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afaik, it's the lack of resources outside of your area of expertise that weight developers down the most.

from a newbie RPGMaker starter's point of view, making a game is a smooth transition from point A, to point B, or so it would seem
given how the maker gives you a good amount of prefabs and starting resources, to them they might say "well with all this content I just
don't seem to understand why people make this sound more complex than it is."

but here's the thing, the more a person begins to invest in the RPGMaker of their choice, soon they begin to realize that in order to make
a good playable game and to top it off make it so people actually would like to play it, it's going to take a lot more than just
cruising from point A to B, suddenly that smooth transition turns into a roller-coaster of resource demands that may or may not
(most of the time it does) end with the dev abandoning such project or (if the dev is determined) putting it on hold until more
resources are met.

at least on my case, at that point when I realized how many resources I'd have to hunt down in order to progress, I had to at least
mentally make an inventory of stuff I needed/had at hand, can I do mapping? check, eventing? check, scripting? well... damn I suck,

need scripts? time to hunt down user friendly scripts or if you know ruby make em, are those sprites too bland or unfitting for your taste?
better pop up that sprite generator etc etc... all in all, I do believe that the lack of desired resources and/or the lack of ability to
implement these in such a desired manner is what mainly demoralizes a developer into quitting or putting on hold their projects.

however I do also believe that once the developer surpasses that gigantic resource-issue barrier, they can finally begin the process
of actually making and shaping up their project into something that looks promising, after all, on this part it's all left to the dev's imagination
to make his/her world/story/game etc, as in-depth or bland as they can, Basically once you have all the resources you desire, you pretty
are free to do as you please with your project and IMO this is where most developers begin to have fun with their work.

...which brings me to the second barrier, TIME.

Rpg Maker, demands time, a newcomer who just stepped into this, might probably have a good amount of time to develop (heck the fact they
downloaded this and started playing with it meant they had a good chunk of time to spare), but as they begin to work and seek resources
time is being spent, it's spent on plot generation, resource hunting, mapping, scripting, eventing, playtesting etc... by the time that the developer
seems to have overcome the huge resource barrier, their precious time (and possibly enthusiasm) is all spent up.

tbh I do believe lack of time to be the secondary (primary for some) reason as to why projects are abandoned,

btw sorry for the long wall of text, but I kinda did have to contemplate a bit as to why is it that we leave some pretty good stuff
behind.

Chains actually don't seems like a bad Idea actually, seeing as I can just run a check to determine proximity (based on being inside an invisible object)
when inside, this invisible check, any kills done, yield a chain, any shots dumped outside of it reset it to 0.

while this does seem fine, I did kinda notice something,

on higher difficulties, say meltdown & infinity +1,  most of the shots the player takes are near point-blank, meaning an almost endless
stream of chaining, I'd probably have to be more specific on when to chain or not, maybe losing a piece of the barrier also
removes the current chain?

I dunno, it's a pretty good idea, and I could probably make it so the particles react to how high the chain is going,
the only thing that's kinda stumping me atm is how to handle it from becoming too broken late-game.

Update time!

I don't know how to react to this but.... FIRST PLACE, AW YEAH 

Tijuana's Hackathon is over, and I barely re-made my entry in 8 hours as a participant on the event,
one thing led to another and eventually, my project won, ironically it was the only app that ran at
a stable 60fps and didn't crash, were there other better ideas out there? totally, but seems this one
apparently had the upper hand that it wasn't a concept but rather a true .exe file people could run.

bonus points for it being addictive as one of the judges quoted.

here's a vid for your enjoyment everyone, I know it's in Spanish, but bear with
me, it's pretty much straightforward in terms of gameplay:

Now, moving on, is there a download for this new update? not yet, mostly because I'm waiting for
my entry to finish validation + I'm doing a brief translation to English for you guys,
(if you would like the Spanish version instead, I'll also upload it as well.)

It appears most of the game is complete on the PC, so next up is a port to Android/IOS, depending
on stability and how well it plays on a phone.

so when people demanded an open world pokemon game this is Nintendo's response...

not exactly the open world people expected but still good

After letting this post gather some dust I decided to revisit it and bring extra updates,

for today's update I bring you....

