Dreamons, Brain Tumour, Pokemon TCG Pocket, Final Fantasy X

Here's some rambling about a game I'm making, two I've played, and the tumour in my brain! Those things go together perfectly well, right??

Ugh, I mostly wrote this yesterday but got distracted before finishing it (also didn’t get much else done and effectively lost the bulk of the day). But I am at least updating at all!!

---

Dreamons Intro Progress

Here’s an 8-minute-long video of the current state of Dreamons’ intro ‘dungeon’ which I’ll be surprised if anyone actually watches (turn-based battles are far more entertaining to play than to watch, in my experience).

I’m curious to know whether Substack will even let me include a 300MB video file without any fuss, though [turns out it will!], plus I tend to look back on these posts each week before writing the next one so I’ll likely watch it myself when I do that. I like recording and looking back on the process’s progress.

I did a bunch of things, including:

• The skeleton of the whole section is essentially complete, probably, though there’s only placeholder dialogue and the areas are bare-bones

• I added Monstrife foes (as a reference to the Monsters in MARDEK and Taming Dreams and the Monstrifes in Atonal Dreams), and made emote faces and some animations for those, though they aren’t complete yet

• I did a lot of tweaking to skills and balancing, though that’s not where I feel it needs to be yet either

• Catalyst follows the player on the map now, to address some issues from last time

A couple of more specific things I gave time to:

This is a view of the map editor I made for myself to assemble the areas.

The demo video begins with the characters warping in, supposedly using the particle-effect portal on the floor. I’ve been unsure about that as a way to travel between areas for a while now, though, so I experimented with an alternative: gate-like portals, using the triangle gate prop that I originally made for something like this anyway before just using it as part of the area tileset. I always liked things like Stargates or the world portals in the Spyro games, so I’ll likely spend some more time implementing these.

I wanted the interior of the portal to be a swirl of colours, so I played around with making a shader for that.

Here’s a 10-second long video of some swirling colours. I hope you watch it on loop for at least 12 hours, even though I don’t think Substack allows you to loop videos.

As you can see in the gameplay demo up there, the sky/background is also made of a swirl of colours, but previously I achieved that using a particle effect. I was never entirely pleased with it, though. So I spent some time trying to get the portal effect I’d made working for the sky.

Which took more time and effort than I expected or would have liked, and it’s still not even done!

For the portal shader, I just used some combined noise aligned to the screen position which flowed over time, and coloured it using a gradient, which this Shader Graph thing apparently supports.

But for whatever reason, it doesn’t expose gradient properties to be manipulable by code or materials, which means it can’t work for the sky, as each area uses six colours for its sky which are currently provided to the particle effect.

I can’t be bothered capturing this at a scale where the text is actually readable.

That meant I had to fiddle around with some cascade of nodes and- bleh, I can’t even be bothered trying to explain it. It was annoying, though! And if you look at the 10-second video of the effect up there, you might notice a few solid blobs floating around which aren’t supposed to be there, and which are likely due to some maths in this tangle of nodes reaching extreme values or something. Ugh.

I don’t know whether to play around with it more or just stick with the decent-enough particle effect I already have. It’s probably not worth wasting time on, but the ‘need’ to get it working tugs at my mind.

---

Re Animated Songs

Last week, I wrote about some kind of musical animation thing (not for the first time), though I don’t know how well I even explained what I had in mind.

I had some ideas for that over the course of the week, so I’ve been playing around with them and making some progress with that. Nothing to show yet, though. I might devote a significant chunk of time this week to that. We’ll see how it goes.

---

Brain Tumour Concerns (Again)

I also wrote previously about some fears relating to my brain tumour, after seeing that the type of tumour I have was listed differently on a letter I recently got (I thought I had a Papillary Tumour of the Pineal Region (PTPR), but it listed Pineal Parenchymal Tumour with Intermediate Differentiation (PPTID)). I did some brief googling to see what the difference might be, and saw something that claimed there’s a 75% chance that both of those types of tumour will recur as a grade 4 death sentence, even years after treatment.

Which has been a difficult thought to have swirling around in my mind.

The other day, I got a (digital) letter from the brain hospital informing me of a phone appointment with my cancer doctor at the end of this month. This is unusual and unexpected, and the letter gave me no indication of what it might be about.

So of course my mind’s been running wild with that, thinking it’s definitely bad news and I’ll be dead in a year so why bother with trying to improve my life at this point, etc, etc.

It could be - and probably, hopefully is - something inconsequential, or even good news. Maybe I’m considered cured and they don’t need to do regular scans anymore. Maybe they just want to inform me of the change. Maybe the change or the appointment were admin errors. Could be anything.

But of course I’m a pessimist, so I might as well start writing my will now. Alas, O woe, and so on. SIIIIGH. “Who will mourn me when I am gone??”; my mind’s been filled with stuff like that.

I’ve been neglecting the mock driving theory exams as a result. Or maybe I just kept forgetting to do them. Probably a bit of both.

One of my (many hundreds of) friends said if I were to have little time left, then shouldn’t I live it to the fullest?

Is that what other people would do? If YOU had a year to live, would you spend it any differently? Would I? I don’t know. I know I should, but… ehh.

My other friend, who’s using her Psychology degree to work in a mental hospital, mentioned that it’s common for doctors there to whimsically change the diagnoses of patients transferred to them because they’re arrogant and feel they know better than whoever diagnosed the patient before. I wonder whether something like that’s gone on behind the scenes.

---

Pokemon TCG Pocket

I saw posts on Reddit about the release of a mobile Pokemon cards app I’d previously never heard of. I was into Pokemon cards only briefly, as a clueless child during the inital Pokemon fad (when was that, the late 90s?), though I’ve barely thought about them since then. Oh, or I suppose I played the Gameboy TCG game a couple of times over the years via emulation. I thought I’d give this one a try, since it’s free.

