Paper Mario - The Last Stage

[raekuul]

butts

[raekuul]

Sorry if I'm sounding completely dumb but what do you mean exactly

future content and/or being not cryptic at all

Unless you go out of your way to backtrack/answer Chuck Quizmo questions, you can't have 25 star pieces before having access to Anti-Guy, and Anti-Guy guards a Power Plus badge.
Technically you should be able to get 25 by the time you can bribe Anti-Guy but I feel like raocow is going to make an honest attempt at winning the battle simply because it's there.
And in any case the bribe method involves backtracking anyway.

[Grounder]

rpgs not very specifically designed around 10-15 minute segments would end up feeling pretty awkward if square-peg-round-holed into it imo

[Zygl]

okay im finishing watching episode 4 and raocow's all like "save until i get 25. save until i get 25" and how much should i bet that

you can actually get all of them within the amount of star pieces you get in the game if you try to go for Most% but since raocow won't be buying anything until he gets 25 he's effectively skipping out on a lot of shit that would make the game easier for him

raoRPG Moment strikes again!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (oh fuck i need to continue rewatching Zwei!! to finally finish it fug)

There are definitely exactly enough Star Pieces to get all those badges, but the way a lot of them are distributed he's almost certainly not getting more than like half of them. There's certainly a lot of helpful and cool stuff he could get instead of saving up for MAX POWER (Zap Tap's cool as shit, Happy Flower would help him a lot with his FP shortage, etc.) but if he wants power (and we know he does) in his position saving up is actually the right play.

Power stacking is completely obscene in this game anyway tbh, he might give himself a bit harder of a time until he gets it but the payoff is ridiculous. Even if he gets the other one, they stack and there's genuine merit to stacking 'em.

[EllenHouraisan]

I feel raocow is the kind of guy who attacks while its tail is up.

[Rixithechao]

Somewhere out there in the multiverse there's a reality where Bruce Willis plays Mario instead of Rat Crisper. I wish we were in that timeline.

DPARG WRITE-UP NUMERO UNO: (bonus music tracks if you read/skip to the end!)

So, as mentioned before, The Demo Plays A Role Game was an attempt to adapt the Paper Demo AU that Chaoxys outlined in his sprite thread (starting here and continuing through the next couple pages) into an actual RPG. This means the game would take place in a separate continuity from A2XT with different designs and interpretations for the characters -- Garish as a chef, Calleoca as a schoolgirl, Uncle Broadsword as a phantom thie- er, archeologist, and so on. Some fan ABCDs were going to be included as well -- my own Baron Magnum as a loose-cannon private investigator in one chapter (we only found out there's a show called Magnum P.I. much later!), Wademo and Waris as recurring rival characters a la Popple and Rookie in Superstar Saga, Ee as the Bowser (who we ended up reusing for Superb Demo Survivors) and the Aunts, a group of mercenaries Ee hires as chapter mid-bosses.

The general premise was something of a riff on TTYD: there are legends of a massive treasure sealed behind a large door in an ancient temple which can only be opened with four relics (which went through a variety of names and concepts, but I think we settled on Tools of the Trade with them being based on actual tools like a paintbrush, chisel, etc?) Ee wants to gather the relics and loiters around the main hub town to scam other people into collecting them for her; when she tries this on Demo and Iris they blow her off because they're already busy with the much more important quest of finding all the ingredients for the perfect vegetable soup. Unfortunately for the twins, due to supply chain issues and other setbacks (many of which are inadvertently caused by the Aunts searching for the relics on Ee's behalf) they end up traveling all across the world for the ingredients and repeatedly crossing paths with the Wa duo, Ee, and the Aunts until eventually Iris gets fed up with it all and becomes invested in the relic hunt solely to spite all the other hunters.

Before all of that, though, we wanted to start with a short advent gift game like we did with the 3D platformer in 2017. The idea was this game could serve as the intro and prologue for the eventual full thing, but all things considered it was still pretty ambitious in scope… but more on that next time!

For now, here’s the first piece of music I composed specifically for the game: the regular battle theme!



As well as a title theme I derived from it much later:

Also, a bit late with this, but I think in either the request or coming up next thread I said that when the Paper Mario LP rolls around someone should remind me to talk about a certain project, right? So starting with my next post here I’ll be appending spoiler folds with bits of info about the time the A2XTeam tried to adapt Chaoxys’ Paper Demo AU into a game — one which had extensive planning and a lot music produced, but was never built beyond a rough early prototype in Unity. We’d like to maybe take another stab at it some point in the future after A2XT2 and Survivors are done, but for now consider these upcoming addendums as post-mortems for DPARG: The Demo Plays A Role Game.

