Oceans Dream

Finally finished icons (for now), that took longer than I wanted it to. I received all the concept art for the enemies so I should be working on those sprites now.

I still need to work on the menu but that will be later.

Drill Mech by TFT as an example of a concept art which I’ll later make a sprite version of.

That’s all for today, I was busy with other things too but hopefully I can get the enemies worked on soon.

So I am making Azulea in RMVX now. It was an unexpected switch but I will likely be happier in the long run for it.

So far I’ve been setting up the database and resources for it. I’ve double scaled what I had for 2k3 so I don’t have to remake it all. So I am working on how it’ll work in game, since I don’t want the default front view system and all.

Tisa, Karen, and Vivian will be in battle, and I’m likely gonna not have any ATB since I don’t like those.

Working on it slowly, I’ll give you an update on how the systems and stuff work like another day. Very sleeepy right now, so this post lacks much info. Also got a monster concept artist so you may see the sprites or concepts of those later.

Have a Tisa pic for the meantime, screens and stuff to come later.

We still haven’t come up with a proper title for it.

I have made some posts about the game before. Basically, I and a few of my IRC buddies are working on this game. We (at least used to) take 3 days to work on it, then pass it off and they’ll add to it, whether it’s story or gameplay wise. We’re starting to get close to the end so we’re taking longer turns now, but hopefully it’ll be done before summer. No guarantees, I don’t like to be rushed.

One issue I was seeing is that we kept being at a high level (at least in that game) before the game was over. So we would have all of the most powerful skills at least a few dungeons before it was time to end it. Also, we had 2 types of skills as a shared skillset, so there was not much diversity among the characters other than the commands which I believe aren’t all that effective (and were a bit buggy).

So I made a unique skillset for each character. You have to equip an orb to change the elemental spells that the character can use (Fire/Water/Earth/Air/Light/Dark), and one orb to set the level of the skillset for the character. These are gonna be fairly rare so you won’t always have all the characters on equal level skillsets, so you have to choose who would benefit most from the new skills you get.

The story involves letters being sent out to various people who would be capable enough to do a dangerous task. A shadowy council tries to find out who is responsible behind the mysterious deaths, and a girl asks 2 mercenaries to take her to the capital city as she has business there. They end up being involved in the up coming events.

There are various characters (I believe 8 if I’m not mistaken) which will join your group, you can switch them out later when you get more than 4. Also, you can collect frooogsssss.

This is a collaboration with Dajhail, Ocean, GreatOldOne, Skie, and Jihaus.

I hope that we can finish it soon. We will release it once it’s complete.

This is a recent issue we had with Chaingame, so I figured I’d bring it up here. In an RPG battle system, spells are generally a pretty big part of it. Turn based games in particular use them a lot. All you need to do is look at the big spells lists in games such as Final Fantasy to see that. I guess some people enjoy putting in their feature lists “999 spells!!!!” or something like that. But it’s not so much the quantity of spells as it is how useful each of them are.

Now, I bring it up because of Chaingame. We had end game spells which pretty much either did everything, or became obsolete. An example would be the Full Boost, which would make Power Boost, Guard Boost, and every other buff obsolete. At the end game, there is no decision whether you should take the round and see which buff you should cast, you can just pick that one and you’re set. Then Power/Guard/Life Boost just take up space in the menu because no one will be using them anymore.

There are some games I’ve played where the main character starts with just an attack and a sword skill. The sword skill does about the same damage or maybe slightly more damage but costs MP. However, it doesn’t scale in damage in the same way. So your attack could do 40 damage, the skill could do 60 damage, but later in the game the attack could do 132 damage and the skill would do about 70 this time. Now, in what case would you prefer to take the 70 damage skill that costs MP over an attack which is free and more easily accessible in the menu?

So when designing skills, you should think about how useful they are compared to each other, how useful it will be in the future, for how long it will be useful, how useful the player will believe it is, and things like that.

