weirdphil - Tumblr blog

[weirdphil]

Making an RPG Maker Game!

So, I’ve owned various other RPG Maker versions, MX, VX Ace, etc.., but I recently picked up MZ because it’s new and I’m a consumer with a wallet on Steam. I’m embarrassed to say, I’ve only spent a total of just over 2 hours across the all of the older versions I own. I’ve had these programs at my disposal for years, and I haven’t done anything with them... Until now.

Three weeks ago, I started working on a game using RPG Maker MZ. The goal was to make something that could appeal to different types of people. I wanted something that could be enjoyed by someone who just wanted an interesting story that wasn’t bogged down with all sorts of adult content, I wanted something that would appeal to people who wanted a game with a female protag who has terrible terrible things happening to her, and I wanted something that would appeal to people who enjoyed games with a male protagonist, wasn’t a wimpy cuckold, and would get to “meet and greet” whichever female NPC he wanted to, even if the main character was cucking another male NPC. I’ve spent a lot of time lurking on ‘other’ forums, I’ve done my *cough* market research *cough*.

What I have now, is a game that I’ve split into two versions for my Patreon.

1) A totally Safe for Work (not that you should be playing games at work but who am I to judge, I’m not a hypocrite) version that is available for Free.

2) A totally Not Safe for Work version available to all $3 and up Patrons-Only on my Patreon.

The SFW version contains all of the same content as the NSFW version with the exception of any of the adult content. The SFW version is literally only missing the trigger that prompts you to turn the adult content on or off and the switch is turned off by default. The NSFW version contains that trigger, with the content enabled by default for the purpose of testing the game quicker. The main story quest of the game will be the same in both versions, but having the adult content enabled will give you access to romance options, new dialogue, new events, and 2 whole entire alternate stories. Pursuing either of these alternate stories will shut off access to both the main story AND the other alternate story that you didn’t pick. Pursuing the main quest will shut off access to the alternate stories.

What this is accomplishing: I’m building a world to tell a story that happens in the Main Story, but there are two alternate stories accessible via the NSFW version that you can optionally pursue. These stories will vary in length and will take place in the same world, same towns, contain many of the same NPCs as the Main Story, but the experience will be drastically different. Even the Main Story will have differences between the SFW and the NSFW versions via the adult content trigger, which can only be turned on or off via a prompt at the beginning of the game before you leave the first room. I’m mainly working on the Main Story for the sake of building the maps and creating NPCs that are unique and interesting right now, and then working on the first alternate scenario before I continue working on the second alternate scenario. The second one will take longer to finish than the rest simply because it requires that I have more NPCs around the world for the player character to phuck. Otherwise you’re just wandering around an empty world all while blue-balled, because I’m not even putting enemy encounters in that story, and you’ll be prompted with a menu to choose which town you’re visiting and will remain at level one for the entire game. Combat will be a thing for the first alternate route, but not right away because you’re equipped with a collar that reduces all of your stats to 1 until you can find a way to remove it. It’s locked on you permanently until then, so getting into combat before then would leave you dead on the first encounter.

For the last two weeks, I’ve been adding more Main Story content, more missions, dialogue and have been adding the optional NSFW content that you’ll not find in the SFW builds. I’ve also started attempting to add 3D CGs to those scenes, bit by bit, but I’m not totally satisfied with the ones I have added, so consider those placeholders. Speaking of placeholders... I’ve removed much of the placeholder sprites from the game, with the exception of random whatever NPCs and vendors. Since I’ve been replacing the placeholders and adding many new variables and switches to the game since the beginning, I would highly recommend starting new save data when going from build to build for now.

If this is something that has caught your interest: Both the SFW and the NSFW builds are available via my Patreon. The SFW build is FREE and does not require any money. The NSFW builds will require at least a $3 patron. Patreon swears that they recommend $3 as the lowest tier because of payment fees, so that’s why I chose $3 as the lowest instead of $1. Whether you pick up the Free SFW build or you go with the NSFW build, please give me some feedback, let me know about any bugs you find so I can squash them, let me know what you think so I can use that feedback to make the game better. Right now, I’m filled with determination and I’m dripping with creative juices, from my brain, like a leaky faucet and the only thing holding me back is my overnight job.

