DOING IT! - WEEK SIX

post=144108
I've been having problems with a certain character and how they'll be introduced to the team. I'd thought of a few ways to do this - either by accidentally meeting in a bar where he leaves you with the tab after some small talk (which would fit with his personality) or having him save them from/leave them in a precarious situation. I need them and the player to like him as a character, but have him a bit ambiguous. After much thought, I decided "why not do both?" and went with it. ^.^

Hm, so I was reading this and thought both were sort of overdone RPG you-meet-a-character ideas, but combing a bunch of them sounds like it would be fun. The character becomes "that guy you run into everywhere," so all of the little incidents actually have some purpose rather than just to introduce player to character.

post=144109
I did have a bit of back story for Alicia already prepared; she got the idea of turning the world into Final Fantasy from a main character. But then she ended up doing horrible things to them, and I didn't have an explanation.
So I made it so that the 'Hojo' convinced her to do those things because they were an 'excellent specimen', and she has lived with regret and guilt from the incident. So she halfway seeks to turn the world into a Final Fantasy copy and also seeks to eventually compress time to return to when the one she treated badly still loved her (mother/son relationship sort of thing)
As for Sephiroth, he was basically sitting around doing nothing until I decided the party would find the Black Materia somewhere, and keep it hidden from Kumo/Cloud just in case he pulls what the real Cloud did in FF7 (hey, Cloud, thanks for screwing us over... twice!), which would create one of the ending's major conflicts, and I'm not saying anymore.
He still plans to turn the world into a vessel and sail around on it.

As someone who's not overly familiar with FF, I'll ask what you're working on here. Some sort of "FF plus other characters" thing, or just "FF, different plot." Anyway, the "turning the world to Final Fantasy" bit sounds like something out of the FFTA series... I admit, that's the only FF game I played all the way through...



So, my stuff... My team is having some issues with the introductory dialogue. It's the first text the player reads so we want it to count. (This is story stuff. Right?) But anyway, it's hard to strike a balance between informative and concise. This is what it's at right now, and most seem to speak it's on the "long" side. (Nico's the protagonist, Waldsworth is his coworker, Chloe's his boss, and the raven, Edgar, is the smartass workshop familiar. The gameplay involves crushing things by pushing statues into them if you're confused.)


NICO: Yaaawn. I could do this for hours. *uses Push on the statue*
NICO: Well, I guess it has been a couple hours. Heh, I bet Waldsworth will never find me in here. *uses Pull on the statue*

EDGAR: Keeping busy?
NICO: Woah! Edgar! Hi! How'd you find me?
EDGAR: How long have you been screwing around in here, anyway?
NICO: I'm not screwing around! I'm doing what Chloe told me to do. I'm, uh... Doing that task, yeah.
EDGAR: Taking care of the dragon beetles?
NICO: Yeah, that's right.
EDGAR: There are four beetles in this room. You've been here for four hours.
NICO: Give me a break. They're tough to kill. Chloe's lucky she hired Nico, expert beetleslayer and grizzled exterminator!
EDGAR: Last I checked your job title was "mage intern."
NICO: Hehe, I'm not an intern, I'm a lithomancer!
*awkward pause*
EDGAR: Well? What are you just standing there for? Kill the dragon beetles.
NICO: Like you said, I'm not an exterminator.
EDGAR: I don't know why Chloe hasn't fired you yet. Even Waldsworth could do the job better than you. Listen up. You have those two pieces of marble that Chloe gave you Crush the dragon beetles between the statue and the walls with Push and Pull.
NICO: That sounds hard. What do I do with the marble again?
EDGAR: Don't play dumb. I saw you slinging that statue around like it's your broken arm. Put the marble on your staff and press the Z key.
NICO: There we go. *push animation* Lithomancy in action!

Anyone have any suggestions on how to tidy that up?

This needs serious work. Tell me what you guys think about it. This is straight from the Introduction of Teluna Everlast. So no real Spoilers since this bit of story is in the intro!



