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[IndigoFenix]

Is the town going to be connected to outside areas as well as the gate in the middle?  One of BoundWorlds' main mechanics is being able to place town worlds inside an overworld...world.  You may notice that one of the towns on Monster Island links to Lusuria - this is not a "hard" link, but rather exists because it searches for a public gate with the "town" tag and Lusuria is the only one so far.

I do plan on making an enormous and endless desert at some point, so creating a link to a "town" that backlinks to a "desert" would be suitable for that.

[Kamani]

I’m not entirely sure how to handle that. Having an extra exit there would be good, but canonically, there is a rest of the world. I suppose I can handle that by just saying that the player is affected by gates that don’t effect others, since that is already basically canon.

Yeah, that sounds neat and should work.

Edit: It occurred to me that, since I will occasionally refer to the player by a pronoun, it should be possible for players to set their own for the Trial Dungeons, to avoid having completely incorrect pronouns (since that is pretty disrespectful), so I added a mediocre settings menu to the core item that allow you to set your preferred pronoun (this was inspired by the game Read Only Memories, although that implements it several thousand times better). I'll need to think of a way to excuse this lorewise if possible, and make the text better (I ended up writing it pretty late at night, and I feel like my writing is currently worse than usual, so I suspect that, when I next look at it, it won't be all that great).
They, she, he, ze, and xe pronouns are going to be used, and I might add custom ones if items get text variables. Hopefully that should cover everyone.
It was a surprisingly large pain, since it involves setting 8 _world variables (possibly more if I need reflexive pronouns too...) and one item variable per pronoun, and I'm going to have to set them at the beginning of every world.

Edit: Shoot, just realized that I'll also have to adjust whether singular or plural words are used (they and is, for example) based on whether they is the active pronoun. Don't have enough time to finish this tonight, so I'll be finishing this tomorrow, probably.

Also, I never realized how weird pronouns are until I had to compare them all. They pronouns have 4 distinct forms, whereas he and she pronouns have three, and although both he and she pronouns have a pronoun used in two situations (his and her respectively), the situations they have one pronoun for aren't the same two. His fills the their and theirs slots, whereas her fills the them and their slots. It doesn't really make any sense.

Side Note: I really should have done this draft style so that a half-finished system didn't end up there... Well, too late now. At least the odds of people messing around with the box in the next day aren't all that great.

[IndigoFenix]

Heh, yeah pronouns can be annoying.  Canonically the player character's gender is "unknown" (one of the reasons for the big cloak in their design) but I have no real issue with characters assuming they are one or the other. See Varsuvius from Order of the Stick, some people call them "he" and others "she" but this is simply what they think.  Don't waste too much thought on it.

Personally I prefer to just have other characters refer to the player by nicknames, like "Wanderer", "Human", or "Poppet" (that last is going to be the Jester's nickname). Occasionally I use "they" but it's awkward so I try not to do so too often.

I might also use the wer/wif/mann system in a world or two.  It sounds weird to modern speakers but I think things would be a lot easier if we brought that back

[Kamani]

Eh, people get my preferred pronoun wrong all the time, so I’d rather not mess up other people’s. This way I can handle the pronoun thing without claiming the player character’s gender (since townspeople in Lusuria are canonically aware that there is an entity of some sort controlling the player character).
Read Only Memories remains the only game I have seen to actually do this really well.

Nicknames would work, but not in every case. People aren’t super likely to say “the (nickname) is over there” instead of “(pronoun) is over there.” They is typically my preferred pronoun for cases of unknowns, but I’d rather allow people the option to choose elsewise (or keep as they, if you prefer it too). I know I hate it when people persistently get it wrong (people referring to groups I am in as boys, for example), so I’d rather not subject other people to that.

Edit: Didn't see that edit before I posted. Which system is the wer/wif/mann system?

[IndigoFenix]

Old English.  Originally, "Wer" meant male adult humans, "Wif" meant female adult humans, and "Mann" was gender-neutral adult humans.  Due to linguistic and cultural drift, "Woman" became more popular to use when referring to females and "Man" was confusingly adopted to mean either "only male" or gender-neutral.  The old system is pretty much obsolete; the only common words that remain are "wife" and "werewolf", but "man" is still used as a gender-neutral suffix for professions and many other words, like "human" - a mann of hume (earth, as in the word humus).

Anyway I think that if our society is trying to be more gender-equal than the wer/wif/mann system is a more suitable one, all of the words are one nice clean syllable.  "Woman" is an annoying word in this sense since it sounds like "man" is neutral and it's just a modified "man" (there may have been a male equivalent once, but I don't know what it is).  And that way we can keep all of those nice and non-awkward terms like "mankind" and "humanity" without them sounding like they are primarily referring to males.

But nobody will ever do that, probably.  Still, I'd like to include my own opinions in worlds I make.  Cause what's the point of making worlds if you can't express your opinions in them.

