Mapping and its consequences... (Pixiv Fanbox)

Hello everyone,

This is probably the last post I'll make before the release of the demo.

You see, I fell on a problem I didn't expect to have which is time consumption from mapping.

Until today, most of my mapping wasn't necessarily quick, but the diversity of the maps helped a lot into being a bit less subtle regarding file handling.

I'll give you an example. In SoV3, the whole forest at the beginning of the game are a combination of elements I assembled together. But most of them were already a single file by themselves. As such, I could just use the complete file (even if there were elements I knew I wouldn't use) because all in all, the forest is just the beginning of the game. After you have the shrine, then the mountain etc... So there's no need to tailor tilesets carefully (and thus earn a good amount of time.)

Same thing for The Hunter 2. I didn't need to tailor the entrance of Ambriosa tile by tile because I knew that when the game would lead to other blocks of the town, I'd have other tilesets, so it was okay. That also helps compensating with the lack of "originality" of said tilesets which are often the same ones over and over again.

However, in Slice of School, things are different. I'm not going to add more maps as the game progress (well, I will between the demo and the v0.1 but the global layout of the school has already been decided. Once all the places are accessible, except on a single occasion or two, you'll play on the same maps throughout the entire game.)

So I couldn't act like in the previous games. The tilesets had to be tailored (to have a maximum of usable elements (100%) in each file) AND original (I really wanted to avoid using RPG Maker base tileset.) And boy wasn't I ready...

I've always said that the biggest problem when it came to tilesets in RPG Maker was the fact that you couldn't afford to have tilesets with too different styles. Otherwise it looks out of place. But that's the major problem: A LOT of those tilesets, be them free or not, have their own style. Heck even RPG Maker sells the "DS pack" which is Pokémon-looking and just can't work with the base MZ/MV tilesets. I already ranted about how MZ new tilesets are lazy recolors/extra-saturated/random stuff that are mostly unusable for the most part, so I had to look for stuff one by one until I found something satisfying. And even though I did find it, I had to replace all unnecessary elements with stuff I'd need... And when you need something precise, it's a HELL to search for it. I've spent too much time on the Internet searching for precise elements I needed for decoration. Sometimes to no avail and I had just lost an hour for nothing. The climax of that is probably what happened to me two days ago where I've searched for hours for shower tiles for shower rooms and NO ONE had that. I found ONE guy who did it and I had to pay the whole tileset for 4 fucking tiles... -_-

Long story short, I've never spent so many time on so few maps. The last two weeks have been nothing but hunting for tilesets, reordering them in Photoshop (it takes A LOT of time considering you have 256 tiles per tilset file), sometimes having to just slide elements because I needed them to have a different X or Y position on the map etc... And to add insult to injury, I wanted to save people the trouble of loading maps whenever they came inside a room in the school so we worked with Hime on a system that hides the roof content until you come inside but where the roof comes out when you get in. I think you'll like it, it saves some time. Cause yeah, I didn't want to leave each room visible like in my other games.

ANYWAY... As of today I've finally made some progress on the maps. They're not 100% finished but at least I can focus on something else a bit as they're well-advanced compared to before. I'm showing you the two floors of the school building (there will be 3 major buildings in the game: the school building, the gymnasium and the refectory/dorm building)

This is the 1st floor

And this is the second floor

As always with mapping, this is extremely unfair as to the eyes of most people it'll just look like your random H Game map. But I hope the few people who actually pay attention to details will notice that actually 99% of what's shown doesn't belong to the original RPG Maker assets.

The title said "consequences". Some of you probably guessed it but I NEVER expected to spend 2 weeks on mapping a couple of maps. As such, I'm utterly late. There's like 95% chances I need a couple more days in December to have the demo ready. Once again it's always the same thing: it's a new game so there's a lot of things to do here I won't have to work on later. The biggest one being the UI. None of the UI is ready for now so it'll take some time, but also preparing all the facesets for conversations, design the whole menu... So yeah no way I can do all that in 8 days :/

Sorry. But at the same time, even if I need a few more days, I'll have made that demo in a month or so compared to SoV3 which took me almost 3 months to put out, I'd say it's fair x)

I'll see you for the release o/