Magnet Mode! (not the final name, I'm still debating this)



you're probably wondering... hey, so what's up with those 2 colors, and why is everything in Spanish?
well to summarize,

Magnet Mode plays similarly to the game "Ikaruga" here's how it works, in Magnet Mode you control
the invincible ship as you do in the existing normal and hard modes, but in this one your ship can change
color with the push of a key, instead of having to destroy neutral yellow walls, this mode throws both
blue and red walls at you, your ship can only destroy walls of the same color as itself, red walls are
destroyed by red bullets, and blue walls by blue bullets, not only do you have to protect your
hexagon, you now have to swap colors in order to successfully destroy a wall,
what happens if you hit it with a wrong color? your bullet gets destroyed but not the wall, make
sure you take the first 2 waves to practice swapping before braving into higher difficulties.

next off.... why is the HUD in spanish?

well at the moment in Mexico there is a national competition for overall videogame design, any citizen
of Mexico can enter it, as long as the game follows certain guidelines and of course is original in terms
of resources such as sprites, music etc + it NEEDS to be in spanish, hence the translated HUD.

I figured the game is stable enough to enter so I might as well give it a shot.

regarding Magnet Mode:

is it out yet? almost, not yet, I'm still working on game logic for this mode.

I'm also adding a Local Multiplayer Mode for Magnet Mode,
(one player controls the red ship, another one controls the blue one,)

I'll keep on posting details as I keep working on this mode.

By any chance is RpgXP still available?

after replacing my old hard drive I managed to retrieve my old XP project but atm I only have VXA on steam.

What are you proposing?

Well, the generator is good and all, but as you mentioned doing RNG abuse and selecting the best bits yield extra-comical
yet cringe-inducing results,

why not take CaH's main objective and apply it to these?

I'm pretty sure we're all messed up enough to give these random bits a more proper use, in other words, we have to dig deeper ;D

oh RNG abuse, how I LOVE you...

http://explosm.net/rcg/MeatyEarVase
http://explosm.net/rcg/JoyousTigerPlane
http://explosm.net/rcg/ExclusivePlayFeeling
http://explosm.net/rcg/RemarkableBlowStranger
http://explosm.net/rcg/VerdantApplianceRiddle

I wonder if we could do a pseudo cards against humanity with these.

yup, people are having fun with this thing.

and seeing how it was tailored for the internet, this was just bound to happen.

EDIT: http://explosm.net/rcg/ApatheticBuildingCamp

This is soooo wrong XD

From ruby to .js man.... all I can say is I'm so glad I took my time to learn a bit of it during unity practice sessions,

but sadly I've just had VXA added recently so I'll probably have to skip this until some time has passed... not that it's out already.

putting that aside, I love how they give us more pixel space to work with other than the default 32x32 per character sprite.

I had Windows 7, so I decided to try out Windows 10 as well,

it was a smooth transition from 7 to 10, some reboots as mentioned earlier and it's was good, it did keep my files which I decided to place on an external drive as I was
about to prepare for a clean install now that I had a valid windows 10 key (HINT: For windows 7 and 8 users, if you plan to do a clean install, make sure you do the manual
upgrade first as Windows 10 asks for a win 10 key which self-generates after the upgrade, it's tedious but it's a safe path.)

so yeah all my files were now safely stored in my external drive, and the windows 10 tool already finished making me a bootable USB, in a matter of minutes I'm halfway done
through the clean install.

minutes later, I now had a clean windows 10, with a considerably shorter boot time. (compared to windows 7's clean install boot time)

here's where my stroke of bad luck begins... after the clean install successfully finished, I started to bring in my files (specifically my drivers) I realized most if not all my drivers
for some reason got corrupted mid-pass from the old windows 7 to the external hard drive, and to top it off, my PC's driver homepage (Acer Aspire series) did not have any
windows 10 drivers atm... (it had windows 8 ones, so I had to rely on those)

but thankfully Windows 10 came with driver compatibility mode so I could at least use the Windows 8 drivers and so far so good.

aside from that, my internet has been somewhat slow and for some reason Windows keeps pushing Bing down my throat in a "NOW KISS!" kind of way
which btw is annoying on the long run, after hearing reports about edge's performance I decided to switch back to reliable Firefox... which you guessed it
has a bad case of Bing as well.... even placing google.com as your main page still redirects to Bing,

other than that I've seen to have stabilized into Windows 10 nicely, I wonder what new updates they'll bring eventually.

