ponett town

So Allison gets her last name from an arbitrary town in Southern California. I've never been there myself—it's just a random name I picked off the map because I was like "in real life Allison would be from SoCal"—but from what I've gathered the locals seem to pronounce it "Go-LEE-ta."

HOWEVER...

"Goleta" is literally just the Spanish word for schooner, as the town is named after a shipwreck that used to be visible off the coast a long time ago. "Go-LEE-ta" seems to just be a mispronunciation that's stuck and refused to go away among English speakers. The proper way to pronounce the Spanish word would be closer to "Go-LEH-ta," so that's how I pronounce Allison's last name.

I definitely thought about glass beach (the song) as a song I'd associate with Claire and her personal arc. She would resonate with that one.

The moons are something I'm leaving open for future stories, but I do think it would be fun if there was stuff on at least one of them. They've almost certainly been visited, though whether it was in modern times via Fantasy Fury NASA or if it's some ancient lore thing is up in the air right now.

It's a little complicated just because adventurers on Reverie have very similar vibes to the good guy pirates in the One Piece world, particularly the ones who are mostly in it for the fun and the freedom and the camaraderie like Luffy and Shanks, with the key distinction that adventuring is a legally recognized profession. (In the Beast Kingdom, anyway. I won't discount the possibility that things could work differently in other unexplored parts of the world.) So like, Amelia would 100% be a pirate in the One Piece world, but because she can do most of that same stuff as a legit job on Reverie she has no beef with local authority figures like the Paladin Brigade—who I guess would be more comparable to the more sympathetic members of the Marines, if anything.

Anyway, in the One Piece world the Novas would definitely just be a pirate crew. I kind of already see them that way lol. They'd also very likely ally themselves with the revolutionaries once they've seen enough of that world's dark side. Certain spoiler characters who are central to the plot later in the game would also definitely be revolutionaries. If you've beaten the game you know who I'm talking about lol. And then a lot of the more "villain-aligned" characters, like Bartholomew and Libra, would be like the more antagonistic pirates.

Sure! So here's Amelia's original concept art from Anthony. I believe I had talked to him about including her in the story, and I'd told him that she was supposed to be a cool adventurer and Allison's role model, but that was about it. Then he came back with this concept drawing (fully colored, even, which he doesn't usually do) and I was like, yep, nailed it. That's her. No notes.

This was done in 2016, pretty early in the game's development, so we were sitting on her for quite some time. I believe Anthony also decided on her name.

Amelia was always one of Anthony's favorite characters he designed for the game, so later on he also did a design for a younger Amelia just for fun. I later incorporated this design into the game via Allison's photo album.

Amelia's original design already included a One Piece reference—the way she wears her jacket like a cloak with the sleeves off is directly inspired by a thing a ton of One Piece characters do to signal that they're cool and strong—so Anthony went even more direct with the young Amelia by straight up just giving her a straw hat lol

Free fan projects: yes. Commercial projects: no

I would say this is accurate, yeah. (I'd give Claire snooty.)

Most people in Greenridge generally weren't aware of the specifics of what happened. The final battle was pretty far from town, and it also happened late at night when most people were asleep. Anyone looking would notice weird shit happening on the mountain followed by a big flash of light and a series of smaller flashes from spells being flung around, but anyone not looking outside probably just thought it was a bad thunderstorm

However, that is definitely something Allison would do. I like that headcanon

Not to scare you off or anything, but making the world itself was definitely the most time-consuming part of making SLARPG.

Usually I'd start working on the basic tileset before anything else, to figure out the vibe of an area. This early experimentation is usually the most fun and invigorating part for me. Then I'd do very rough sketches in a drawing program to block out the overall layout and flow of an area, trying to envision how that will shape the pacing of the story. This is more about the big picture of every map than trying to make it look pretty. How does this area connect to other areas? Do I need some kind of diversion to make this section longer? Should it open up more over time as you find certain key items? Are there shortcuts for backtracking? Are the layouts varied enough from room to room to keep players from getting lost? And then from there it's just about building the maps one by one, tile by tile, rigging up any necessary event logic and going back to add the tiles for additional details as necessary. Which is the most time consuming part. But then you have a whole area you can run around in. Wow!

Granted, my tilesets can be fairly complex in their detail, and that added more time to the process for me. Many hours spent manually arranging grass and tree and cliff face tiles so everything lines up right. Using simpler tilesets and cramming in less detail on every screen would save you time. But there's always going to be some amount of tedium here. That's just game development for you. You get used to it with experience.

I mean really his look in the game is less of an intentional redesign and more a result of me not having drawn him as much at that point. I also don't think he had his formal ref sheet to work off of then, so I took more stylistic liberties with it. I broke his mane/beard down into separate shapes kind of like how I draw Allison's hair, which I suppose helps him fit the game's art style, but that's kinda just how I was drawing hair at the time. And the eyepatch was a detail we were going back and forth with on his fursona's design at the time. It's a reference to the fact that Anthony has a very slight lazy eye with worse vision in real life. Eventually we did away with the eyepatch on his sona's regular design, but I wanted to keep it in the game because giving him an unnecessary eyepatch gives him some Grunkle Stan energy

(Anthony always wanted me to give the fortune teller a unique wizard costume in the game, which he did a concept sketch for, but I always though it was funnier if he was just some random guy with some tarot cards.)

As for my own fursona, I've never really drawn a "Reverie version" of her. I'm not sure what I'd do with that, other than potentially giving her a more fantasy-themed outfit for fun. I don't think I'd have to change her design to fit the game, SLARPG's art style is just my regular art style but with black outlines to match the sprites.

So Melody and Allison's kiss skills in SLARPG are set up in an odd way. There may be another way to do it, but this was something I figured out how to do very early on in my RPG Maker career and it's worked for me this whole time.

The skills actually listed in Melody's and Allison's skill lists only do one thing, which is launch a common event that will, in turn, handle the actual kiss skill, which is how I can force it to only target a specific party member. The event logic for Melody kissing Allison looks like this:

(There's also a bit of logic to trigger some dialogue in a certain fight, but for the sake of this explanation we're ignoring that.)

To break this down:

So, there is no way to have a skill target a specific actor and only that actor - at least, there isn't any way I'm aware of. So instead, I have Melody kiss whoever the party member in the second position is, which just so happens to be Allison's spot. If the party order was altered, this would completely break. Melody would just kiss whoever's in Allison's spot. So for parts of the story where the first two active party members aren't Melody and Allison, in that order, I just have them unlearn their kiss skills and then give them back when the order is back to normal.

(I believe in testing there was a solo Melody section where I forgot to remove her kiss skill and there was no check to see if Allison was in the party, and the result was that she would kiss herself.)

It can be played with just about any PC-compatible controller, I believe? Though it might take a little fiddling in the settings to get a good button layout, and I assume it won't recognize D-pad inputs because it doesn't recognize them with Xbox controllers either, forcing you to use the stick to move. Honestly it's easier to just download JoyToKey and map whatever controller buttons you want to mimic the keyboard controls

I'm sorry to disappoint but it is a humble tobacco cigarette

She actually customized it herself! I imagine she isn't good enough at sewing to make one from scratch, but she took a plain blue witch's hat and added on the triangle pattern and the star herself, and she probably gave it some kind of enchantment to give herself a minor boost to her casting. She also designed the guild tabard.

wrong troll