10 Years ago, A Great Darkness covered the lands. Demons spawned into the world, Undead roamed the lands,the animals of the forest were twisted and corrupted and changed into Ruthless Beasts. This time was known as, The Blight. Countless Villages fell before the might of the Dark Force that Tainted the world.
Soon, Mankind was on the verge of destruction. Ragnar Daver Tyran, created the Divine Enforcers. A group of Knights,Mages,Thieves,Archers anyone who could hold there own in combat. They trained in an Underground city known as Dalure. After 5 Months, they charged out of Dalure and attacked the Demons. Within 3 months, The Blight was Ended.

In present time 1985, The Year of Sun, The Divine Enforcer still exist. Protecting Villages from monsters and such things. But recently, demons have been reported to walk in the Forest of Gakure. Valen Revance Tyran, a reknowned bounty hunter and tracker and now Divine Enforcer has been sent to track down the demons and see if they exist. Simply thinking this was just another mission the Enforcer gave Valen, he began tracking down the Demons. He didn't find any demon, what he found was something worse. A Dark Force worse than the Blight.


It is very much a WIP.

post=144163

post=144138
Preparing his church for the increased foot traffic this time of year is Darius, the aging parish priest. Learning firsthand that the Seven rarely answer prayers, he's developed his own way of tending his flock. By day he listens to their troubles...and by night he takes to the Tetrodi streets to deal with their tormentors firsthand. Because Darius is possessed by a powerful demon, and in his twilight years he's going to make sure the city is a just little safer one body at a time. But as the militant Eyes of Heaven begin to arrive for the holiday celebration, he'll have to be deadly careful to protect his secret identity.

This does not need much work at all. Keep all of your writer's "poetry" away from it. It's concise, engaging, and unique.The last thing you need is a bunch of apocalyptic and flowery language that tries to present it as something it's not. Also, I like the protagonist. This is something I'd at least download.

post=144143
This needs serious work. Tell me what you guys think about it. This is straight from the Introduction of Teluna Everlast. So no real Spoilers since this bit of story is in the intro!



10 Years ago, A Great Darkness covered the lands. Demons spawned into the world, Undead roamed the lands,the animals of the forest were twisted and corrupted and changed into Ruthless Beasts. This time was known as, The Blight. Countless Villages fell before the might of the Dark Force that Tainted the world.
Soon, Mankind was on the verge of destruction. Ragnar Daver Tyran, created the Divine Enforcers. A group of Knights,Mages,Thieves,Archers anyone who could hold there own in combat. They trained in an Underground city known as Dalure. After 5 Months, they charged out of Dalure and attacked the Demons. Within 3 months, The Blight was Ended.
In present time 1985, The Year of Sun, The Divine Enforcer still exist. Protecting Villages from monsters and such things. But recently, demons have been reported to walk in the Forest of Gakure. Valen Revance Tyran, a reknowned bounty hunter and tracker and now Divine Enforcer has been sent to track down the demons and see if they exist. Simply thinking this was just another mission the Enforcer gave Valen, he began tracking down the Demons. He didn't find any demon, what he found was something worse. A Dark Force worse than the Blight..

You're not kidding that this needs work. This needs a rewrite. That first paragraph is the most generic fantasy trash it's possible to imagine. "A long time ago, there were lots of monsters, but then someone defeated them." Just erase this. I'm willing to bet it has very little relation to the actual plot of your game, the second paragraph. If it is somehow necessary to the current plot, then introduce it little by little throughout the game. If I saw this on a an introduction it would inspire facepalmage. Chances are your game doesn't need to introduce itself with a scrolling text bar about the history of the world. The player should ease into your environment because of the atmosphere, not because you hit them with a wall of text.

As for the second part, it's really generic, but it's better than the first paragraph. It could work if your character's personality is interesting, I guess. I don't know enough about your actual plot to really give any advice about your scenario. I'm not trying to rip you apart and I'm sorry if it's overly critical but including that "blight" stuff I really think is a mistake.