One of the hardest skills for the player to use are the status effect spells. Final Fantasy X had a great idea for them, simply have them as Attack + Status effect so you don’t lose the turn if the status effect doesn’t connect. You don’t have to do that though, but if they are in the game, they should be useful to the player. What use is it if only the weak enemies that you can easily kill are the only ones affected by status effects? Alternatively, if you’re not careful, they can break the game and make it boring for the player. I read a review on a game that had high HP bosses but that all were easily put to sleep, and sleep lasted a long while and wasn’t easily interrupted. The difficulty went down to 0 like that.

You want to have the player think about what they’ll do, and “Attack, Spam Ultima, Spam Cure4, Attack” every turn doesn’t involve players brains very much. Games should have meaningful choices.

OK, that is it from me for now, I am tired. Thanks for reading and feel free to offer suggestions, feedback and comments on this!

About making money in games:

(This is not limited to RPGs though I may use that as a topic, and no I don’t mean making REAL money off of it)

It seems hard to balance doesn’t it? Maybe it’s too easy to make money. Maybe you’re constantly looking for money. Maybe it’s only like that until the end, when you have too much money left over. There may be multiple currencies. You may want to do away with currency and have a barter system, or use “currency” for other things instead of purchasing equipment.

First off, you should consider what to call your currency. Gold is easy to recognize, but maybe you want to vary it up a bit. As long as it’s easy to tell that it’s money, you can call it (or have it) as you want. Fallout has you trading bottle caps (I didn’t know this at first actually), some games have you collecting various items to trade (Feather x 10, Ruby x 10). It depends on the culture you have going on in your game. Do they use salt to trade? Gold coins? Dollars? Do they call them a certain name? (Lucre for example)?

How easy is it to obtain? Pretty easy and you can generally afford what you want to get when you get there, or you’re just scraping to get by, selling even your own equipment because you have nothing else? This, along with the name of the currency, can be very dependent on the setting you wish to create. Something like Fallout or another game where the character is struggling to survive should have currency hard to get. Other games can be easier to obtain it, as they may be a higher status. FF8 had a salary, and some games earn you money from renting out houses. Although this can lead to…

The issue of having too much money at the end game. Some games are more problematic than others at this though. You get some games where you’re like “I bought everything, I have a bunch of money left over and I keep getting more, now what?”. Some have high value end game equipment that is so expensive you feel you’d have to grind for years to get it. It can be hard as you may not really have much else after the player buys everything they wanted to. But it can be something to think about. Maybe the player can spend their gold on something like buying things for a players house, paying rent for more item storage (so the player can carry 200 items instead of 100), or have a rare and expensive items be available that can be bought.

It is possible to manage currency in different ways. Maybe instead of buying equipment, you use points to upgrade your skills and just find the items or have enemies drop them. Maybe you trade in currencies/items for new ones. Maybe you get monster drops and sell them. Maybe you only have a salary and have to use that. Some people like the monster drop because they feel getting gold directly from enemies makes little sense. I personally find it easier to see the gold right there so I don’t have to estimate how much I’ll get, but it’s nice getting a big amount when you sell a lot of items. I also like the drop system when I can get usable and even good equipment from an enemy. You could loot the entire equipment set from an enemy in Oblivion, I liked that. Although the downside was that it made animals/monsters much less desirable to fight.

The amount of money you make on a quest or treasure chest should be proportional to the amount of work it took to get there/achieve it, and where you are in the game. A very simple fetch quest on Level 1 shouldn’t make you rich, nor should a difficult quest on Level 30 give you 5 gold and send you on your way. Same goes for treasure chests. If you make the player go out of their way and have to fight quite a bit of fairly hard monsters to get to it, you should reward the player and not give them a cheap potion for their efforts.

The placement of places to buy can also have an effect on your game world. You might have a shady dealer on the road. Maybe a merchant on the road will charge less because you don’t have the vendor markup. Maybe there’s a used merchandise with reduced prices (but slightly lower quality) goods. Maybe you have a goblin merchant in the lower depths of your dungeon in case you need more potions there. Maybe you can send your dog to go to town and buy stuff for you so you don’t have to leave a dungeon. You don’t need to always have a town -> cave -> town -> dungeon -> town simply because you need a place for the players to rest and trade. Some games only have one town that you can town portal to, or have full restore spots and treasures around so you don’t really need towns.

