Slice of Venture Remake Diary #14 (Pixiv Fanbox)

Hello everyone,

For this post, I'm going to talk about something I don't talk much: programming. And there's a reason for that. Hime's the one dealing with the scripts and stuff, so I'm better at talking about my part. But after some thinking I thought about two things: Hime's work isn't displayed much in my posts and that doesn't help you getting an idea of the amount of work things represent.

You have to understand one thing. Hime dislikes working on other people's scripts. Most of the time it's because they're badly coded, but also because there are tweaks and things that can be easily done for me if the script is started from scratch. So just like in Slice of School, EVERYTHING in Slice of Venture Remake is made by her. Of course we imported some scripts from SoS and she rewrote scripts from The Hunter 2, SoVO or even SoV2 (because they're made under MV) so they work under MZ. That being said, since all these scripts are made from scratch, they call for bugs. Right now I've just spend a whole week making testing sessions and reporting many bugs to Hime so she can correct everything. Through that whole week, while it was necessary for the game to be smooth, I haven't worked towards adding new content because of that. And it's all the truer when it's a new projects as there are tons of things you need to check only once for the first update that never need to be tested after. So yeah, 1st version = more bugs & longer debugging.

In order to give her more justice, I'm going to list you all the things Hime's been working on for SoVR (and the list isn't finished) so you can have a clearer idea of the backend workload.

1) Textbox/Namebox/Facesets. You've seen the game pics. Everything is customly coded. From the size of the textbox to the position of the facesets and the priority on the z axis.

2) Facesets accessories. No need to detail that, it's the content of the previous post.

3) Add more than 6 choices. In SoV, talking to Mari or checking the horse was showing a list of 10 options. But RPG Maker's max is 6. So we had to add a script to raise this number.

4) Creation of a Ring Menu. For some reasons, SoV2's wasn't importable. So it was done from scratch. It's not finished and I'm postponing it because there are other priorities but it really looks bad for now XD

5) Creating macros. This is something for me, not for you. But it doesn't mean there's no script behind it. In RPG Maker, showing some elements in the textbox require a specific code. For example, showing an icon needs you to write \I[XXX] with XXX being the value of the icon on the icon file. It doesn't look like it but writting \I[XXX] takes 5 seconds. If I add like 100 icons in conversations for the day, it's 500 seconds lost. Now I can just write \XXX which is MUCH faster :p

6) Custom Status screen. Just like in the other games (except SoVO), there's a need for a specific Status screen. And since the needs are different in each games, they're all done from scratch every time.

7) Followers controls. Something VERY important to me. The sisters are always two in the game and while talking to a random NPC is not a problem, I've always disliked having the follower looking in the wrong direction when an important conversation started. Now I can control EVERYTHING about the follower and even ask them to reach a specific point on the map by themselves. This is HEAVY nitpicking here. I've never seen it done in all the games I've played (even if, to be totally honest 95% of them have a solo playable character), but that's definitely the kind of detail I take pride in paying attention to :x

8) Automatic character switch. For some reasons, I needed that the player sprite switches to a car on the world map automatically (and switch back once in a map outside the World Map). In SoV it was done manually. In SoVR, it's not possible anymore. Hence the need of that script.

9) Custom Dash Speed. Something we took from SoS and improved. Now there are two speeds of dash (1 & 2) but 1 is already the sped up version (hard to go back to the original speed honestly.) So at speed 1, walking is like normal speed running, and running is x2 speed. At speed 2, walking is running x2 and running is x4 speed.

10) New Inventory Windows. Just like the Status screen, gotta make a new one and code it so that it fits the requirements of SoVR.

11) Unmoving Parallax. There's a map in the game with a parallax image. However the size of the map makes it that the parallax image moves with the map. It's impossible in RPG Maker to ask it to stay still. So we had to add ascript for that.

12) Keep the windows ratio. The game's resolution is 1400x1050 (4:3). I didn't see it because my screen is QHD, but on an HD screen because of the windows task bar, the game automatically resized to 1400x1000. Meaning you have two nice black bars on each side of the window (of 25 pixels each). So we needed a resize script to keep the whole ratio if windows automatically needs to lower the size of the window.

13) Creation of "advanced bubbles". You're familiar with the bubbles from The Hunter 2. We kept the idea but reworked it all to have more possibilities. Now bubbles can be temporary, consistent, still, animated, have an offset in x or y, appear, disappear at will, have the number of frames they want in their animations etc... While bubbles won't be as present as in TH2 because the gameplay doesn't require it, at least there's much more flexibility on their use and look now.

This is the main list. Keep in mind that outside an exception or two, I haven't listed all the script conversions she worked on nor the huge amount of bugs that needed to be worked on as well (some of these script can easily create side effect making other elements of RPG Maker broken but you can't know about it until you've reached the specific situation.)

Anyway, that list is NOT over, there are still other things she's working for, including a mini-game. A real one. Something I hope you'll be pleased with. But that will be for another post :p

That's all for today!

See ya o/