Seven

[Felix-0]

I like the look of the combat and the art style. Might I ask why the game is called Seven?

[A Forgotten Legend]

I linked to the artist who did the original monster sprites (and what I based my hero sprites from) in the first post.  He has a huge pack on enemies if you like the style.  I'm actually planning on going with something closer to a sprite style because of practicality.  Its a lot easier for me to edit and create new enemies than try to make one work in a style I'm not really good at, and I think it will help keep the art style consistent between different parts of the game.  The name seven is based on a concept surrounding the bosses, but if I told you more it'd basically give away the rest of the story.

[Felix-0]

Haha. I understand. It reminds me old an old RPG I worked on. 7skies. Which revolved around a norse mythology concept on how the world was split into horizontal slices. Except in 7skies there were a total of seven worlds. With the northern worlds being heavy focused on magic, and the southern worlds being focused on machinery and technology.

[A Forgotten Legend]

So, instead of plastering the screenshot thread like last time I'll keep my menu updates in this thread!  Haha  Anyway, I made it back to where I was and manage to code the whole system much cleaner the second time around.  Its probably a good thing I lost the old menu!  This one is much easier to work with once I start adding in the other sub-menus because half the work is done already!  Just have to copy and paste some common events and change a few variables.

Here's the new menu:
[spoiler][/spoiler]
[spoiler][/spoiler]

Its pretty similar looking, except I bumped up the number of items per page to 9.  Most of the stuff I redid involved how variables were accessed and made a much more efficient use of pointers.  I also added some new sub-menus that I plan on integrating.  I still need to update the colors to the face graphics -- the changes that I made to the characters are really color changes where the faceset shows.

[A Forgotten Legend]

I've spent a good deal of time on my equipment menu so far and couldn't figure out why it wasn't working.  Apparently the equal to function in condition branches doesn't work like I thought it did so splitting it into two condition branches did the trick!  Here's the idea:


[Spoiler][/spoiler]


I only have the first part of the show images part for the heroes coded. The menu checks to see what weapons are available, the level of the weapons, their element enchantment, and then who has the weapon if its equipped.  All I need to do now is the actual selection part of the menu and creating the actions. EDIT:  Just finished the equip function of the menu.  Top image is the final menu.  Going to work on the magic menu tomorrow.

As far as how the menu will work, each weapon is actually a weapon "orb".  Each orb grows from battle regardless of who equips it.  Each weapon can be enchanted with one of 5 elements.  With each enchantment/level combination it gives the equipped hero a different set of skills.

 
I've made pretty decent progress on the menu system in the last few days so I'm hoping to have it completed soon.  The other menus are much less complex than this one, since its like an inventory/equip screen in one.  Also I still need to redo the menu titles in the new window skin.  Oops.

[Prpl_Mage]

Sounds like you have it figured out there.

[A Forgotten Legend]

Finished the magic menu in a few hours, so I might be able to work through the rest faster than I thought!  The next menu is the orb menu which is a little more difficult because its an equipment menu again.  Hopefully I can just copy all the events I made for my equipment menu and then change the variables.

The magic menu looks like the equipment menu.  When you select and element, it will take you to the equip menu where you can select a weapon to enchant.  You can enchant as many weapons as you want with the element.

[Momeka]

The menu system looks good.
Don't know if you have something like this already but maybe add a quick status summery of the characters in the main menu, like hp, mp and status effect. Just so you don't have to go all the way down into the status menu if you just want to do a quick check of their conditions.

[A Forgotten Legend]

Hm.  I hadn't thought of doing something like that.  I could probably easily do something like this:

on the side and then they would disappear when you opened up a submenu.

So maybe like this mockup?

[Prpl_Mage]

Brilliant

[Momeka]

Looks great, maybe include their level as well.

[A Forgotten Legend]

Oh, right, that would make sense, wouldn't it? Haha.

Production on this is going to go slow for a little bit -- I'm writing music to go with a collegiate/professional traveling stage production of Shakespeare's The Tempest so I'll be working on that for the the next month or so.

[Zoltar]

This looks cool too! So your battle sprites change to match your weapons? Are you using battle animations? Is that how your using such large sprites? They are pretty.

[A Forgotten Legend]

Sorry this is a month and half late but I completely missed someone posted here.  Yeah, I was using battle animations.  The game checks to see what item is equipped and then changes the hero's class to match that item's battle animation set.  Since I'm not really using the class system anyway it works pretty well, and my custom menu system avoids the player seeing the class and title stuff anyway.

An update on progress I guess is due.  I've completely scrapped most of the maps and started all over.  I haven't made a whole lot of progress due to student teaching (kind of like an internship so it takes a lot of time).  I graduate in early December so I'm going to start having a lot of free time soon (unfortunately for my wallet).  As far as the menu system, I implemented the mini-status icons for the heroes that I currently have.  Working on sprite images for other characters at the moment so I can finish the menu systems.  All that's left of the menu is the status and save menus.  The status menu will probably take a bit of time and the save menu is just a matter of designing how it'll look and putting it in.  I'm using the custom save/load plugin for dynrpg so I'm excited to see what I can do with it.  Also updated my story and fleshed it out a little more to give myself some more direction.   Next step is going to be a storyboard to get my ideas together.  Character wise I really want to better their development so the game isn't as bland.  I'll also be redoing the battle images to keep my art styles more consistent.  I think I am going to go with map style backgrounds and just slightly more detailed character sprites.  The large ones I'm using currently have proved difficult to animate in a way that is doesn't take up the whole screen every attack.  I'll post some more recent screens when I feel I've made significant progress.

[Meiscool]

Sounds like a massive overhaul. Wish ye luck