If you are interested in this game, or know someone who would like it, head over to my patreon page at this hyperlink right here in bold text.

[weirdphil]

undefined

[weirdphil]

Our Twitch Channel is Now an Affiliate!

Just the other week, Twitch.tv/weirdphil just hit a huge milestone. I’ve received my Affiliate status on Twitch and the channel can now receive cheers/bits and subscriptions. I’ve gotten to work some new assets for the channel, like a channel badge and candlejack emote, and a spiffy animated gif for the subscriber notifications through streamlabs. I still need to add more icons for those who continue to sub for 3 months and longer, and we’re only limited to 1 emote at the moment, but I’ll be breaking out some of the old-old candlejack-themed variations of profile pics and turning a few of those into emotes when I can/allowed.

So what’s next? Well, I’ll need to stream more often for one. I’ve abandoned StreamlabsOBS for now, since a recent update has killed the stream’s frames per second, so I’ve integrated all the viewer counts and notifications into regular old OBS Studio. I’ve been inviting my friends over for some streams on the weekends, as they are available. These live streams are replacing the former daily We Pway videos that we used to do, so instead of recording a bunch of footage that we would cut down/edit/re-render/upload/publish over some chunk of time, we’re doing it all live, and if the streams are good then we will put them on YouTube later. So, YouTube will still get some decent content every once in a while, and Twitch will get our live streams as often as we can. I am trying to get into a good streaming schedule alone, and every other week or so (at the moment, hopefully at least two weekends out of any month) I’ll have either of my buddies over for some co-op fun. We’ve played a bit of Earthbound a few weeks ago, we played Mario Bros 3 this weekend. Weeknight streams will usually go for two hours from 6pm to 8pm, and the weekend streams will typically go all day long (up to 6 hours or longer if we can manage).

I’m just a tad sick at the moment, so weeknight streams are going to be limited for now. Obviously, the end goal is to be able to get to a point where I can stream for longer and more often. Donating helps, but having viewers around on the stream helps more than anything else right now. The next milestone we need to hit involves having an average of 75 viewers per stream over a 30-day period. Thank you all for the views, for the cheers, for all the follows we’ve had since I came back to Twitch this June. Please continue to support the channel.

[weirdphil]

Vive is Here!

I’m still missing assets for We Pway videos, as well as all the Ocarina of Time footage. I’ve just had to accept that there’s no getting it back. In the meantime, I’ve been getting all of my streaming junk in order and I’m looking into possibly getting a semi-regular streaming schedule going. I have an HTC Vive now, so I’ve been testing it out while streaming on my Twitch channel.  Highlights will be put up on the YouTube channel. I’ll keep them appropriate enough for Twitch’s code of conduct, but I’m not going to care too much about YouTube since we got de-monetized while I was out recovering from my head injury. So, to recap, more Twitch streams coming up, we got VR, stream highlights on YouTube, otherwise it’s all Twitch from now on, hopefully with a streaming schedule soon.

[weirdphil]

New PC is Complete!

Unfortunately, two of my old HDDs died. I was able to salvage the data off the old C drive, but the old D drive was too far gone, along with all of my data I’ve been saving and sitting on for the past 10 years. I’ve lost all of my music, pictures, all of my unedited videos for WePway (including the Ocarina of Time finale), all of my custom Candlejack avatars, everything is gone. I recorded some DOOM (2016) for the WeirdPhil channel this last weekend, and it looks great. I am still unable to properly record in 60 FPS, so I will need to buy a new PVR that will allow that. The Hauppauge HD PVR Gaming Edition 2.0 that I own can only record in 60 FPS at 720p or lower, and 1080p at 30 FPS. Further WePway episodes will be on indefinite hiatus while I work on making brand new assets, since we’ve lost all the channel art and thumbnails and templates.

I should be getting my HTC Vive sometime in early June, so we might shift our focus from daily WePway videos to live streaming on the old WeirdPhil twitch channel. So, here’s what I’m working with:

CPU is 7th gen Intel i7 7700k at 4.2 ghz GPU is MSI nVidia Geforce GTX 1080 at 8 GBs 32GB of RAM Dolby Atmos surround sound

I’d like to get some more new equipment, but unfortunately my car has had some trouble as well. I need to spend $1500 on repairs for my car.

