sideline at this point and there really is a lot of more important elements that I need to be working on.

Nevertheless, I thought I'd post the piece as it stands (as is likely to remain standing).

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Video Footage

Having finally committed to a piece of screen capture software (with a view to eventually concocting some sort of trailer) I now have a much easier way of providing clips of in-game footage.

Anything I record (that's in any way worth watching) I'll also be uploading to youtube.

So, here it is:

In-game footage of Erias Line:

Please excuse the temporary low quality. I'm not actually using Action!, I'm using Fraps, and have only just sorted out paying for the license.

Let's Take A Minute

This blog is primarily for showcasing my own work, in the hope that it will eventually come to stand as a C.V. (or 'resume') of sorts. But this post is about somebody else's work and efforts, without which I'd still be crying my bodyweight in frustrated, frightened tears.

RPG Maker VX Ace, whilst undoubtedly the perfect foundation for anyone who wants to make an RPG but has no programming nouse, is not (apparently) without flaws.

I have, for two years, been working very hard on my demo. Continually upping the stakes and increasing my workload, I've humbly attempted to put quality before any other consideration. From the beginning, where I fumbled with the program and made ugly tilesets cannibalised from Google reference images, to now, where I consider myself to have acquired many new skills, the Erias Line project has become deeply personal to me. It constitutes hundreds of hours of painstaking, often back-aching and headache inducing work. With the encouragement of friends, supporters, contributors and well-wishers, my ambition for the game has steadily flourished, drastically exceeding the idle curiosity that first lead me to try RPG Maker VX Ace's trial version.

Imagine, with this prologue, how I reacted when playtests of the demo's first five maps lead to repeated crashes.

Crashes.

With no explanation.

Typically, RPG Maker VX Ace identifies coding faults in an error message. But this particular brand of crash, insidious and evil, culminated in the dreaded "...has stopped working, Windows is searching for a solution to the problem" banner and nothing more.

(When has Windows ever actually found a solution, by the way? Is it really even looking for one? Or is this message merely a form of ineffectual consolation?)

Trembling with fear and irritation, I took to the VX Ace forums to share my problem. And, like a patient in a GUM clinic, I anxiously waited for results.

To my rescue came Galv.
His website.

He recommended a thread in which was contained a 'debugger' script by Mithran, that deals with a generic problem encountered randomly by VX users.
That thread.

Now perhaps, to those with a more intimate understanding of coding and the software's technical aspects, my problem was incidental, commonplace and worth nothing more than a tut. But to me, like a prehistoric man faced with the wrath of a stubborn VCR timer, the issue was one of terror and intense frustration. My own methods of trial and error having failed miserably to even identify the problem's cause, I was literally elated to find a real world hero coming so casually to my rescue.

Galv, sir, should you ever come across this post, I'd like you to know the special significance of your help. I cannot over-exaggerate the particularly sinister timing of this malfunction and your simple recommendation saved everything. I wish that I could offer more than the gesture of special thanks in the demo's credits.

Erias Line: Final Steps

I'm fast approaching the end of the design phase; I'll soon have all the components ready for making my parallax maps. In honour of this checkpoint, I'm posting the very last element of my resource sheets that I've completed.


These are screenshots of the walkway above the Solis Terminus.

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.

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Erias Line: Final Faces

These have been finished for some time now, though I'm only just uploading them. The avatars for the three main characters (of the demo) took a lot of time, principally because I am not, generally, adept at compiling faces. I'm very happy with the end results, though.

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