Looking forward to hearing about this! These videos have gotten me thinking "the Paper Mario formula is probably the natural fit for DemoRPG". If you ever were to try and restart, Godot seems to work great for the 2D-characters-in-3D-world esthetic; i have an online friend whose team recently restarted development of their own RPG in the engine and it's been fun watching their progress (their game is stylistically 2D, but technically they use the 3D stuff for things like layering/positioning sprites, menus, etc).

Yep, it'd most likely be in Godot! Aside from the engine being FOSS (and thus not at risk of being dropped or dragged down by a parent company) and the 2.5D-friendliness you mentioned, there's a particular aspect of the workflow that's especially promising. I'll talk more about this when I get to writing about the prototype, but one big roadblock in Unity was how convoluted a certain system felt to work with; in my time working on Demo Survivors I've found that Godot's equivalent of the feature is much more enjoyable to work with, even if it does has its own issues.

[Catabo]

HEDGEHOG FACT: did you know that the saw-lead-sounding instrument that plays at the beginning of the title screen drop is a Sound Canvas patch called Doctor Solo? It's the same thing that plays during the chapter title intro in Fire Emblems 6 and 7.

Between "i hope Kammy Koopa will give me a raise" and "we were worked too hard by the Koopa Bros.", it sounds like the Koopa Kingdom needs unions.

[raekuul]

that'd be a labor union i'd be happy to support

[KobaBeach]

There are definitely exactly enough Star Pieces to get all those badges, but the way a lot of them are distributed he's almost certainly not getting more than like half of them. There's certainly a lot of helpful and cool stuff he could get instead of saving up for MAX POWER (Zap Tap's cool as shit, Happy Flower would help him a lot with his FP shortage, etc.) but if he wants power (and we know he does) in his position saving up is actually the right play.

Power stacking is completely obscene in this game anyway tbh, he might give himself a bit harder of a time until he gets it but the payoff is ridiculous. Even if he gets the other one, they stack and there's genuine merit to stacking 'em.

Unless you go out of your way to backtrack/answer Chuck Quizmo questions, you can't have 25 star pieces before having access to Anti-Guy, and Anti-Guy guards a Power Plus badge.
Technically you should be able to get 25 by the time you can bribe Anti-Guy but I feel like raocow is going to make an honest attempt at winning the battle simply because it's there.
And in any case the bribe method involves backtracking anyway.

taking notes for my ongoing playthrough this sounds poggy af (though i would probably look up all the locations)

[MonkeyShrapnel]

Technically you should be able to get 25 by the time you can bribe Anti-Guy but I feel like raocow is going to make an honest attempt at winning the battle simply because it's there.

As he should, because bribery is illegal and immoral

[KobaBeach]

the bruce willis tangent sounded so goddamn deranged it's a top 10 raoquotes of 2023. someone remind me of this on the 2023 moists

[KobaBeach]

pingos

Sorry for the backseating but I think you might have forgotten a little path on your way to Koopa Village?

Might be worth investigating, even if it's nothing.

Sorry if my constant "genre savviness?" is getting on your nerves

[Grounder]

origami king made a bizarre retcon that makes it so bob-ombs don't respawn after kaboom, making bombette entirely impossible

but more importantly

how she's gonna drive a kart with no hands and only two feet HUH

[Chaoxys]

The ultimate couple. This was the first thing that popped into my head after todays episode.

[KobaBeach]

origami king made a bizarre retcon

nintendo's canon doesn't matter :)

[raekuul]

a title so nice we used it twice

[camwoodstock]

it only took 9 episodes to go for the kirby 64 combos, we suppose?

[Rixithechao]

And thus the paper world began barreling uncontrollably toward apocalypse.

DPARG WRITE-UP DER ZWEITE:

So, I did a bit of Discord DM archeology and I've got some corrections to make: DPARG wasn't planned to be an advent game. It was going to be a 2020 birthday game. There was also more than one prototype.

