What a great little gem - it looks great, is fun to play, and the atmosphere is right up my alley. That, and Talbot is so cute!

So I'll be annoying and repeat/ask...

Is it really impossible to use a big picture as background without harming performance? I know I once tried it in RPGVX where I inserted it as a parallax background.

Although I admit that the example newt posted is impressive (I might consider that solution for some things), what do you do if you want a background like this:

<img src="http://www.brainygamer.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/12/28/odinsphere34.jpg">

?

What if such backgrounds are reserved for smaller layouts, like rooms or small caverns, and then tiles are used for larger layouts?

I guess I could just try it out, but it is still early in my project, so I'd rather not harm it from the get-go (in case the performance isn't harmed until a lot of objects gets thrown on top. In that case it would suck to spend so much time on getting painted backgrounds...)

So I'll double-check with the experts instead.

Just wanted to say that your tutorials are very useful! I learned a lot of interesting stuff while going through them.

In the last part you also included an Array Helper - looks really practical, except I can't really get it to work? Even though I change the items.txt file, nothing gets loaded into the program. So if I try to create a new array_items.dat, it just gets filled with 0's.

I think I saw something like what you want the other day when looking through the starmap cap.

Put the object creation inside an event group. Have a variable for the objects you want to create. Timer equals 140 = activate group.

Upon creation:

add +1 to that variable.

Then: is variable great or equal to 1 = disable the creation group.

(Not a very graphic example, but I hope you know what I mean. Otherwise try looking into the cap I mentioned).

This may not be useful for you any more since it looks like you decided on an rpg-ish genre, but if you're still thinking about doing a story game with lots of text and choices, there is this nifty program for it:

http://www.renpy.org/wiki/renpy/Home_Page

It is also pretty flexible for adding certain kinds of gameplay, but if you want a lot of that, it's probably easier to go elsewhere.

>

> And how long does it take you to do something like this drawing, lineart plus color?

>

I think 3 days for the pencil in spare time, and color quite fast, in two ours maybe.

It is much faster if you have quite finished/detailed pencil.

Two hours!? Whoa, colouring is always what takes me the longest. I really need to improve my speed...

That picture looks really impressive