Both screens look really good, YDS, but the top one seems just a little off. In the bottom one, the palettes for all of the components are really close together. Everything fits together. In the top one, both the character and the trees look really superimposed.

Thank you for giving it a look!

With this story, I'm trying to weave as much real life experience into the plot as possible. During my time with the dealership and the used car lot, I had a lot of opportunities to drive various cars and trucks. I was always thinking about how to work things I did/noticed into a story.

I've never had to cover up a murder or bribe a city council man, but I figure if I pump enough reality into the rest of the story it will help carry the bits I'm just pulling out of thin air.

I am planning to continue, and actually have a couple more sections roughed out. I have the characters and high points of the story mapped out on index cards, all I need is the free time to stitch it all together.

Here's something quick I wrote the other night. It is the cold open for a new story I'm staring.

https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B2VecW5LTlufVHNuTWVmeV9IeDA

Due to the abuse my hands have taken over the years (bashing into boards, bones, bricks, etc) it gets really uncomfortable for me to play power chords in standard tuning. For my faster punk stuff, I actually switched over to bass and found it was a lot more comfortable for my hands.

Besides just switching instruments or going for a mini-guitar, you might try some alternate tunings. I use a variation of the tuning Thurston Moore uses on Honest James, and it is extremely comfortable to play around in.

I also invented a tuning for my noise rock band that is pretty comfortable. DAEGBB. Now, after I started playing with it, I googled it to see if anyone else uses it. Apparently there is some guy that uses it on one song, but since I never heard of him until that point, I still count it as my own invention.

The combination of DAF#ADD and DAEGBB sound really well together in a two guitar set-up, by the way.

I liked the Bat-Thermometer section, as well as a bunch of the other Point A to Point B objectives that were dressed up as following evidence, bullet trails, radio signals, etc.

Instead of always telling you where to go, sometimes the game encourages you to explore with some of these. Exploration leads to more riddler trophies and challenges, side encounters, and fights which all contribute to your skill development.

You are doing the same exact thing you do in every game like this (this is where you need to be to advance the plot, get there) but they dress it up as something other than follow the flashing icon, sometimes.

As for what I've been playing... lately the answer would be not much. I have a couple of characters started in Dragon's Dogma, but I took a break from the game and can't really muster up enough of a desire to get back into it. I just check in every couple of days to receive free gifts, rift crystals, and style accolades for my pawns.

Max Payne 3 was a lot more fun on the harder difficulties with the auto-aim turned off. It was nice to be able to poke out from cover and sweep my reticule over an enemy's head instead of it staying locked on his chest. I still wish there had been an option to view the cutscenes in graphic novel format. Max Payne cinematics should feel like a graphic novel, not a Tony Scott film.

I think earlier versions of the game's screens looked better. The viewer's eye bounces around this one like it's trapped in a pinball machine caught up in a twister, just trying to find something to latch onto. When the image finally stays put long enough to parse, all of the soft edges and blurred components clash with the hard edges of the character.

I do like the icons for the user interface though!

As of today, it has been five years since the last time I drank alcohol. I still have bottles of bourbon, whiskey, and rum in my house though, because I still believe that commitment without temptation is meaningless. Of course, they also come in handy when I'm cooking steaks or being a decent host for friends who still drink.

I enjoyed FF8 back when it came out, of course I was suffering from a slight case of being 16 at the time, so my perceptions could have been a bit off. I never understood the backlash against it, except for the fact that it had more realistic (-ish) character designs and proportions, tried to tell a more mature story (-ish), and had new mechanics.

I'm not a big fan of restricting equipment with licenses. It was kind of annoying in FF12 that I had to buy skills/equipment, then I also had to earn the licenses to use them.

Something I used in one of my game attempts was a little similar though. Based on the main character's renown/rating as a bounty hunter, he gained access to restricted equipment from a few shops. You could have licenses that allow the character to purchase better equipment, but don't magically have to knock a gun out of their hands if they aren't holding the right slip of paper. Then you just have to decide whether or not you will have enemies drop restricted equipment as well.

Some easy fixes here.

Shooting Guns:

Make a Battle Command called "Shoot", set it to Attack type.
Make a Status Condition called NoAtk (or whatever). Set it to "Restriction=No Action" Make it last 0 rounds with 100 percent chance to cure.
Make ONE battle event page with the condition HERO uses SHOOT command.
In that page have a variable check. Set Variable "Ammo" to number of AMMO items in inventory.
Make a Condition Branch that Checks if Ammo >0 and has an ELSE condition
If Ammo >= 1 then remove one AMMO item from the inventory. Characters turn plays out as normal.
If Ammo <= 0 then inflict NoAtk status on Hero. Optionally, Show Message "OUT OF AMMO!"

Two two simplest ways to display bullets remaining would be through face sets or animations, provided you're not using a patch that enables pictures during battle.

