Generative Exercise: Repurposing Elements

This week I am following up on “Gone Home” with a generative exercise.

 I’ve been playing with ideas on how I can use found and triggered narrative elements that reveal aspects of character into a new game of my own design.

The idea I came up with is an exploratory dungeon-delving game, set in ancient Japan, borrowing feudal elements. 

(Final Fantasy Style Banner Made in Photoshop... 121 seconds. :P)

“Four Brothers” follows the tale of four samurai sentenced to exile beyond the gates of Hell. The preliminary level involves searching out jisei, Japanese death poems written by monks and haiku poets on the verge of death. As we correctly identify the jisei, and matching them together, we will reveal a party member.  Once the party of “Four Brothers” is assembled we will journey deeper into the void, with each level revealing more about our past and our reason for exile.

Currently I am working in RPG Maker and hope to have some demonstrative elements up on Thursday.

 Right now I am troubleshooting why my in-game text is so dark (I recently installed some tile sets, so that may effect it) and I am working on my "Lantern effect", which changes the size of the circle of light around the character. 

Here's the eventing I'm using for lantern:
Added Lantern to Item Database. Lantern items are consumable and trigger the event "Lantern On"
Lantern On is a Common Event that issues the following commands:

Control Timer:  Startup (0 min. 10 sec.) // Starts a ten second timer
Control Switches: [0004 : Lantern] = On // Triggers a switch
Show Picture: 2, 'maca2k',  (273, 200), (100%,100%) Center, 255, Normal // Brings up my vingette graphic
// which changes the illuminated area around the player

I then made a parallel process to control how the timer and lantern behave based on the amount of time left on the timer.

Conditional Branch:  Timer 0 min 9 sec, or less // Is there any time left? If there isn't do the following
Erase Picture: 2 //Delete the picture, there's no time left on the lantern
Control Timer: Stop // Stop the timer as there is no time left.
Else: // Do nothing
Branch End; //End This Branch)