I’ve been liking it so far. It’s sleekly-made, and opening free booster packs scratches the same psychological itch they did back in the day but without the cost or hassle of acquiring them physically.

I read that the battle system is a simplified version of the ‘true’ Pokemon TCG rules, though I’m not familiar enough with those rules to know. I don’t usually play online competitive games, but - after some PvE practice battles, and despite some initial reluctance - I thought I’d try to play against some strangers with what few cards I’d collected from the small number of booster packs I’d got for free. Surely I’d be up against other naive beginners and we could fumble funly together, right?

Here are some examples of what I’ve typically been up against:

That is, these ‘Beginner’ level complete strangers begin matches by immediately playing multiple rare, shiny legendaries they’ve somehow obtained, usually multiple Mewtwos.

I checked Reddit since I knew there’d be a community around this already, and saw this post about other newbies having this same experience. Here’s another. And another.

There, I saw a lot of discussion about ‘meta builds’ and the like, as is the case with every PvP game. One ‘mid-tier’ deck mentioned was a Blaine deck, which I’d already mostly built of my own accord as I’d got lucky getting two Ninetales and particularly like that Pokemon and its card (I used another version of it in the Gameboy TCG game a lot). So with some modifications, I assembled something which is actually beating most of these legendary-packed ostensibly meta decks most of the time. When I don’t get absolutely terrible luck with which cards I draw from my deck, anyway.

So doing that over the weekend has been… interesting. Fun? I don’t even know. I usually try and stay away from competitive games since, well, who enjoys losing? And I’ve never been a hardcore min-maxing meta-chasing gamer type. I’m more interested in casual or story-based single-player experiences.

I’m really surprised though by the competence and fortune of everyone I play against. I never encounter people who clearly don’t know the rules, who make stupid decisions, who’ve built decks that make no sense. I’d expect a percentage of players to be hardcore enough to research and pay for meta builds and study how to play best and all that, but everyone? Are they the only ones even trying to play against strangers? I don’t get it. Where are all the clueless children?

The game seems to have been available in some form for a while before the recent global release, so maybe a lot of people I’m up against have been playing a while? But ALL of them?

Bizarre.

---

Final Fantasy X

I actually made the effort to take my own screenshots, but this one I just stole from Google Images is more representative of the game as a whole.

I also started playing the Final Fantasy X HD Remaster, since I’m trying to work my way through replaying these old games that were a huge influence to me and my work; apparently I played VIII, and IX this year, according to Steam, and must have played VII last year.

Like with the others, it’s been transporting me back to a different time in my life, when I was first making my own games while living in Australia as a teenager. I’ve been noticing both narrative beats and gameplay mechanics that clearly influenced MARDEK, and others that continue to influence the way I approach games - both as a developer and a player - these days.

This is one I just took myself. Way worse, right?? This is how far along I currently am though.

I particularly like the easy switching between active allies, and that most opponents (during the early game I’m still in, at least) have a weakness just one character can exploit, so battles involve switching out the most appropriate allies to one-shot the specific opponents you’re facing.

I vaguely recall mostly ignoring that when I was younger, and sticking to a fixed party, though due to Dreamons’ switching mechanic I’ve been making more use of it here.

I’m appreciating it more as a developer, too, as it’s clear the devs thought hard about how to make turn-based battles less static and more interesting, and how to have it feel like your whole party were travelling together without making battles too crowded (or too technically demanding).

I was obsessed with Auron back then, for whatever reason; this digital painting from 2004 was some of the first digital art I ever did (it’s also basically just copied from official art, though, so it can hardly even be called fan art).

I also remember kind-of dressing up as him once (did I borrow a longish red coat from my mum, or something? Can’t recall), which would no doubt have led me down the road to proper cosplay and conventions and all that if only I’d known the right people. Instead, the interest just fizzled out. A shame.

The voice acting’s not as bad as I thought it might be, and a lot of lines are conjuring up very specific memories. I think I must have replayed the game many times, back then? Enough to have thoughts and feelings about ‘this part’ coming up, that kind of thing. Have I had that experience with a game since I was little? Probably not. Also a shame.

I just got to this infamous scene which people bring up to mock the game, though I never had any issues with it when I was little. I thought I’d cringe and think about how naive I must have been back then, or something.

It didn’t seem nearly as bad as people have made it out to be, though! The laughing is obviously intended to be stupid and fake, and it’s immediately followed by genuine, convincingly-animated laughter, and one of their allies asking what they were up to because they sounded like they’d gone crazy. But I’ve seen people talking about it as if the fake laughing was a sincere attempt to portray actual joy.

Also, Wakka is Bender and Jake the Dog, which I can’t help but notice constantly now. He seems the most competent voice actor of the lot so far.

Like with the other Final Fantasies, I’m surprised by how much story stuff there is. A lot of similar games would use story scenes as an excuse to tie dungeon romps together, and I’ve sort of had it in my mind for a while that that’s how these games are done so it’s been driving recent decisions. In these, though, there are long stretches without any battles at all, and what counts as a ‘dungeon’ isn’t clearly-defined.

Some of the actual revelations were things I’d forgotten about, so I’m being surprised more than I expected to be, and get to experience the story anew. So I’m enjoying that. It’s not as nonsensical as some other JRPGs! Yet.

Unlike the other minimal remasters, this FFX one has remastered music, about which I have mixed feelings. I love the old music, so any minor differences with the remade music feels wrong and bothers me. As people familiar with MARDEK would feel about my post-MARDEK work, or a remake if I were to do one, as I’ve written about many times before.

I love how the soundtrack is mostly made up of variations of a few important melodies. That inspired me a lot, too.

I think I’m going to go and play To Zanarkand on my piano for a bit!