[weirdphil]

My CPU is going to DIE. :(

I, uh, wasn’t really concerned before, when I would boot up my PC and it has a message telling my CPU temperature is too high. I knew my PC was pretty old and having issues, but I didn’t expect it to be quite this bad. I’ve got my chassis fan running at max right now and I’m going to need to get that new PC finished ASAP. All I need is that damn $330 i7 and then I’m good.

The new build is almost complete. I just got the blu-ray burner drive yesterday, and the 512gb SSD the weekend before. I’ll need to try and finish editing/rendering whatever I still have left and then back up all the things onto my external 3TB drive. The most excruciating thing I’m going to need to do will be getting all my mods for Skyrim just right. Should have the new CPU in another month, so I hope I can last that long, or else I’ll have to not eat for two weeks. Hmmm... now that I think about it, I’m already overdue to lose some weight. :P Time to stock up on instant ramen.

[weirdphil]

2018 WePway/WeirdPhil Update

So, I hope this isn’t too immersion-breaking here, but the majority of videos playing on the channel, popping up Monday through Friday are all from our backlog of videos we stocked up on right before Christmas. That backlog is drying up and we’re unfortunately looking at a pretty grim future for the channel at the moment, and I’m not even getting into the whole “YouTube has removed monetizing from our channel” bull crap, though that part is indeed true. Right before Christmas, I suffered a head injury while working my overnight job, and since that happened I have been dealing with a concussion and post-concussive headaches that have been extremely painful. I’ve gone to doctors, I’m on work restrictions, and I’m to believe that I’m on workers comp, which is all fine and dandy, but it’s been rough for me as the sole do-everything-guy working on the channel with my friends. I’ve mentioned before, my friends only show up for the recording, and I do everything else from hitting the record button to editing and rendering and uploading the videos and maintaining the channel and our social media outlets. I’ve also been limiting my screen time on video games and haven’t touched my video editing software since the injury, so we really are scraping the bottom of the barrel here and we’re about to run out of content. Because I’m the sole do-everything-because-nobody-else-knows-o-wants-to-do-anything-to-help-guy, who also happens to be injured, we’re looking at yet another possible hiatus coming up.

All of this going on, the recovery, and combined with YouTube killing what little money we were scraping together from the channel is hitting us hard, like a steel beam to the head, so to speak. I don’t know when I’ll be able to get back to editing videos, but in the meantime I’ve been looking at possibly streaming some more for once to either Mixer or Twitch. I also need to quit my current job and find a replacement job since they’ve killed any chance at a raise or promotion now. Seriously, I’ve lost sleep because of this job. I’ll try to update if anything cool or interesting is going to happen to either of the channels. If you guys have any suggestions or words of encouragement, feel free to message me on my twitter feed.

[weirdphil]

Deadly Premonition...

We’ve been playing the Director’s Cut edition on PC for a while on our WePway channel on YouTube, and whenever we record footage for Deadly Premonition, we’ve added more and more mods, for the sake of keeping the game running smooth and preventing crashes. Unfortunately, we will not be finishing the PC version of Deadly Premonition Director’s Cut. After doing more research, it appears that there is no fix for the game’s horrible memory leaks. From what I’ve read on the PC version, the entire world is loaded into your RAM when you walk outside of a house, and while you may start the game with 60 FPS, it slowly begins to dip lower and lower the longer that you play. I’ve had issues with the game crashing during specific cutscenes, and while I’ve been able to get around most of them we’ve run across, I’m learning about other crashes and errors that can happen much later in the game that can potentially corrupt save data. Deadly Premonition looks to be a fantastic game, and it’s a shame that the PC version will never get fixed entirely. We spent 3 weekends recording footage for use on our WePway channel, and I’ve been forced to make this decision, though not taken lightly.