(Also this means a "werewolf" is always male - the female should be a "wifewolf".)

EDIT: Looked up the etymology of woman, turns out it just evolved from wif-mann and the male equivalent would be wer-mann.  Of course, they both wind up sounding like "woman" once they've been corrupted that far.

[Kamani]

Huh. Neat.

Sounds good with me. The current system is a bit strange, and that one would probably be easier for me.

Makes sense. And yeah, major linguistic changes to make things less bad seem to happen basically never.

Fair enough.

Edit: Uh... Where did the memory partitions button for items go? I can't find it, and I think I'm not just foolishly missing it this time (although I wouldn't 100% discount that).
Edit: Other than that, the pronouns system is now fully set up. It doesn't affect anything yet, as the only instance I found where I used a pronoun to refer to the player is in the town dialogue before the box is gotten, but it could come up in the future, and it would be torment to go back and enable it if I did it half way through instead.
I also changed a few pieces of Lusuria dialogue for voice and continuity fixes (for example, Rel and Alan said they were waiting for lunch, but everyone else said they had already eaten. Now Rel and Alan also say the same). I still probably missed some stuff, but it should be better now. Haven't published the changes yet, since I still have to test the pronoun thing, but I will once that's done.

[IndigoFenix]

Oops. I disabled the weapon parameters options since they aren't working anyway but accidentally messed up the rest of the menu. That's fixed.

I do remember there being a few discrepancies in Lusuria when you start out, the sign at the dungeon entry is there even at the beginning (unless you fixed that). You can use the object editor on the player to run tests with different starting parameters.

[Kamani]

Okay. Thanks.

... A. How did I never notice that? B. Why did I use a standard sign for that?
I am utterly confused at past me's actions.
Edit: At least it was an easy fix.

Edit: Okay, all changes should be published. As far as I know, there are no glitches, but I am pretty good at messing up, as far as I can tell.

Edit: Brief note on the Jester in the prison. If you talk to them twice, their turn to face you probably shouldn't repeat, seeing as that just makes them turn right and then face back up. This is still pretty obviously mid-dev, since the King still does things like say "You must tell me your name" no matter what you input, but...

Edit: It occurs to me. If it was possible to save text variables to items, I could also put a name setter for the Trials, just so that people could change what they were called there (since it might be a bit goofy if your username was something entirely un-namelike). As is, I would have to convert each individual letter into a number, and then reconstruct, which would be less than pleasant.

Ugh, I really need to decide what NPC sprites to use already. I suspect that I should use the ones from this pack (https://opengameart.org/content/edited-and-extended-24x32-character-pack), seeing as it has a lot of options, but since I have to individually cut out every single one I want to use, I have to decide on a set, rather than just testing them all.

[IndigoFenix]

Yeah, the jester is still very much a work in progress.  I'm having a hard time writing his dialogue. He's supposed to talk "as though he is in a stage play" (he was a great performer who went stark raving mad, and the only time he can talk at all is if he thinks he is performing).  But I'm not sure exactly how to write like that... I thought of having him talk entirely in rhyme but that gets tedious fast.

I do plan on making an option to save text variables, but the truth is I didn't really intend for characters to use the player's name very much... Making it an option at all was intended more for characters who can break the fourth wall.

Check out any plot-heavy game with both a name input and full voice acting, and you'll be surprised at just how much dialogue you can get away with while never mentioning the protagonist's name.

But at any rate, I'll make it an option.

[Kamani]

Ah, makes sense. I don’t attend plays really, so I don’t know too much about how performers speak, although the little bit of currently in Jester’s dialogue seemed okay.
Yeah, I would think writing in rhyme would get real annoying real fast.

Eh, I’ve already started, and it makes sense in Lusuria (where if you told people that you wanted to be called really anything, they’d accept it), both in that everyone just asks, and that they do know about the spoilers plot stuff.

Yup. I often see them write it in the text, and then say something else. But I’m not voice acting, so I’m not stuck with that rule. Voice acting is completely beyond what I have access to anyway, so...

Okay. Thanks.

Oh, I need to start coming up with characters. Seeing as this is a more... standard, I suppose?, town, I'll need a greater cast, but most of them aren't going to be quite as talkative, in all probability. I am also probably going to use an excuse and say that the player isn't allowed into the main town part of the town with all of the houses.
Although, thinking about it, the people who are more likely to get along with strangers are more likely to be living in the middle of the town, since the people who are less likely to get along with strangers were more likely to have moved away.

[IndigoFenix]

Hm. After reading up on it in Tv Tropes, it seems that making the voice acting different than the dialogue boxes is more common than I thought. I was thinking of Persona 4 and Final Fantasy 10.  The former uses a nickname for the main character, the latter manages to tell a whole story while never mentioning the main character's name at all. Oh, and Undertale also plays with this in that the name you give the character is not actually their name, and since none of the other characters refer to them by name you don't actually find this out until the end.