The discussions for the full A Paper Thing game concept stretch back to 2016, when Chaoxys was still making the original lineup of base sprites. However, I didn't made a prototype for an ASMT series RPG until 2018, when I built a basic tilemap-based test room in Crocotile* with Golden Sun tiles and dropped it into a project derived from the GUrP game. I fumbled around with trying to get billboarded sprites to not clip their heads into walls and poked Hoeloe about the billboarding setups in her own projects a few times before moving on to other stuff. Then in June 2019 I was going through my old Unity projects, stumbled upon ASMT_RPG again, and shared it with Enjl.



After trying to fix it up for the then-current version of Unity I copied over the assets to a brand new project with the tentative name The Demo Plays A Role Game, and we started discussing battle mechanics and setting up the channel group in the ASMT server. The goal was an even blend of PM and M&L, but we quickly decided the paper artstyle would be ideal since it'd keep character animation simple, and, well... there were base sprites already! So we roped Chaoxys in accordingly. I still dragged my feet on switching to a lower camera angle, but a couple days later I confirmed with Hoeloe that trying to fix or get around fully-billboarded graphics clipping into walls and floors just wasn't worth the trouble. Thus, DPARG would become a full PM clone, at least outside of battle.




The initial plan was to keep things fairly short and simple, but Chaoxys and I do tend to... escalate our ideas when brainstorming together. Scope creep was far from the only reason the project fell through**, but it was still a big one! By vaguely-recollected rough estimate, the plans eventually grew to encompass a prologue longer than that of either PM64's or TTYD's beginnings. So next time we'll be covering Demo's and Pal's detour through the Ant Kingdom and the asset production problems that plot posed!



* I think Crocotile cost like... $15? when I bought it, but nowadays it costs $30 so I recommend the free Sprytile addon for Blender as an alternative. You'll need a 2.x version of Blender, though, as Sprytile hasn't been updated in a while and has stability issues with 3.x.

** Yes, I'm partly referring to the pandemic lockdown here (and also Animal Crossing because that's one of my favorite franchises), but the release of Bug Fables also factored in. And, as I mentioned in my response to Catabo, there were some technical hurdles; I'll get to those soon enough.

[Catabo]

It's BOMB-ba-tee! That's how i used to pronounce it as a kid because the "name ends with -ette=girl" logic was not yet ingrained.

A pancake with gravy doesn't sound like the worst thing in the world? Not ideal, but not the worst. This is coloured by the fact that yesterday i went to my favourite café where they have stuff like waffles with sausage and gravy. Maybe i'll try it next time instead of just always getting the peanut-butter-and-banana waffle.

[PSI Ninja]

raocow: "Hey there everyone, this is raocow, playing Mario Party."
Bombette: "See that? You see what I bring to the party, Mario?"

Almost.

Back when I played this, I always thought that holding and releasing the A button for the Body Slam was awkward, because of the way it cuts off the "ending" sound signalling that the gauge is fully charged. Just never felt right to me.

DPARG WRITE-UP DER ZWEITE:

Wow, I had no idea so much work had been done for this behind the scenes. The extent of what I knew about this project was that I seem to recall someone here using a "Paper Demo" avatar where she spun around.

A pancake with gravy doesn't sound like the worst thing in the world? Not ideal, but not the worst. This is coloured by the fact that yesterday i went to my favourite café where they have stuff like waffles with sausage and gravy. Maybe i'll try it next time instead of just always getting the peanut-butter-and-banana waffle.

Dangit, now you're making me think of Luigi's adventures in the Waffle Kingdom.

[BobisOnlyBob]

[raekuul]

[UFereSanyo]

I don't know if anyone has stated this yet (lazy to read) but

when a lil golden flower appears, make sure to take care of it as many times as needes. Just exit and re-enter if it doesn't show up

[KobaBeach]

The initial plan was to keep things fairly short and simple, but Chaoxys and I do tend to... escalate our ideas when brainstorming together. Scope creep was far from the only reason the project fell through**, but it was still a big one! By vaguely-recollected rough estimate, the plans eventually grew to encompass a prologue longer than that of either PM64's or TTYD's beginnings.

absolutely no offense to you or chaoxys but i fucking hate this (the scope creep not the rpg). please dont scope creep ever again or i'll step on you

[raekuul]

both future content and backseating

edit: talking about future content is fine, just keep it under spoiler boxes. this was just a bad double-whammy of also being backseating, which honestly at this step is just pointless because by the time it's relevant it'll be forgotten. and it's not like it's permanently missable content anyway.