Announcement and a question

[Byron Pennyworth]

Blind and I are getting close to finishing the demo for our game, and thus I feel I can tell you a little about it.

It is called "Election Day" and it is a Duology in three parts, produced by Hell to Pay Studios.

It is being made with RPG Maker 3 on the Playstation 3.

It is in most ways a traditional RPG and will feature combat.

It has both an moral alignment system and a fame system (though these will not be readily apparent in the demo)

EDIT: Nevermind, answered my own question by looking around the site a little harder,

[Valkysas]

Re: Announcement and a question

go to the memory card menu in the PS3, select the memory card the save is on, select the save. put some kind of removable storage in your PS3 (USB flash drive or SD card), and copy that save to the thing.

plug into your computer, go to PSV/EXPORT/PSV, and grab the PSV file.

zip it, upload it via the submission forum.

then people do the reverse to play it.

there's longer explanations in the articles and "using the pavilion" pages at the main site (click banner), but the above is the basic version.

[Byron Pennyworth]

Re: Announcement and a question

Thanks. I think we've got USB flash drives lying around unused, so that's convenient.

[Valkysas]

Re: Announcement and a question

if you have a PSP, it'll work in USB mode.

[Byron Pennyworth]

Re: Announcement and a question

Well, we were putting the finishing touches on our demo and noticed it took up a quarter of the card. We did some math and realized our concept just wouldn't fit, not even on multiple files.

So... Hell to Pay Studios is proud to announce:

Cleric: An Unholy Serial

I have even less to say about this game than I did about Election Day, except that it will be on (something like) eight to ten files, each released individually over time.

All in all, I'm glad we almost finished our demo despite the fact that it's no longer worth it to release it. It taught us a lot, and Cleric will be all the better for it.

[Valkysas]

Re: Announcement and a question

um, all RPGM3 games take up a quarter of the card.

[Byron Pennyworth]

Re: Announcement and a question

Yes, but we were only a seventh of the way done with the "first disc" of our full game.

I suppose we could finish and release the demo, but without a full game coming out to fill in the rest of the story, I consider it useless. Why put out the first chapter of something knowing no other chapters are forthcoming. Or, more importantly, why play that first chapter?

[Perversion]

Re: Announcement and a question

Dumb question, but did it not dawn on you, even using a virtual PS2 memory card on the PS3, that one file took up fully one-third of the card? Yes, it's more than a quarter. Out of 8 MB, each RPGM3 file takes about 2.3 MB. So less than 1/3, yes, but as you can only fit 3 files per card, I call it 1/3.


Also, are you not keeping track of your percentage of data use? You think you are only 1/7 done with the first "disc" of your game? Did you neglect to see what percentage you are at right now, and then estimate how much more was going to fit in a single file, or even on one card?

I fail to comprehend how you can make this elaborate game idea without having any information on RPGM3's memory limitations.


In my first game, I wanted 4 areas (each with a different world map); north, south, east, and west. So I guestimated that if I could get each area to fit within 25% of the file, ballpark, I'd be okay. After making the first area, I was at 27%. So far, so good. After making the second area, I was at about 68-70%....erm....yeah, there went the fourth area from my game. I ended up only making 3 areas, but during the last 30 or so hours of creation time (the game took 200 hours to make and playtest), I was hovering between 93%-98% the entire time. I kept having to delete stuff, streamline a ton of events/modes (to the detriment of aesthetics), and redo stuff just to get everything to fit. It REALLY sucks having 98% of your data already used, and find out that you need to make 2-3 events all the way back at the beginning of the game in order for everything to work.


Especially because a lot of times, adding only one or two lines of code to an event would give me a message that I was not able to save, even though those one or two lines did not use up the 2%-3% I had left. I ended up handwriting a bunch of event code, deleting the events in question to free up space, make the new ones at the beginning that I needed, and then had to remake all the ones I had deleted. Mathematically, it was exactly the same in terms of percentage of data used, but the software was just really twitchy about doing it the other way.

[Byron Pennyworth]

Re: Announcement and a question

"I fail to comprehend how you can make this elaborate game idea without having any information on RPGM3's memory limitations."

A combination of bad estimations and getting ahead of ourselves. You wouldn't believe the amount of stuff we had already cut so that (we thought) it would fit. The main problem with Election Day was, really, that we wrote it to contain backtracking to earlier areas. Cleric is a much more linear game where you're moving forward the entire time, so putting only one or two areas per "disc" is much more feasible.

"...there went the fourth area from my game...I kept having to delete stuff, streamline a ton of events/modes (to the detriment of aesthetics)..."

Exactly what we were unable to do with Election Day without compromising the story to the point of no return.

Do we feel a little silly for getting this far before we noticed the extreme memory usage? Yeah. Are we going to let it stop us from making a full, complete, multi-disc game? Hell no. Work begins on Cleric yesterday.