Your not being overly critical at all. In fact I'm in the process of taking your advice. I'll post the finished product later.

I wrote a premise for the story in The Looming Spire a week or two ago, posted as a page in the game profile. http://rpgmaker.net/games/1939/prologue/

The premise is somewhat simple. I'll write up a summary of what I've already written so far.

A big mysterious tower appears atop a mountain in the countryside. It was almost as if it came from nowhere. Atop the tower rests a giant stone sphere. One day, the sphere began to glow like a dimly lit moon, and in the following weeks, thousands of winged beasts came flying from within the tower, searing across the sky and terrorizing the villages, murdering entire families, blazing a path of rampant and ruthless destruction.

Eventually the beasts were defeated by the rallying armies that came to aid, and their siege stopped. The stone sphere returned to it's normal, dormant, un-lit self once more.

Sixteen years later, the stone sphere begins to glow once more. The hero, in a strange turn of events, finds himself within the tower, or the Spire as it is known, alone and armed with only the sword his father used during the first time the sphere was glowing.


I'm struggling with whether or not I should introduce more characters to the story. Perhaps a "Navi"-type character that follows the hero around offering advice, or a second adventurer/rival type character that you bump into throughout your adventure in the Spire, both of which will allow the hero and his background to develop further.

Or should I take more of a Metroid-type approach, and create a mysterious and alien environment with no dialogue at all?

Choices, choices... still not firm on the matter.

post=144188
I'll say what I said to Orpheus earlier. You DO NOT want to open with the "Widescale invasions have thrown the country into turmoil, leading to an era where poverty and crime are commonplace." Just leave it out completely. A barren, war-torn landscape conveys this clearly enough without you having to come right out and say it. Now for introducing the hellish aspect... I think it would a lot nicer to have the fact that this is hell gradually revealed while the protagonist catches glimpses of the manner of his death. However, if you do it this way, when the game opens, it looks like a very generic crawl. So the alternative would be to open with a scene of the mens' death, which I think is the best of the options you presented.

Of course, as I phrased 'demonstration' of the setting, not outright storytelling of it. There's no worse intro than a bland narrative over the history of a world you haven't seen enough of to care about. I was thinking that the scene of the men scavenging the battlefield would suffice well enough. Otherwise, I agree, though. That was my original plan in the case that I did decide to involve Hell in the whole affair. Thanks for the input.

I like the basic premise, narc. I was actually thinking that it whether or not it would be a good idea to put a helper character in the game is heavily dependent on the type of game it is. Metroid didn't have one because the entire atmosphere lent itself to being mysterious and unwrapping what exactly happened. If that's the type of game your game is shaping out to be, think about that. Or, alternatively, if your game is like, say, Zelda or Alundra, where it's driven by a character narrative, then a rival or a helper, or both might help that along.

post=144248
I've been working on the cutscenes for Lyonell Manor. I've already finished a few, but I thought I'd share one with you all and see if you think it sounds alright. Anyone who has played the demo to completion will probably get what's happening. Anyway, that's the first scene. Any thoughts?

Eh... It's okay. Probably passable if you're not trying to sell your game on story, but otherwise it needs some work to get it up to good.

Don't use "..." so much. Ellipses are fine once in a while to indicate a character is trailing off, but "Urggh...Slade...what are you....?" is a bit much. Consider using a new text box, a dash, or just cutting it out altogether. Too many of these things make your writing look like it should be some breathy Twilight romance scene. For instance, that sentence could be rewritten as:
"Urggh!"
"Slade, what are you --"
If nothing else, it's a bit more active.

Change the flowery language. It's possible to be dramatic without being melodramatic. I'm just going to drop a list of words from your dialogue that strike me as a bit trite:
- aura
- possesses
- surely
- pertains
And a few others like that. But anyway, if Slade's supposed to be some loquacious nobleman or something then it's not strong enough and it just looks like bad writing.

That's about it, I'll do a quick rewrite because I'm bored