It is possible to also have item values change depending on the location and needs of the area. Fable plays around with this idea, so you can give some merchants who are low on goods and sell stuff you bought in an area where it was plentiful and make a profit that way. Certain games (tends to be more of the open ended western RPGs) have stats that influence how much you buy/sell for. Bartering or Persuasion or whatever they decide to call the skill. Basically if the merchant likes you more, they’ll charge you less. Maybe you can also give free gifts for a frequent shopper, or one that made a big purchase. “You bought 10,000 Gold worth of items from the store, have a free Armor Polisher to go with it!”. Some towns might charge a higher tax on all goods, or maybe the events going on in the game can effect the economy. If there are goblins in the mines, it might raise up prices for equipment that relies on that ore until you clear out the mines. Then miners can get to work and lower the prices on the equipment. FF5 had an interesting, though short example:

-There was a fire town you arrived in. They had equipment you wouldn’t be able to get until later, at a lower price. But when you buy one, you are arrested.

-After that, due to the plot, you find out the power of fire is weakening. You defeat the boss who is controlling the queen, but the fire crystal breaks.

- Without the power of fire, they can’t use it to make the same equipment for cheap, so the price goes up and you have inferior weapons to buy.

Other story related or area related causes can change or set prices in the world. Wine made in a certain town will be more expensive elsewhere, but cheaper in the town its from.

It’s just something to think about when working on your game. Your game doesn’t always need a deep economy, or things like that, but it’s always good to at least think about your gameplay ideas and see if you find something that fits well.

This is a new game by Anaryu and KKMcK (with a main character sprite by Skie). It’s for a contest that took place in RMN. I’ll get you that link when the site decides to work again, but for now you can use the link here:

http://kkmck.deviantart.com/art/Lux-Licentia-164417295

The deviant art link has a title screen picture and the download for the game and some description. I’ll get up some screenshots later also.

I died a few times but I was rushing through it, and you should take advantage of combos. Interesting and well done game especially for the time frame, try it out!

So I finished my part of the contest game, it was a bit hard but I got the graphics made for the game. It won’t be released on time, but my part is done at least.

So now I’m back to Azulea. I’ve been doing some story planning, getting some ideas for the gameplay and design, and I even made a new battle background. I’ll be doing more of those, I’m planning one a day.

The story is still holding me back, but I wrote down all the ideas I had so it’s more a matter of connecting the whole thing and getting the gameplay to play nicely with it. I hope to update this a little more frequently now.

I have been working on stuff, just not Azulea for the most part. I do have more of the story figured out for it but I haven’t really sat down and plotted it all out yet. I may need help on that anyway, was thinking of asking someone.

Anyway, I posted some screens before on the chaingame that we’re working on. It’s a private one and we’re already near the end but we’ve been taking turns on it. I get home from work at about 6 PM these days so I pretty much take a nap, then start working on that project for a few days before I hand it off.

The game is about 1-2 hours long so far, has a few dungeons and cutscenes already. The basic story revolves around a girl called Rise who hired 2 mercenaries from town (Siegmund and Reinhardt) to escort her to the capital city. Of course, it doesn’t go as planned…

I’ve been doing more of the mapping part, editing tiles, and creating dungeons and working on the gameplay. I don’t like doing the story stuff (as is apparent) so I have my friends doing that part.

We will likely make a public release of it once it’s done, maybe in a few weeks? We just need some time to polish it once we finish the story part.

Screeeenshot!

Not as much progress yet on the game itself, doing some story things. The inclusion of Naia changes things, so I have to adapt to that.

I do have the intro though, I added to it so hopefully it will add some interest to what is going on. I worked on some other things like adding some NPCs and fixing map issues but other than that I was mainly playing through it to see what needs to go and what I should do.

I plan to get more done on Azulea these days so hopefully I’ll actually get to add more areas then.

Here’s an art by KYayb: