Rorasuketo Dev Blog

  If you're wondering how you'll find the  Rorasuketo  table at Mitten Kittens in Lansing this October, keep your eyes out for the weirdos wearing purple Lala t-shirts. So far, we're only planning on distributing shirts to the immediate creative team and booth babes (well, the booth hunk, anyway), but I might toss a few fun ones in the order just in case a billionaire skydives into the immediate vicinity and says, "You're the creators of  Rorasuketo?  Give me a t-shirt right now and you can have the keys to my Ferrari." It's good to be prepared... to towel-snap a billionaire with a custom printed t-shirt. My latest Alpha 1.04 playthrough reads as 9.5 hours so far. That includes time spent hopping over to the other monitor to fix or change things. Throwing in a \.\. or two to let dialogue breathe, or making a note to give Wedge's hands two more pixels - that sort of fix, most of them. At one point, I did run into a game-breaking bug (I want to say the t...

It's been a real struggle figuring out the SteamPipe documentation. I've been learning that the instructional videos from Steam itself have incorrect, outdated, or misleading information in them. (!) It took a lovely tutorial from a YouTuber to get me on track. Many thanks to AuroDev for putting that out there. I spent today trying to sort out how to make Achievements work with RPG Maker MZ. There are several different plugins/workarounds out there that promise such integration, one of which looked very promising. I even started to mesh it into the game... but I couldn't get it to work. Someone tried to have AI give me instructions, which I reluctantly followed with an enormous degree of distrust. There were a lot of very rocky moments here in Casa de Norcross as I raged my way through several misunderstandings. I've been told that I need to use my indoor voice when making futile verbal requests of my computer. There's really not enough documentation for these plug...

I am in such a good mood today. My husband is getting a lot more kisses than usual, there is a spring in my step, and I occasionally break out into chants of "It's done!" or "It's happening!" My alpha testers now have access to the game, and here, I sit back for a minute, like Gandalf with his pipe, and reflect. There's still a lot of work to be done: Fixing whatever inevitable bugs are discovered in the alpha, catching up on Steam documentation, figuring out what NW.js is and how to update it, adding to my walkthrough, adjusting sprites, and maybe throwing in a couple plugins for cosmetic purposes. And yet. It's finished . I have a video game that can be played from start to finish. A cohesive project. A  thing. I never finish my projects, so this is a huge personal achievement. As I keep saying, because it still blows my mind, I started  Rorasuketo  in 2018. That's eight years ago . It's taken me eight years of picking it up, dropping it, k...

It's a momentous day! Observe:   I finished the storyline for  Rorasuketo.  The last map was a roller derby montage in chapter 4. A nice way to wrap things up. The game is... in its most raw form, "finished." Now the tweaking and fixing begins in earnest. I've got a few testers lined up, but first, my husband and I are each doing a playthrough to ensure there are no major game-breaking glitches that will stop everyone in their tracks. My first export actually gave an immediate error upon launch. (RPG Maker scans for used and "unused" images upon export, with the option to exclude the unused ones. However, employing an image through a third-party plugin, like a HUD, can apparently appear as "unused." But the file is actually used, and RPG Maker only figures that out at launch. That's my best assessment, anyway.) I have found a few missing screen fade transitions and unwarranted outfit changes. Things like that. So... I think we're going to b...

We were online for about an hour and looked at how some of the roller skating minigames worked in RPG Maker MZ. You can rewatch the stream if you missed it. I'm pecking away at things. It's still hard to lock in (as the kids say) and do the bouts because they are staggeringly un-fun compared to everything else. I find myself going back to sprite sheets, even. It's like when you need to do the dishes, but instead you clean the microwave, mop the floor, and anything else to avoid that dreaded casserole dish caked with lasagna. Hell, maybe even this post is avoidance! But I powered through yesterday, and Jam 1 of Bout 4 is done. That's no small feat. I count 7 different outcomes based on player performance just in that jam. A solid landmark accomplishment. Okay, to be kind to myself, here's what else I've done this past week: Finished Bout 2 (!) Second therapy session for the player Finished up wristguard logic puzzle (wouldn't you like to know?) Cleaned up/fi...

  Don't forget! I am doing a webcast on Friday, and you can now submit a survey to be an alpha tester.

I watched my adoring husband do a 3.5 hour playtest over the weekend, and in the process filled a 2' by 4' white board with things to fix or change. It was a bit overwhelming, recognizing all the work I unexpectedly needed to do. It was also a little deflating, experiencing my game through someone else's eyes - seeing it for exactly what it is instead of the ivory tower I've worked up in my mind. I am only where I am, and can only do what I can do. (There's also only so much a player will experience. They won't find every easter egg and engage every dialogue option.) No,  Rorasuketo  is not going to be the most incredible video game of all time, but I would like to think I still have something special and unique. The people in my corner agree, which is nice. Though my list of fixes was long, I was able to knock out many of them quickly. (Some are anal-retentive things like "change the line break in this one piece of dialogue" and some are fundamental, ...

It's been brought to my attention that I am incredibly disorganized! So I've been getting intentional about making lists and flow charts to make sure, as the game starts to come together into one long strand, that everything is accounted for. So I started a new document where I laid down the entire story, highlighted by themes and subplots, to make sure the colors were well-spaced, well-represented, and resolved. I say the game is "story-based," and I would like to think I am correct. After doing this particular activity, part of me worries that I'm trying to cram too many subplots into a 4-hour package. Then again, some of them are optional or possibly subtle enough for some of the first beats to fly under the radar. I don't see a ton of replayability in Rorasuketo for the casual player; the explorer type might want to have another go or two to try other friend or story options. So I think it will be good to intertwine a variety of threads! I'm happy to s...

I spent way too long banging my head against the wall yesterday, trying to figure out why the game wasn't receiving button inputs, only to find out that I had a switch turning on and off while an NPC was moving in the background. I can't remember what it was I was trying to do when I originally placed that NPC on the map. Did that switch do something originally, and why did I change it to do something else later? Do I have a switch doing double duty somewhere else? And that's why you need to keep your switches organized, kids. Anyway, I'm channeling a little Dance Dance Revolution with my arrows here, which I have no qualms about. You're not an ordinary fella!     I'm contemplating doing another webcast soon to keep me accountable. Summer is rocketing along and I need to tap these days to the maximum.

Finals week is right around the corner, and while this humble scholar has an optimistic lookout for April (go on! ask me about glycolysis!), the first few weeks of May could be complicated. A common pitfall for new college students is not recognizing that most summer classes run at an accelerated rate. Having been around the block a few times, I signed up for a 3-credit summer course expecting the accelerated six weeks, only to discover it is  double- accelerated. That's one college credit per  week . It's a plant identification course, so I assume it's timed this way for maximum efficiency in the field. I predict I will exit May either loving plants or despising them. Winter vacation is when I historically do most of my work for  Rora , with spring break in second, and summer is a bit of a wild card. My official goal is to finish the game by the end of this year, but my unofficial goal is to finish it by the end of the summer. With beta testing and all that, we'll s...

One of the first things Steam has you do as a developer is tag your game. Here's my first go-around. Note that these tags are selected from a list:   The risk with using the "dating sim" tag is that my game may be miscategorized as pornographic, either mechanically by Steam, or by human passersby.  Rorasuketo  is not pornographic in any way. But affection is a core mechanic, and I want people who like affection mechanics to be able to find and enjoy that aspect. No one's taking off their pants, but you do choose who you take on 1:1 social outings to get to know them better. In the gaming world, you call those "dates." And while my game has sports as a backdrop, I'm not totally comfortable calling it "a sports game." I would reserve that kind of thing for an actual simulator where you have more control over plays and so on. There is no "roller derby" or "roller skating" tag. Just "skating." Similarly, there is a lon...

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 ...

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...

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...

I did a cool thing this weekend, which was to drop $100 USD on a Steamworks account. This means I can soon start developing a Steam page for Rorasuketo , and maybe this will light a little bit of a fire under my ass to get this thing done. Not sure when I'll actually publish the page - and whether it will exist as "coming soon" or only after it's ready for purchase - but I've at least put in an investment that goads me into putting something out there. Homework hasn't piled up yet, but I am still feeling a little worn out from the winter break work blitz, so I am meeting in the middle by doing what I'll call "nuts and bolts." You could also call it quasi-procrastination. Deciding where Achievements are going to go, making checklists to ensure I don't miss anything before exporting the final product, writing the walkthrough, deciding price points, that kind of thing. Dare I even say I networked a little bit with a Let's Player with about 5...