Developer Diary (Maple Hills) #5 (Patreon)

On the last Domina diary, I mentioned I was going to start implementing the game's Iconset and the work is now mostly done. 

Maple Hills College is going to be a pretty colorful game, with autumn oranges and pine greens, not to mention the characters themselves, so I decided on a more minimalistic style for the icons. There's a large amount of icons to be used here, more than the standard RPGMaker ones (that Domina uses), and they are all in black and white.

I'm also in the process of implementing the new looting system. The game will feature a lot of dungeons and a lot of chests to be plundered, so I decided on a "loot list" integration instead of preset loots like in my other games. That means that all loot (except quest items) is semi-randomized based on the place you found the container in; so if you just defeated a whole gang of drug dealers in their secret hideout, you're most likely to find drugs and ingredients for drugs in their chests. However what you find when you open each chest is random (while still staying within the drug dealer loot list).

Such a system fits perfectly with the semi-open world feel I'm going for this game, and it also adds replayability, for it's impossible to know where the best items are hidden even after you've played the game multiple times. 

As you can see, opening a chest doesn't automatically add its contents to your inventory like in normal RPGMaker, but you can now choose what you want to pick up; which is important because a lot of the items will simply be worthless to you, depending on your character.

That's all for this week's dev diary. For the coming week, I am going to continue implementing the game's items and assigning them in loot lists. Cheers.