Ascend

Ascend

Genre: Puzzle Platformer
Platform: PC & iOS
Release Date: February 2013
Built with: Stencyl
Role: Art, Design & Development

Ascend was a game I put together as part of my requirements to be allowed to graduate from De La Salle- College of Saint Benilde’s Multimedia Arts program. To my knowledge, I was one of the first Multimedia Arts students to submit a mobile game as a thesis in the program’s history. I can’t lie, it felt awesome. What didn’t feel awesome, however, was that I had to learn to make iOS applications on my own. The Multimedia Arts program had not yet offered mobile applications development to its students and the Game Development program was still in its infancy.

The game was initially planned to be for PC only, but my advisor at the time urged me to go mobile saying two other students would be doing the same and would be mentored by another professor. I said yes under the assumption that we’d get special classes to learn iOS development, aaaaaand because I had a huge crush on one of the other two students that had signed on to make an app for their thesis (if you’re reading this, pretend you didn’t if we ever meet again). It turned out the professor would not be available for mentoring, however, so we had to learn on our own.

The game is janky as hell and isn’t as great as I’d wanted it to be, but I’m plenty proud of this one because it at least helped me land my first game dev job.

Visual Novel Interaction Menu

After years of saying I’d get to it, I’ve finally gotten off my ass and coded something. YAY ME. I decided on making this because I remember needing it for one of my older projects and realizing there still doesn’t appear to be anything like it made for RPG Maker VX Ace. This script creates an interaction menu which creates a list of events present in the map that also triggers said events when selected. This script is ideal for anyone looking to build games like visual novels, text adventures, or if you just can’t be assed to map stuff.

Version 1.01 (4/27/2016)

Demo: HERE
Script: HERE

 <I’ve added a ‘Move’ command as of version 1.01. I still feel there are already plenty of fully functional fast travel menus out (HERE and HERE to name a few) and those are more likely to be more feature-rich than anything I’d care to repeat here. For the sake of having it all ready to go though, I’ve put it on.>


Features:

  • Creates a command window that lists specified events present in the map and activates the specified event on select.
  • Events can be classified into three different actions: Move, Talk and Inspect.
  • Easy to use?

Terms of Use:
Free to use for commercial and non-commercial projects. Please credit the authors. Also, tell us about your project so we can try it out!

How to Use:

  • SceneManager.call(Scene_VNMenu) to call the menu.
  • Add the comment vn_area on any event you want listed under the Move action.
  • Add the comment vn_npc on any event you want listed under the Talk action.
  • Add the comment vn_object on any event you want listed under the Inspect action.
  • The script only checks for note tags on the active page of the event, so if you don’t want the event to show up on the menu, just make a new page of that event without the note tag.

Known Bugs Features Bugs:

  • Delisted events still show up on the menu!
    Discovered that if Event A triggered a switch that made Event B go to its second page which is supposed to hide it from the NPC list, Event B will still show up on the menu. My current fix to this is adding a Wait command between Event A triggering the switch and calling the VN Menu. I believe this may be due to the fact that calling the menu suspends activity on the map, preventing Event B from refreshing itself into its non-active state before the menu compiles the event list.

Stuff Left to Do:
Advice on how to deal with these would be greatly appreciated!

  • The blurring and darkening of the screen bothers me. Still figuring out how to fix that.
  • I wanted an option on the command window that could call the main menu, but SceneManager.call causes crashing.
  • Darkening/disabling an option if no relevant event is present
  • Make it prettier