Cats can persevere. We had a cat who lost his leg, we don't know how but he came home after being missing for a couple of days and showed up missing a leg, no blood, he didn't look in pain, but unfortunately, the wound was too infected for the vet to do anything. Wherever he had gone, he had managed to make it home missing a leg.
And nice work on the bike DJD. Now you need to build a shell for it and try to make it look like a real motorbike. And speaking of motorbikes, I'm going to the Peterborough bike this weekend, might check out some potential 2nd bikes and also look at some gear. Roadskin are going to be there and I am very interested by their Titanite clothing, which is supposed to be very tough, yet lightweight and has room for armour. With any luck Honda will be there, given the number of new releases they've got this year, I might get to have a good look at the 2017 Rebel. Sadly my dealership don't have them in at their Cambridge branch yet (as they tend to do most of their motorcycles in Bury St Edmonds so they get priority).
Also, I've been playing around with my newer game idea more recently, which I think I mentioned before, after coming up with from seeing damn good bedroom coded RPG's out there, thinking, "why don't I just do one?". Not Abeyance, which of course is now an old idea, which I'll do eventually, but that one would require me to get back into 3D. Instead, it's something I was cooking up in RPG Maker MV. I am seeing myself realistically getting something done in this. Maybe I'll showcase when I've got a demo done. The principle around is to take the classic RPG cliches and set it as a backdrop for a world. You know, 4 heroes wielding weapons of light going against some unknown evil force, seeking the powers of the gods and going on some great adventure to defeat some god-like being. I might even make a few joke references to existing games. This will be for the sake of parody, partly on my frustration of so many games that take the same backdrops, same themes and same gameplay, which is no bad thing but don't really give me a story or characters I care about, so I'll parody the cliches, but add my own depth to it. For example playing Diablo III lately, I feel like in one of the earlier dungeons, the execution of Leoric's wife by Leoric should have been something impactful, something I'd care about, but felt like a copy & paste tragic scene with characters I do not know or care about and that might be because Diablo III had its action in mind, but feels like a shame with those beautifully animated cutscenes, all the backstory and lore that when it comes to story itself and the characters involved, it's a bit...meh. But I am an RPGamer who plays both for gameplay and story.
So what I am planning and working on is my own way of deconstructing the cliches of the type of RPG I'm making, with the aim of having characters you care about and a story you can be invested in (an ambitious claim, but I hope my years of writing and running an engaging roleplaying group pays off). For a start, you don't follow the heroes in the story, you follow a group of common folk, trying to make their way in the world. Much of what the heroes do sits in the background and every so often comes into view. From a gameplay perspective, this means, your characters are not very good fighters and in these circumstances? You make choices on how to get out safely. You may get saved by a hero or a hero may accompany you. Or to use other skills to your own advantage. In it, I am introducing an element inspired by playing point and click adventures. Any quests you do won't always have the obvious answer, kinda like I was doing with Abeyance and one thing I've liked about Divinity: Original Sin (I/II) as well, you get told what needs doing, you get your own clues and it's up to you as the player to figure it out. Talk to people, explore, look around, use items and so on. And with the added element of danger in the world, I want to make each character all the more important and give some room for permanent death to make decisions all the more important. Common folk don't get the option to "respawn" like the heroes. And that's one other thing I am doing with it, hero respawns happen as part of the game's lore, but my take on it is that the heroes' bodies will remain when they die. So, I'd imagine entering a difficult dungeon to find the walls plastered with the corpses of previous hero spawns. There may be opportunities for humour in there, like heroes not having power levelled enough to fight a boss. One I am working on at the moment is the Red Warrior keeping on dying to a dragon and your chat options include telling him to go away, get strong, learn new abilities and return to fight the dragon. There will be twists too, which I won't hint at.
But being RPGMaker, it should be manageable enough with my time to get it out there and nowadays is actually quite a powerful engine in the right hands, and some people have done gorgeous stuff with it (like The Amber Throne). Then when I want to refine it and introduce elements not pre-coded in, I have the ability to code in JavaScript and also, write over the sprites when it comes to doing my own assets. I might pick up something like Aseprite for that. I may also have bought a couple of royal free musical packs, just because I cannot do music to save my life and stock RPG Maker stuff is...meh, as are the sound effects and my choices so far I think work.
