So, I don't update forum posts very often - it's better to get news from my blog (or work blog) directly, but I'll summarize the past few months.
Around the start of October, the very start of the month, while I was working on Faith & Prayer Version, my external fried and broke on me. I mentioned this in the first post. Recently, I got some information on my external - the Read/Write head on it was broken, and would need to be replaced. The rough quote estimate was around 600~1500 dollars. I opened up a donation pool to try and help me fund the data recover (because there's other important stuff to me on there that can't be replaced even if I had all the time in the world), but I'm not expecting a miracle of it being under 900 dollars, nor am I expecting people to donate such great sums of money. So I spent the past 3 months in a hyper-depressive slump, gradually getting worse and worse as time went on.
I decided it was time to put an end to that.
On the 25th, I reopened RPG Maker XP and my backup of Faith & Prayer version for the first time in 3 months and started to try and recover my groove. Since then I've added a few small things, such as an EV/IV check screen. I'm also not entirely ready to rework on the maps I had lost, so I'm doing a play through of the game once more to try and find some earlier bugs and issues, and as I play I'm touching up the maps. I've grown a lot since I started working on Faith & Prayer Version back in, and I've noticed some of my older mapping decisions are a bit tacky, as well as some of my balancing decisions. In the balancing department, I have changed Curator Miles's battle around. This change was made because I felt having Chibi Suika with Minimize was godawful and this wasn't my idea in the beginning. This is currently up to a suspect test, but I haven't had any real issues with the new fight. As for the maps, I've touched them up in a way that I think improves how they look, but keeps the design the same. For example. This is Pallet Town in Demos 6 downward
And this is how it looks in Demo 7 now.
The same type of changes have been made to Route 1 and Viridian City so far. Expect the new Demo to have revised maps along these lines. As a result, you'll need to save inside buildings before updating, but that's something to worry about when the update happens.
I also made some tweaks to the trade script! It's not very big, but it adds some more life to trading I'd say. I'm looking into revising the trade segment some more, so it looks prettier. The only real changes to it right now are a bgm during trade and a fanfare when you finish a trade.
An example video can be found right here.
So, while progress on Demo 7's actual content is... well, near-non-existent (I had some D7 stuff before I lost the external, but mostly some framework scripts, such as music looping), I'm slowly working myself into being able to actually work on the game again. I can't tell you when Demo 7 will be done (i never could tell you when any demo would be done), but I can tell you that progress is being made once more.
I haven't gotten proper word back about if the external data is recoverable yet, as it was Christmas Weekend so the repair place was closed, but I'll call in later today and see what I can find out. If you want to donate money to help me recover my data, please hold onto it until I find out more - I don't want people donating their money only for me to find out that I can't recover the data, then sitting there with money stockpiled in my account. I'd honestly feel terrible. If you really want to though, there is a link to my paypal donation button
on my blog.
I'll try and keep people informed on the updates to Faith & Prayer Version as time progresses. Until next time folks, stay magnificent!