The final episode of We Pway on the WePway channel will air on the 27th of November. We may take a week-long hiatus to transition We Pway to it’s new home on my personal channel, WeirdPhilP. We are getting some content ready, new channel art, etc...during this hiatus, I will be attempting to play the PS3 version of Deadly Premonition Director’s Cut off-camera so that we can resume recording for the channel at the most recent in-game event. The only other game that I’ve done this with was Ocarina of Time, where we recorded a single N64 episode that ended with our capture completely messing up, continued on with the Wii U port via Virtual Console, and then went back to the N64 version after playing off-camera to get caught up. The different here is, that only took me 2 hours off-camera to get caught up on Zelda. We’ve covered a lot of ground in Deadly Premonition already, and some horrible quick time events that I hoped I would never need to relive again. I’m hoping we don’t run into any huge game-breaking glitches on the PS3 version. The last thing I want to do is invest time in the PS3 version and then be forced to drop down to the Xbox 360 version where there is no Director’s Cut content...

[weirdphil]

YouTube changed again...

Hey guys! So I’ve read that YouTube has changed their rules yet again, and have turned off our ads since we have less than 10,000 lifetime views across our We Pway channel. If you wouldn’t mind helping out, please check out our We Pway channel and watch some videos at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCixUwUZlGva2zuXGgXweisw

If you see anything you like, click that Subscribe button or share some videos with your friends. :) We have daily content and we don’t want to stop doing this anytime soon. If you’re willing to check it out, thanks! If not, well, I tried. :D

[weirdphil]

So It Finally Happened

Maker Studios has finally cut ties with me. As I figured, I’ve lost the ability to edit or create YouTube “Shows”, which is a feature I only had been using when I was much more active on my channel. Everything has gone about as expected, except that I didn’t plan on all my videos being un-monetized. This means I have over 45 pages of videos that I need to review and re-enable for moneys. I was planning on sleeping, but..... Well, I can still render videos while I’m doing this.

[weirdphil]

Got the Email...

Maker sent me an email a few weeks ago, confirming what everybody already knew. I’m one of the 60,000+ (or whatever) channels being dropped so they can focus on Markiplier and Jacksepticeye exclusively. (I kid, but, you know them)

I don’t know what sort of changes this will cause for my channel. I’m sure the ability to create or edit “Shows” will be missing perhaps, and I might see a bunch of copyright notices that I hadn’t seen before while I was partnered. What I can tell you, is switching to Maker from Zoomin’Games was easily one of the worst ideas I’ve had for this channel. Zoomin’Games sent me money every month, there was no threshold that I needed to hit, no quotas I needed to reach. My only beef with Zoomin’Games was the fact they were located in Europe and I felt that their location might cause an issue for me in the future.

I have been mostly just been spending my time working on videos for WePway, noticing issues I’m having with my aging PC which now has issues recording newer games like God Eater and Senran Kagura Estival Versus. Menus look all fine, but once the gameplay starts, the frames drop on the capture. My only workaround I have at the moment outside of building the new PC would be to run the PC through the Hauupauge connected to the Lappy. Easy enough, but I would then need to connect my PC to the smaller TV instead of my larger monitor. It would actually look better when captured that way as opposed to using OBS. Speaking of OBS, I tried to switch from OBS to OBS Studio, and while I’m still having the same issue with those same games, I have noticed the frame drops to be smaller, but still not something I would want to upload due to it’s lack of quality.

So, I will be keeping an eye on my WeirdPhilP channel for the next few days and see what happens when Maker finally drops me. I don’t have anything worthwhile to upload to WeirdPhilP at the moment, but I am working on Donkey Kong Country 2 videos for WePway. Please check it out and subscribe to WePway if you haven’t already. See you guys next time.

[weirdphil]

Some News on Zelda on WePway.

We’ve already recorded, and have uploaded some new Link to the Past videos for the channel, but we’ve been forced to keep them on the back log for the last month. We got hit by Copyright content ID matches, not by Nintendo, but by COMPASS_CS or something, some sort of company located in Singapore, who Youtube has allowed to Content ID match us with -get this- the BGM from the Dark World. Since two thirds of the game takes place in the dark world, you can imagine this will likely effect the remaining LttP videos. We’re anticipating this also. Heck, if Nintendo hit us with Content ID matches, I’d be fine with it, but this isn’t even Nintendo doing this. I’d already disputed the videos effected, but it seems it’s going to take the entire 30 days to wait through this, likely because this so-called company in Singapore doesn’t check their inbox, are run by robots, or don’t actually speak any English. I’m hoping this doesn’t cause too many issues for us, as it’s our goal to continue to provide daily videos for the channel, but if it keeps happening then that means we need to render even more videos and put them up on YouTube and just let them linger in the back log until we’re sure the mindless YouTube bots have combed over all of them and the appropriate disputes have completed.

The disputes should be automatically finished by March 10th, which will be fine because we’ve got more footage on my PC I’m still editing. We’ve also got a special episode coming up for March 17th, so look forward to that. I’m also planning on doing a solo live stream sometime in the evening on the 17th. Might stream some Breath of the Wild. See you all next time!

[weirdphil]

New Games on WePway

These last couple of weeks had us running through Sonic Colors, and now returning to Dark Dreams Don’t Die. I’m rendering footage for Freedom Planet right now, but before that goes up on WePway, we’ve got some Kirby’s Epic Yarn. Enjoy! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCixUwUZlGva2zuXGgXweisw

[weirdphil]

RWBY: Grimm Eclipse Xbox One Save Loss Issue

I’ve been trying some things out in my spare time to get to the bottom of this issue. I’m not a dev, but I’ve had a tech support background working for jobs that I can’t mention due to Non-Disclosure Agreements, so I actually find bug reports to be a bit fascinating (Crazy, I know). This save data issue on RWBY has been causing issues for myself and clearly others. I’ve reported it to their dev team via twitter and their google-doc-powered bug report form. We’ve seen their response the other day. the “We’re aware, we’re working on it” sort of response that also mentioned connectivity issues.  Clearly, they are getting to the bottom of it, but in the meantime, we don’t know for sure what’s causing this issue and we don’t know how long a patch is going to take to reach us. We need to know what is causing the issue and how to avoid it, because I don’t want to just stop playing and wait for a patch, I’ve got monsters to vanquish.

So I’ve been going over everything in my head, figured I might as well post my information that I have gathered up here in hopes that this helps other folks besides just myself, and if anything, we can think-tank a temporary plan to avoid what’s causing the loss of data. Here’s everything that I know right now.

1) It definitely happens during or after online play.

2) Getting no feedback (response) from selecting your Profile name from the main menu in order to force a prompt asking if you wish to change profiles is a clear sign that any further progress is doomed.

3) This is NOT related to external HDD. I moved the game data from my external the other day and didn’t see any further issues pop up until this morning when I attempted online play again.

4) Selecting “Cancel” while the game is performing matchmaking or a search for open lobbies could be causing this issue. Go ahead, try it yourself.

5) Selecting “Cancel” after the end credits when you’ve killed the final boss is a definite “NO-NO”. I did this on my very first session. I spent about 4 hours playing a single online session with a brand new level 1 Weiss, unlocked several achievements, completed several requirements for advanced skills (countering, ranged kills, reviving party members, etc) and maxed her out at level 10. After pressing, Cancel, I returned to the main menu, then visited the game’s xbox live hub to look at my achievements and browse the LFG tab. On the LFG tab, I noticed an open group named “Save data is lost after exiting game” which instantly got me worried. I exited my game, rebooted the game, and found all of my progress from the entire morning lost, including my level 5 Yang that I played around with in single-player before going online in the random quickplay to start leveling up my level 1 Weiss. Keep this in mind: All progress that was made during that entire session whether online or singleplayer was lost as soon as I hit Cancel on the online lobby search prompt. It’s likely that hitting Cancel at any time is what’s causing the save data to forget that you played that entire session. The problem is, it could also be related to the online connectivity issues. The only reason that I’ve hit cancel on those prompts is because they were taking longer than usual to begin with. That said, the issue could be cause either by selecting Cancel, or simply by trying to access the online features, which defeats the entire point of playing RWBY.

Again, here’s why I’m posting this information: I think that I’m getting close to the “How?”, but I can’t be 100% sure. I’ve tried all sorts of things from moving the game data to different storage devices, to logging out and back into Live while running the game (that was pointless) to performing a hard reset to the Xbox One itself, and I’m still seeing the issue where selecting your profile name from the main menu provides no prompt to change profiles. Remember, I’ve at least become certain that the loss of function from that menu option is a clear sign that you’re already being effected by the data loss bug. If anyone can confirm any of these things I’ve discussed here, if anyone can chime in and share any pointers to avoid the bug (aside from not playing the game) please do share it with the community. Who knows, this could all be pointless if the devs decide to update the game with the fix today, not gonna bet on it since it’s a Saturday, but let’s discuss it anyway.