It's on 3DS.
I think that people are overreacting, this is obviously a spin-off. There's no way this game is meant to be an "actual" Metroid game. But I think it's kinda sad that for the 30 year anniversary we get this instead of a Wii U Metroid.

I'm having mixed feelings about this one myself, yes I do admit, I was expecting a game that had a true connection to the main storyline, and having a spinoff is
kind of a weak contribution to the series especially on their 30th anniversary, but another part of me is kinda happy that metroid DID get at least SOMETHING this
time, or at least it shows that nintendo still cares enough for the IP to give it a test run with co-op multiplayer

as for it being on the 3DS, well it has it's ups and downs, the ups would be that since the game relies on co-op it would probably be great to play on
the go or locally with friends, the downside would be the overall graphics, heck even if they DID change the graphics I'd still say the 3DS would heavily
limit them on the visual awesomeness compared to a WiiU game.

For once an art style turns me off from a game with a cool concept.

Give me this exact same game on the Wii U with the aesthetic of the previous three Prime games, and we have a winner.
I always thought the Federation was awesome, but this is not.

I gotta agree here, even Prime Hunters looked better on this regard, chibifying the Galactic Federation of ALL the elements of the series
was the biggest visual turnoff the game has atm...

(I'd say a theory on why they gave the Galactic Federation the chibi treatment is that possibly the ones piloting the suits in the end will be Mii avatars
as the pilots on the trailer DO resemble Mii players with that kind of thin-body/big-head build.)

if it had a more serious style and the planets to explore had a more populated look (at least on the first showcased map of the snow region)
the game would probably draw more positive attention.

The steam version (at first) was not recommended since they didn't have the Heavensward expansion yet

luckily it has been recently added so that's great, yet people seem to be complaining atm about extended periods of server
downtime, but I dunno if it's just for steam or if it's an overall downtime for all.

I'll probably test it out as well once I fix my main PC.

Alright so, I've seen the original announcement on the E3,

at first I won't lie, I liked the concept, 4-player multiplayer co-op, and gameplay that relies on teamwork (at least during the missions
that the tree-house showcased), all in all it's not THAT bad looking for a spinoff.

I must admit though the visual style of the game is somewhat of a turnoff but should the gameplay be good I guess I could get
used to it and still enjoy it for (possible) sheer amount of co-op goodness.

what kinda does get to me is why is everyone so suddenly angered by this game?

is it the metroid game most fans expected? (highly) probably not, but all in all it's not that horrible (gameplay-wise, visually can be debatable)
to basically un-wish for it, afaik people are signing a petition to cancel it's development (yes there's a petition to cancel development for it)

I mean let's assume the game IS indeed as terrible as the fanbase is talking about.

if the devs still decided to release it, it would be their loss as the low sales/ratings would give them the cues they need to possibly change
the game into something more desirable, but as of now the game is not even out yet and people are treating it as if it were some sort of
unforgivable walking abomination.

most of the comments I've read basically boiled down to:
"[they did not include/they changed] X element from the original M.Prime in it so now [this does not interest me / I find the game offensive]
  therefore it must be gunned down like the atrocity that it is."

or

"I'm a true Metroid [vanilla/prime/fusion] fan, and this is not what I asked when they announced a new Metroid game
the series is now terrible because of this."

I get that the fanbase can freely state their thoughts on the game just as much as any other person can out there, it just seems kinda
weird to hear lots of people ask if not downright demand (and demand cancellation) for something to change/get erased before giving it
a proper chance.

besides isn't MP:FF still on it's alpha stages? It's not as if the gameplay seen on it is set to be the final release.

I guess fans could ask for changes as seen fit, but it's kinda sad to hear them demand a takedown instead of providing
constructive criticism.
(again this kinda comes from the comments seen from the reactions, most just seem to complain about it without pointing out what other
methods could be used instead)

so, what's your take on all of this? should we let it burn or give it a chance? I'm into co-op so I'll probably give it a shot should they ever release
a demo for it.

one thing is certain though, regardless of the outcome this is NOT a happy sight for Metroid fans/devs as such backlash would probably just harm
the chances of a true new Metroid title from coming into the WiiU or 3DS, it's all some form of destructive domino effect where no one could
possibly win, at least that's how I'm visualizing this ordeal atm...

the game IMO is pretty sweet, has great looking PvE and if you're one of the players
who dislikes PvP then this game IS for you.

still as discussed before the monthly fee is probably the huge turnoff with the game atm...

I'd like to try playing both this and Guild Wars 2 someday, but I'll probably do GW2 first since it's essentially free
after the first purchase (I'll probably wait for a discount though)

[HARD MODE!!]

It's Pre-Update Time!

It has been a bit of time since I last showed a significant update, so here's the next one:

HARD MODE!!



That's right, aside from the normal mode, now my project features a new mode that instantly pits the player
into a harder & faster stage than the previous one.

So what are the differences from normal mode and hard mode?

In HARD MODE the player starts with 3 bombs at their disposal, however they are no longer able to obtain new bombs
from enemy kills unlike normal mode, only 3 bombs for the entire round so use them wisely.



The player's core is also SHIELDLESS! Unlike normal mode, if an enemy wall got past the player's invincible ship
the core's shield would take the incoming blow and be destroyed saving the core for that one impact.
however during HARD MODE, the core starts unprotected from all sides and any single impact will end the game.

and to top it off, the game starts at the second-highest difficulty available, Meltdown, if the player manages
to survive for 200 kills, the game bumps the difficulty into Infinity +1. it's a fight to the end from this point
forward.

HARD MODE is not intended for beginners as the game assumes you already know how to play + uses
most if not all the available patterns indiscriminately.

HOW DO I PLAY HARD MODE?

As of right now, the main menu has been updated so the player can select a mode before loading the round.



Clicking on NORMAL sends you to the normal mode stage where you start with a full shield, low speed, and increasing bombs.
Clicking on HARD sends you to hard mode, hope I can see some of your records in the future

HARD MODE is nearly complete and is now in a phase of internal testing done by me, once I have finished working off all the bugs
and errors, I'll update my demo link to show the latest file with hard mode included.

Until Next Time ;D

NEW EDIT: The new demo is out, here is the dropbox link: https://www.dropbox.com/s/oc3jyghktp40oc7/Project%20R.E.M.S.%20Demo%20v1.4.rar?dl=0

You can now also Press the R key for a quick reload if you die to skip the death menu.

I also took my time to re-edit the poll, to have a more relevant question, if you have the time, please take a minute to answer it as it can
help me with later developing tests.

the first post has also been updated.

Is super house of dead ninjas still available? and if so, may I please have it?

level editor approved games were always a weakness of mine.

NOTICE: Important DoublePost!! trust me it's worth it.

I did a little work and present to you, the Test Demo v1.2

LINK: https://www.dropbox.com/s/b7k23pnuzny5bkw/Project%20R.E.M.S.%20Demo%20v1.2.rar?dl=0

This demo is an overall improvement over the previous release, featuring:

-A now working transition w/ loading screen (there had been some reports that after pressing enter on the main screen it froze, this fixes it a bit.)
-Instructions at the start.
-Bullets do not spawn unless the player is ready (by pressing spacebar)
-there is now a visual cue when difficulty rises,
-whenever the difficulty rises you the screen is cleared from enemies, but you don't receive any points, think of it as a breather.
-some patterns are toned down a bit.

I have also edited the first post to update the demo.

Congrats you've moved to the Main Projects section. Do you want the Pool removed too?

Thanks as for the poll, rather than remove it, I figure I can still use it, I'll simply change the question to something more up to date
as apparently there's still many things I can ask CP around to improve overall gameplay.

I played the demo, it's actually pretty fun, you implemented the wall flash before the spawn too which is nice, personalty  Think it need to last longer and have more of a delay before the walls actually spawn but I still lets you notice before the wall is there and moving which is good. The difficulty ramp up is a little off, right now the easy section lasts a lot longer than the harder sections and there is almost no warning before the Difficulty spike.

You've noticed it as well? I guess I do need to tweak the duration of each difficulty wave,

but just as an info-dump, here is the current difficulties list of my game:

NAME:                 KILLS NEEDED TO REACH:                  SPEED MODIFIER:

START-UP                          NONE                                       x2  (originally this was x1 but it was so painfully slow that it got pretty boring fast, so I skipped x1.)
NORMAL                           20 KILLS                                     x3
GEAR UP                           50 KILLS                                     x4
OVERCLOCK                     100 KILLS                                     x5
MELTDOWN                      150 KILLS                                    x5.5
INFINITY +1                     300 KILLS                                    x5.7

(I think I should make a new poll about this, change both kills needed to reach same difficulties or leave them as they are? + keep names or rename difficulties?)

The Met down difficulty is also exponentially harder than the previous the difficulty need to be spaced out and ramp smoother. perhaps if there was a small lull in the spawning between difficulty changes, perhaps with some text in the center of the screen for a second to let players know it would feel better to. right now it just dumps you into the higher difficulty while enemies form the previous difficulty are still on the screen.

I kinda do agree on the whole difficulty changes instantly, I'll probably work on a more visual cue + wipe all current enemies on field (no free kills though)
with luck this will be added on the next release.

Took me a bit to figure out the controls, you might want to go with something more standard like the space bar, enter key, or even alt/ctrl. At least give a hit as to what does what. still didn't figure out the bombs yet.

hmm, I thought I did place the controls on the first post, but oh well, I'll probably re-map shooting to be done with the spacebar, bombs with Alt, and pause... well Enter seems
to work fine.

as for the smart-bombs, while you detonate one with the spacebar (as of this demo) you need to have at least 1 bomb in the HUD or else spacebar does nothing.

everytime you kill an enemy, aside from getting +1 kill, you also gain a silent +1 to the bomb counter, when the bomb counter reaches 50 on the first time, you gain 1 bomb,
however after gaining the bomb, you lose all bomb counters you've had and start from 0 again, also the bomb counter quota is increased by 10 each time you get 1 bomb.

first bomb need 50 points, second one 60, third one 70 and so on until it's capped at 100 points needed per bomb.

Once I figures out the controls It actually plays pretty well. I think spawning multiple ways at once should be avoided though, even a small delay would feel more natural and allow me to develop a flow. one you let the player develop a flow you can purposefully write patterns that break the general flow to add difficulty.

Thats' all my sage advise for now. Keep up the awesome work.

This one is kind of a double edge, the delay IS there, it's just not noticeable on higher difficulties due to how fast is going, I do have to agree on something though, the 2 patterns that spawn 3 walls at once ARE vicious, so I'll probably rework those, giving them some form of delay between them to create a more manageable pattern.

EDIT: Placing a delay over these 2 is not possible without breaking overall game integrity, I'll see if I can reduce the odds (or downright disable) for these 2 patterns
of spawning on higher difficulties.

but I do indeed appreciate all this feedback, I'll work on these fixes and update the first post once a more stable version is released.

QUICK EDIT: Added a new poll regarding changes that will happen on a new difficulty change.

Good News everyone!

I have finally completed and uploaded a special demo you guys can try,

you can download this demo on the updated first comment on this topic

it's NOT the full game, as it lacks several features and modes I plan on implementing later on, while it also has
placeholder music that I WILL change before even releasing the full thing (royalty free chiptunes are a pain to find)

but until then, enjoy this free demo and post your high scores / questions / bug reports / enthusiasm / etc...  if you can

until next time ;D