The faceset solution requires copies of the character's face set (and the use of the battle system that displays face sets) that represent how much ammunition they currently have.

The animation solution requires you to make battle animations displaying the numbers of bullets remaining. The player has 11, on the turn they shoot, you could add in a Display Battle Animation call with an animation that displays the number 10, to indicate that they are down to 10 bullets.

2.

The Two Round Skill.

Easiest way to do this is through conditions and events. This is set up for an enemy all attack type though. An individually targeting version is still doable, but slightly more involved.
You need to be familiar with calling a common event during battle. It isn't that difficult.
Make a Status Condition called Skill Trigger (or whatever you want). Set it to restrict the character from attacking.
Make a skill called Two Round Trigger (or whatever) and cause it to inflict the Skill Trigger status on the user.
Create an Event Page in the Battle system with the condition Every 1x turn. This page will run every turn. Create a common event called Two Round Skill (or whatever). Call that event from the Every 1x turn battle event page.
Create a variable called Skill Charging (or whatever).
Create a switch called Use Skill.
In the Two Round Skill common event, check to see if the player is in the Skill Trigger condition.
Check to see if the Skill Charging variable is >1. If it is turn on the switch Use Skill.
If it isn't, add 1 to the Skill Charging variable. (Causing the skill to trigger on the next turn's call)
Back in the Battle Event, have a page with the trigger Switch:Use Skill is on.
In this page, set up your animation and damage figures that make up the visual appearance of your skill. You could even have another status Condition that sets the user's animation to whatever your "casting/magic use" animation looks like (just remember to have a line canceling it at the end.)
If you want to take the enemy's defense or intelligence scores into account while applying the damage, you could create variables to track them and adjust the final damage output accordingly.
Finally turn off all your switches, reset your variables and character conditions at the end of the Use Skill event.

Multiple Party Member Skill:

This one I'm not 100% on. I'm planning on using something like this in a project I'm working on, but I'm not to that point yet in development, so this is a theoretical answer. It relies on the same principles as the above solution though.

Create a Status Condition called ComboAtk.
Create a skill called Combo Setup that inflicts the user with Combo Attack.
Put a page in the battle event that occurs every 1x turns and calls a common event.
In that common event, check to see if Party members 1,2, and 3 are all in the ComboAtk status condition.
If they are, turn on a switch called Trigger Combo Attack.
Make a page in the battle event with the condition Trigger Combo Attack = On.
Fill out the details for the attack here, same drill from before. Enemy all skills are easiest to make, individual targeting ones take a little more work.
Remember to clear the status conditions and variables as well as toggle any switches you use back to their original states at the end of the event.

Fatigue Condition on 0 Sp:

Create a page in the battle event with the trigger Every 1x rounds (or just nest it into one event with your other every round functions). Store the values for each party member's SP into a variable.
Have a condition branch that checks to see if their SP > 0, with an Else condition.
If their sp variable is > 0, remove your Fatigue Condition.
If their sp variable is <= 0, add your Fatigue Condition.


End Notes:
These suggestions are geared toward Rpg Maker 2003. Most, if not all, should still be viable in Rpg Maker 2000.

The every 1x turn doesn't mean every player turn, or every party turn, it means every turn. If you have a skill that triggers after two turns, and there were three enemies and one party member, the party member would end his turn, one enemy would act, the second one would act, and then the skill would trigger. If you want it to be locked down to where it takes two turns for one character to use a skill, just make a skill called Charge. Easiest way would be to make it a switch. Have an event page triggered by that switch that adds a Battle Command containing the Skill Subset that your charged up skill is contained in. Make an event that checks to see if the character is using that command, and if so make sure to remove it at the bottom to return the player to normal operating conditions.


Hope this helps.

Even though it did cross my mind at first, I decided that firing up Blender or Lite-C's MED to make resources for an RM game was a little bit of overkill. Instead, just I used Photoshop's perspective and scaling functions for the first couple of test walls, and ended up doing the rest of them with one of the brush transformation tools in Deluxe Paint 2 Enhanced.

The project I'm using it in right now is a dungeon crawler that uses the DBS, albeit with 80-90 event pages of customization.

I'm also planning on using it for a straight up adventure game later on that wouldn't have any battles, but I need to refine it so it will display certain types of areas better first.

An early test of the terrain id dependent fake first person version of Rm2k's Future chipset.

To see it in action...
http://youtu.be/BZq17BRPpUU

Hachi: A Dog's Tale came on last night. As an Akita owner (well, half... she's a mix), and someone who was familiar with the Hachiko story, I figured I had to watch it. Seeing Richard Geere and Cary Hiroyuki Tagawa in the credits, I figured that the story was going to be the white guy moving to Japan, seeing the statue and then researching the story, and that Cary Tagawa would be playing Hidesaburo Ueno in flashbacks or something.