[weirdphil]

Switch Pre-Ordered

At least I think it is. I haven’t gotten an email back saying it isn’t, so I’m just going to cross my fingers. So, as long as I’m being honest and saying I’m planning on getting the Switch, I figure I should mention some concerns here.

32 GB of internal storage / Up to 256 GB expandable via micro SD.

This is Nintendo more or less killing any interest consumers may have for holding large digital gaming libraries. I didn’t need to delete anything from my micro SD in my 3DS until I purchased Pokemon Sun, and I’ve owned and have been purchasing digital titles for the 3DS since it’s original launch. (Running an Ambassador system, shout out to my Ambassador homies) I use an external 2 TB storage on my Wii U and an external 5 TB storage on my Xbox One. I don’t believe I’m going to be able to get that kind of convenient storage for the Switch. I do see USB ports on the Switch dock, but that may very well be intended for charging controllers; there is no way I can see to connect an external HDD to the Switch. With this all in mind, this will definitely push physical sales and I’ll need to either put down the money for a good micro SD or keep my storage holding only saves, screenshots, NES/SNES/N64 ROMs, DLCs/updates/patches, and anything else small enough to only take up a reasonable amount of storage. So, this is my only gripe with it at the moment. Granted, I’ve pre-ordered, I’m a huge fan of Nintendo and all that, but I’m going to continue to voice my concerns. If people don’t complain and voice their opinions, then change for good would never happen.

[weirdphil]

Emptying out the Backlog

If you’ve been watching We Pway since Christmas, you may be wondering “Phil, you just started recording with two mics, why are you only using one again instead of two?” and there’s a very reasonable explanation for that. We just started using two mics on the week before Christmas, when we started recording for the X-Mas We Pway episodes. We have a TON of footage stocked up on my HDD from before this change, and I’d hate to throw it all out, so we’re trying to focus on finishing the remaining footage we recorded prior to December, get it all uploaded, and then resume the 2-mic-episodes once we’re all caught up. In the next week, for example, we’re uploading the final episodes we recorded from 2 years ago in my old-old-old living arrangements. Some of this footage was almost lost due to the fact that none of my video editing programs could pull up the video track, even though it looked perfectly fine when viewing the video on a media player. This required me to use OBS to record the recordings of that footage. This happened with Castlevania 64, Sonic Colors (uploading at the start of next week) and a few other games (D4 and Freedom Planet and Unbound Saga all had the same issue). I believe that I’ve worked out the issue. I’m no longer using the Hauppauge to record in MP4 format, and I’m recording it in an MPEG-flavored .ts file format which seems to have completely resolved the problem. I’ve only had MP4 files screw up, but the .ts files I’ve always noticed have worked fine, and until recently, I had originally been recording in .ts format just by accident. Everything we’ve recorded since December has been without any editing issues for the most part. Speaking of Freedom Planet... Yes, it’s coming, we’re just having issues with it. The footage we had earlier was having the same issue we mentioned earlier, and the Wii U version we were playing for the show continues to lock the system up completely at the same exact spot in a part of dialogue at the end of a level, so we’ve switched to the PC version and trying to adjust that. It’ll happen, it’s just taking a tad longer. It will be another bit where we start uploading episodes with a single mic, and then all of a sudden we have 2 mics again.

[weirdphil]

Streaming on New Year’s Eve!

To support our new YouTube channel We Pway we’ll be live on https://www.twitch.tv/weirdphilp streaming whatever games we can think of. Don’t know when the stream will start, possibly 4pm, and it’ll continue until my pals need to head home to sleep. For sure, we’ll be going until Midnight to celebrate.

We’ll be playing games, chatting up with the viewers, promoting the new YouTube channel, might give out some Steam game keys I’ve got laying around here... Be sure to swing by the stream. We’ll have Dan (AmazingBeado) with us for sure with a possibility that Hootz may show up.

See you soon!