I'm not sure what kind of overlap there is between people who like to play RPG games and Supernatural fans. I suspect some people might play a game DESPITE its being about Supernatural, and some people might play a game IF it's about Supernatural. I am trying to find a good balance between making a game that's fun to play and one that mirrors Supernatural canon enough to interest fans. Your feedback is welcome!!
I have two new monsters completed since my last update. The first one is my interpretation of a rugaru.
I am undecided about his pants. They are torn in an overly cartoonish way; maybe I will redo them. On the other hand if it's good enough for the Incredible Hulk to have those V shaped tears, perhaps it's good enough for a rugaru as well. Here is the original model, poor Jack who showed great restraint in not nibbling on unconscious Dean while Sam extracted himself from the closet.
Rest in Peace, except no, you forever roam Purgatory until something there kills you I guess. Of course in my game he is not meant to represent that individual rugaru, but the idea of rugarus in general. It's not like he personally resurrects and changes his shredded pants and attacks again on the next map.
And here we have a werewolf.
Now, you may object, Corbin's misadventures did not begin until long after the Purgatory storyline. True... But as I just rationalized above, he isn't meant to be "Corbin," just "average, dangerous but befuddled, tragic werewolf." (Oddly, both Corbin the werewolf and Jack the rugaru had a wife named Michelle, according to the Wikia.) I'm not sure how he ended up with white tennis shoes but they show the blood well so he can keep them.
Too bad Madison's stalker ex turned out not to be a werewolf; he would have made a great model. Of course I am not sadistic enough to make Madison herself into the model. But let's pause for a moment to imagine her fate in Purgatory... Yeah. Okay, moving on.
The background in the battle scenes is my considerably unfinished artwork. Maybe it will be completed for the next update!
Speaking of battle scenes, how will the fights work in the game? I was wrestling with the battle concept, and I think it will go like this: Take vampires as the example. They must be killed with a special skill, Decapitation. Dean, Cas, Sam, they can all whack the head off a vamp. But the battle has to consist of more than just that. So let's say the HP needs to be knocked down first. (For those of you unfamiliar with these kind of games, HP or hit points represent how much life a character or enemy has; typically when hit with an attack one's hit points decrease until death occurs at 0.) Suppose the vampire starts with 100 HP. S/he will not go below 1 unless the Decapitation move is used. Use it when the HP are at 100 and it has 0% chance of working. Use it when the HP are at 80 and it has a 20% chance of working, use it when the HP are at 30 and it has a 70% chance of working, and so on.
Similarly, werewolves will need to have their HP knocked down and then they can be killed with a special skill, Heart Stab, but they have an additional requirement, that the weapon be silver. So supposing Dean is the only one to be equipped with a silver weapon when a werewolf is encountered, then he will have to strike the finishing blow. Also, any kind of weapons can hurt the werewolf but silver weapons will hurt it more. If no one has a silver weapon, your little pixel guys will have to make a run for it.
I've taken a detour from directly working on my game to learn some JavaScript, since it may be hard to implement my ideas with the default RPG Maker system. Some "under the hood" tweaks will be necessary. Thank you Codecademy.com, a site that offers free coding lessons for a number of computer languages.
I have a couple more things to show in the artwork department. I've started the tileset for the non-Purgatory scenes where Sam is searching for Dean (as opposed to, say, hitting a dog or settling down with a girl or any such nonsense ^_^) in the beginning portion of the game. Specifically, I am working on making a gas station/convenience store. Sam can go there in response to Kevin's prophecy.
Most of these graphics come with the game, but I made the Gas-n-Sip sign and the slush machine from scratch. Yay!
Zoom:
I also erased the stuff off the counter that comes with the game, in preparation for putting some slush cups and such on it. The sign is actually for the outside of the store, but I stuck it on the inside for now because I haven't made an outside yet. I figure there will be some supernatural event that will cause the machine to begin spewing out blue slush, so I will be animating it later. I'm also going to tweak the contents of the shelves. RPG Maker comes from Japan and if you look closely you can see the refrigerator display contains triangular rice balls. That's probably too exotic for my American convenience store, but all the shelves full of cup noodle, well that's an international taste treat, isn't it?
That's all I have for now. Thanks so much for reading!