I mean the only time you really need to say someone's name is to get their attention or to talk about them when they are not present, so it really depends on the story you are telling... I mainly intended for the player to usually be a generic "everyman", a catalyst and a spectator who is just kind of there while the actual plot mainly happens to other people. But we'll see how that evolves.

You can use the Last Guardian npc for generic townsfolk, or at least as a placeholder until you find more high-quality sprites. Generally a game town doesn't need that many houses or people though.

I notice you like to set up towns symmetrically. While this is not exactly bad, placing features a bit more randomly can look more visually interesting.

[Kamani]

I believe both Digimon World:Next Order and the Digimon Stiry: Cyber Sleuth games used the different text box and voice acting.
Undertale does handle that in quite and interesting way. Probably the only game I’ve seen do that. Edit: Not counting Amnesia plot lines. Plus, it effectively handles players who try to choose the name to make it the same as the real name pretty well.

Spoiler: Grand Trials Spoilers (click to show/hide)

I suppose my project is kind of a spin on that. The player’s actions are simultaneously meaningless and the only thing that matters. Completing the Trials and obtaining the medals is, in the end, pointless. But, at the same time, your presence is the entire point of the plot. In the end, actions are meaningless, while being there means everything.

I don’t like Last Guardian much. No standing still sprites means that everyone is always part way through a walk. I already have some sprites, but they came packages with a blue background on every single one (and there are like 100), so I’m trying to decide what to use without testing them all.

Symmetry is something of a bad habit of mine. I just like how it looks. But it’s important to try different things, so I’ll give it a shot next time I make a town.

Edit: Town is on hold for one more day, because I'd like to talk to someone I know about relevant topics so that I can not mess it up.

Edit: So instead I made some more minor tileset edits to add pieces that I need. Still looks bad, but it looks better than it would otherwise. So, I guess, good?
Edit: Looks like I need another thing this doesn't come with. This tileset has a lot of holes...
Edit: Thinking on it, I decided to do it this way so I could do it lazily and spend less time doing tileset modification which I am pretty bad at. I think I'm bad at this whole laziness thing. I mean, this is far less work than actually making a tileset, but I was just planning on doing a bit of colorization.

Edit: Wonder how many tilesets you can have in a room/world at once before loading and lag start to get painful... Seeing as I'll be using like 30 tilesets, I might be running into that... Maybe I can find a more efficient way to handle this? Anyways, think I have everything I need for the tileset, so that's probably finally good. For now.

[IndigoFenix]

30 tilesets in a single room?  You are almost certainly making more trouble for yourself than you need to.  What are you trying to do?

Have you considered using a white-and-transparent mask layer tileset?  Using plain white squares, some colorization, and possibly an alternate composite operation or semi-transparency you can probably just use one extra tileset for each color, and then use that as an overlay over the regular tiles.  I'm not exactly sure what you're doing but I'm guessing that would probably be easier than whatever method you have planned.

[Kamani]

I have to have two tilesets for each color (because one has to be above the standard desert and the other has to be below it), then a third for each inactive color, plus three levels of desert detail. Add that together with every other tileset I have, and it stacks up fast. Although I don’t know where I was getting 30 from, it seems more like 20. Could have sworn it was 30 yesterday. Huh.

Although doing it that way would make infinitely more sense, certain pieces of the tileset don’t fit together the way I need them to, so I made modified versions. Doing semi-transparent white squares probably would have made infinitely more sense though. Unfortunately, at this point, I actually have everything set up, and it would probably take me longer to set it up to work that way. Good idea for next time though.

Edit: Going to end up doing starting the town tomorrow because I was busy today. At least I can work on the dungeon still. Even if I am doing it an unnecessarily complicated way.

Edit: Hey, wait, with how I'm doing the inactive tiles, I don't need to make an inactive tileset for every one. That subtracts my needless tileset count by 4. Wooh.

Edit: Wonder how much trouble I'm going to run into with enemies being on red/blue tiles when they become inactive...

Edit: Prototype Droom1 is done (not counting the second time it'll be pathed through while on the blue path). If you've got time, could you tell me if it looks okay? I know it works pretty well function-wise (except that I temporarily disabled the switcher requiring the player to have an item for testing), besides the potential issue listed above, but I am not really the best judge of aesthetics. It doesn't have to look perfect, since I am developing this with only free tilesets and no art abilities, but it should look okay at least.

[IndigoFenix]

Ooh, I see how it's working.  That's pretty cool.  You can improve the effect by adding a short cutscene when switching.  Maybe a sandstorm foreground effect that fades in and out, swapping the tiles when it is opaque.  Or a screen shake.

Almost figured out the string storage function.  Do note that it will consume 16 bits per character.  But hey, if you want it...