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We have the best soundtrack in the world!

You can check out some game info and the entire Rorasuketo soundtrack by Michael Chadwick here . It's absolutely divine. When I said I wanted to pay homage to the Super Nintendo games of my youth, he went to town and grabbed some soundfonts from games like Final Fantasy IV, Earthbound, and Battletoads . I am so happy with the results. The battle tracks are head-bangers, and the emotional lows are perfectly bittersweet. I wouldn't change a thing. I've known Mike since the boom days of of LiveJournal  — which is a long time, for the kids following along at home. He's an immensely skilled guitarist and songwriter, and has a really impressive catalog of work . Originally, I was going to write the music myself, but Mike has far more experience. And in creative projects like this, doing everything yourself has the potential to turn out an inbred, constipated piece of art. Collaboration adds depth to the work that you might not have realized before. It lightens the workload....
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Affection Mechanics in RPG Maker: Gifts.

This is the post where someone says, "Wow, this person made this  way  too difficult for themselves, even for a rookie solo dev with a garbage workflow." Or even: "That is a lot of stuff I'm definitely not going to read." Well, what can I say? I'm trying to use as few plugins as possible. Plugins are code inserted by a third party on "top" of the preexisting RPG Maker structure. Don't get me wrong: Plugins are amazing. There are a lot of incredible programmers out there doing even more incredible things with the RPG Maker framework. I think I've paid for 3 or so plugins and used several other free ones. The two big ones are Hakuen Studio's font manager and the  Heads-Up Display Maker from Some Random Dude (no, that's his name). But what I'm afraid of is stacking 100 plugins on top of each other and getting to the dreaded point of "something's broken, and I have no idea where or why." This is something that  does ...
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You cut him!

Bout 1 is done. This is a big achievement! I have been putting it off for ages. It is starting to feel like Rora is finally coming together as one unit, not scattered into bits and pieces. It feels like it's really happening. I will stitch together these pieces into a whole. I find that being visible on Steam is holding me accountable and giving me the energy to work on the game every day, rather than my usual fits of starts and stops. At some point, I will need to tend to my homework more faithfully, but the game must march on as well. There are  expectations now. He's worried! You cut him! You hurt him! You see? You see? He's not a machine! He's a man! - Duke, Rocky IV
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Affection mechanics in RPG Maker: Dialogue.

We're getting into the weeds now. This is not for the faint of heart! And for aspiring game makers, I can't guarantee this is the easiest way to go about this, but it's what I've cobbled together during my time in RPG Maker MZ. First of all, I establish some variables. These are numeral integers that you can set, add to, subtract from, multiply, whatever - and then apply to any other variables or game parameters you like, like gaining or losing a very specific number of HP. I name one variable per teammate.   The idea: whenever you encounter a teammate for the first time, you can talk to them to raise their Affection variable a little bit. Let's say I want to plop the skater Wreck on a map. I create a new event - one square on the map. This will be Wreck. She will be hanging out, doing squats.   I open the event's details. On the left side of this window, I specify her image, that she'll be "stepping" (animated), that she doesn't change directi...
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In which our dev panics just a little.

Something I've saved for the last big push of the game build is the derby bouts* themselves (of which there will be four). It may have been a poor strategy, saving the most tedious parts for last, but here we are. Maybe I needed to get all the art and affection mechanics and endings and town maps to build the sunk cost to a point of no return. Anyway, I've been developing the individual minigame mechanics of these bouts for a while, and you do  encounter most of them in the demo at team practices. So I've had things more or less planned out and built - all I have to do is piece together all the if-thens at bouts and plop in the quick time events. If you succeed or fail at one task, there's a branch. If you succeed or fail at the next task after that, there's a branch. And so on. So you can either rock a jam completely or fail it completely - or fall somewhere in between. Just like real derby, one good hit (or whiff) can change the entire dynamic of a jam. That's...
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Steam store is now live.

If you go to Steam and search for "rora," this happens. Oh, look, it's the thing I made! Check it out here ! Wishlist if you desire.
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Demo v0.2 is now live!

If you haven't played a demo yet, head to rorasuketo.win and grab the latest. In this new demo, you can get a new job, shop for gifts to your teammates, and endure a short series of drills to join the roller derby team. It ends on a nice little cliffhanger that I think is appropriate for a demo. It's been so long since I put out the last demo (two years?) that I can't remember what other improvements I may have made. Presumably, though, there are a few!
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In the queue!

I have spent the last day toiling away on graphical assets and officially pushed the "submit for review" button. We'll see what happens next. Here's the preview that I can see, at least: The Japanese in the subheader of the logo is a little treat for the manga fans and gives a little taste of that influence. I'm not putting the subheader in  all  of the promotional materials because the game is in English and I don't want to give the wrong impression. Previously, the subheader was all katakana, but I seem to have dialed in the right kanji . At least, Google Translate seems to think so. Phew. I also realized that in my own Steam store , I have filtered out the tag "Sports" (I played a little  Mutant League Football   when I was a kid, but even then, I was randomly selecting plays), so hopefully that will not do any harm in the scheme of the almighty algorithm. Prioritizing tags was very difficult, but in the end I listed the first five as: JRPG Skat...
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