Then I saw a white kid talking about his grandfather's dog, followed in short order by Geere's character finding a Shiba Inu puppy at a train station. I was concerned that the movie was taking a total WTF approach to the original story.

Of course, they started using a real Akita once Hachi had aged enough in the story. They took a lot of liberties with the story, most of which are just for framing purposes, but I actually enjoyed the movie a lot. So many scenes with the young Hachi reminded me of episodes with my own dog. Knowing the actual story also helped, but wasn't enough to keep me from hitting the border of tearing up.

Which was when my dog, possibly sensing something was up with me, came over and rested her head on my leg and looked up at me. Cue me bawling like a little baby through the end of the movie. I haven't had a film dehydrate me like that since the ending of Life is Beautiful.

Of course, today I asked my dog to wait for me while I went to another room to find my cell phone (asked, as in I didn't use her actual 'Do not move from this spot' command). I came back out and saw she'd meandered into the kitchen and was considering a walk by licking of the chopping board I'd used at lunch. "Did you not get the point of the movie? This isn't where I left you." She replied "woooooooooooo" and then fell into an automatic heel command to follow me around the house.

I never finished System Shock 2, Condemned 2, Wild Arms 3, Shadow Hearts:From the New World, or Final Fantasy XII.

The incomplete ps2 games were due to my console dying on me. I've subsequently patched a functioning one together from two I had laying around the house, but I've been away from the games for so long I don't really feel like picking them back up. I watched an LP of Shadow Hearts From the New World, picking up about where I left off... then I lost interest in watching the lp. I don't know what that says about the game, but Shadow Hearts Covenant is still one of my favorite rpgs of all time. I tried FF12 again, but I was in that damn repetitive as hell tower/ziggurat/whatever and just said "hell with this."

Condemned 2 just fell apart for me the more I played it. It made less sense than the original, which is strange since it went about explaining everything that happened. The part I gave up on was the bowling alley. I had a good trip through, had found (I guess) all the hidden stuff up to the point where I was, but I had a power outage (or something, been a while). I went back and replayed the level later, and realized that I'd missed something, but when I went to go back, I had faceless mannequins blocking my way. I reloaded a save and did the level again up to that point, only this time I forgot to find some other thing, and had to stare at the damn mannequins again. I said "F-ck you too," and turned the console off, and never had a desire to play the game again.

System Shock 2 was one of the games I attacked after falling in love with Deus Ex. I wanted more games to be like Deus Ex, and I wanted to play them all. For me, System Shock 2 just wasn't as good. I had fun with it, but for some reason my interest just tapered off, big time.

Just remembered, I also haven't finished Vampire:The Masquerade: Redemption. The modern sections were kind of annoying with the horrible accuracy rate for firearms. I found myself cheating the game and carrying unlimited ammo and healing my characters all the time through console commands when things got out of hand. It just wasn't fun to play that way, let alone in its original broken state, anymore. It was a shame, because there was potential there.

I opted for fully modified revolver in those "lets fight off an army" sections. The second one went by so much faster with explosive .357 rounds going off like machine gun fire than it did with the sniping attempt I tried the first time.

I was disappointed about Montreal being limited to the one area you had to go for the mission. I was expecting it to be the third hub area. But, in the time of HD gaming, the better something looks, the less of it there is going to be to look at.

I had the same though about the UI. I was looking forward to seeing another countries representation. Then I figured maybe the computers all come from a central corporation so they'd all be the same, or maybe what we as the player sees is just the visual representation from Jensen's hacking augmentations, which would cause the universal appearance to make perfect sense.

Some new lyrics popped into my head while I was messing around in a strange tuning: I've got a message in a bottle, written down in gasoline. I'll sign it with my lighter soon, sent from my heart straight to you. I will make you a promise, so someone might keep you close. Leave a record of all you've seen. Sign it with your lighter soon, like a bullet burning through. We'll sign it with our lighters soon.

Spoiler Alert:

Not that I saw in my first playthrough, although it is mentioned in an email.

whoa statues that can be broken... i hope kojima has his lawyers ready...

Play the game, fight that boss, tell me it doesn't remind you of the other fight... at least a little bit. I mean, there is an achievement called Foxiest of the Hounds for completing the game without setting off a single alarm. They are wearing their Metal Gear Solid influences right on their sleeve.

Also. Spoiler Alert. This game has bosses.

I'm sticking to my guns on the Human Revolution/Metal Gear Solid similarity, especially considering I just fought this game's version of the Psycho Mantis bossfight... with it even going as far as taking place in a room with "statues" in it, and guess what? One of said statues can get broken. I'm seriously expecting to get into an elevator at some point that has a couple of cloaked enemies just waiting for me.

Still enjoying the game though.

Also, the last couple of posts about it have made me seriously consider picking up Alpha Protocol in the near future.