Hard to believe more than a year has gone past when this pet project of mine was finally completed. But it passed the 5K download mark in combined DLs, so that has made me quite happy. =) Even though it hasn't quite reached the popularity of say, Star Stealing Prince or Lunar Wish.

Funnily enough, all three featured games for December for the years 2012 ( SSP ), 2013 ( LW ) and 2014 ( Enelysion ) were made in VX, a nice little hat-trick, considering the engine is normally seen as the weakest of the modern RM engines ( XP, VX/Ace, MV ).

I've been thinking about patching this game one last time ( with the patches included, unlike the current version that's available; the patch is a separate DL ) before I can lay it to rest. Though I'm not too sure if I should include some bonus content to celebrate the game's one-year release, or tweak the writing or, I dunno. Something that will enhance the overall experience of this project, rather than just let the player feel like they're playing a rehash. Maybe I can include a bonus dungeon that allows Laine and co. to battle all the previous bosses in the game, but beefed-up versions of them ( Oh the horror! Imagine how nasty Avinchii would be! ). Justified really, since your mighty party should be around Level 25+ by then, aka Endgame level.

Maybe extra weapons/armours, extra loot, the usual stuff that will give players an incentive to play through the game again. Or even throw in a mini side-quest where I've hidden about 50 'mini-doubloons' throughout the game and can be traded at that one town to get awesome loot. ^^ Bonus tracks too, since I know for a fact that the music in Enelysion is one of it's strongest points, and one I'm very proud of.

Or a 'banter' option. Think Phantasy Star IV's Talk option.

Just any excuse to see that silly Siglud and his equally dry-humour friend Cillian talking nonsense with Laine and Pat. XD

Closing thought. Should I do some new artsies? ( I can do art, but my style doesn't suit a game like say, Tristian. I'd go for marimo's art-style for that particular game, but I don't think I can afford her ;_; ).


Because it's eeeeevil. Just kidding.

Of course, this is all 'in-between' stuff while I slave away at Tristian.

So it all came to me in one glorious flash of inspiration. I've finally nailed down an idea for my IGMC entry, and because it is tied to Enelysion's game world, I might as well post it here. ^^

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What if you could literally go into the head of your heroine and take an internal journey to make her grow from the inside out? Determine how to grow her strengths and battle abilities by fighting off her common foes: Rage, Melancholia and Avarice and follow Laine as she struggles to overcome her loss, faces her darker side, and ultimately, become a better person as a result.

Yes, this is based partially off the movie Inside Out, because I just found the premise so promising for a game centered around growth.

Plot:

Laine Fisher has had a bad day. She failed to take down the notorious gang that has been plaguing Landen for the better part of two weeks, swore at Patrick and got involved in a dispute over money with her employer, Krei. After threatening to fire her for her unacceptable behaviour, Laine has a pint or two too many to drink, and has a very strange dream after passing out in the Dirty Dog.

She wakes up in a strange dream world and has to find her bearings on her own. During her journey through this place ( which looks a lot like the Sidhe in the original game ), Laine has to confront the negative facets of her personality, do battle with physical manifestations of Anger, Greed and Melancholia and eventually, her dark side. At the end, she faces Rikard’s spirit, who tells her that there is no shame in what she is feeling, and after this exchange, she wakes up in her own bed at home, with Pat at her side.

Timeline:

A month before the events of the actual game, and a few days after Rikard’s death.

Gameplay:

The Sidhe/Dream world

Foes are only encountered once, then disappear. A boss representing the emotion of each level needs to be defeated for Laine to overcome this trait. An emotion bar is represented on screen, showing how close Laine is to ‘defeating’ her negative trait.

Divided into three distinct levels:

The Wrath area is populated with fiery creatures and treacherous rivers of lava. Laine will gain stats in ATK and HP for this stage. There is no currency. Rather, the foes drop a currency that enables Laine to purchase skills ( JP-system ), which are all locked at the beginning of the game.

During these stages, Laine’s ATK power skyrockets, but leaves her vulnerable to attacks. She can also become Berserked at times.

The Melancholia area is a sombre blue, glowing cave filled with spectral creatures which drain Laine’s HP and try to inflict status effects on her like Depression and Weak.

Laine is more resistant to magic, but her attacks are weaker.

The Avarice area is a temple-like structure full of treasure. However, Laine will be penalised stat-wise if she tries to open any of the chests containing valuable loot. Laine can use her ‘avarice’ based skills ( which require koruna to cast ) on foes here.

After she clears all three areas and the bosses, Laine faces off against her dark side. After she defeats her doppleganger, Rikard will appear, Laine will wake up, and the game will end.

Gameplay progress:

Laine’s stats are fixed. She can either can stats through defeating her foes, getting small stat-ups, or she can equip certain ‘personality traits’ that double as skill enhancements that can combat certain types of foes: Eg; the Calm trait working well against Aggressive foes.

After clearing each level, she will get a large stat-up and a 'trait' to help combat her foes.

Because of her recent loss and certain traits, Laine will be weak against certain ‘elements’. Because she is in mourning, the Depression state affects her worse and because she is hot-headed, the Aggression-based fire foes tend to do more damage to her as well.

I'm also linking certain skills to certain traits ( which is probably borne from my love of the Sims3 ).
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There's probably a lot more to the gameplay, but I'm just trying to hammer the core aspects of the game for now. But expect a game page within the next few days or so. ^^

So, thoughts on the idea? Opinions?

So, I've taken that baby step forward ( and hopefully a leap as a developer ) into the indie-game making scene. Help up vote it and show your support, RMN! :D And add me as a friend if you have an account over there. I'm lonely. :3

http://gamejolt.com/games/rpg/enelysion/38492/

I wonder how tolerant they are over there with regards to games that need existing software to run...

Anyway, hope to see some of you over there. My heart ( and most of my posting ) still remains with RMN, however. <3

After weeks of testing the game non-stop, I feel it is ready to put the Redux version out. And I won't say anything about it being the last, lest I curse myself and have to upload another patch to fix some small error/ map/glitch that I may have overlooked. My last 'speedrun' playthrough still came in at around nine and a half hours ( instead of 12.5 hrs ) so the game still has enough meat in its playtime to classify itself as a 'decent length' RM game.

With that said, I only hope I can lay this 3.5 year old toddler to rest and focus on my other baby, Tristian, and hope she won't rouse me from some much needed rest. Because I am EXHAUSTED. Even as I type this, I can feel every joint in my body aching because I wanted to see if I could work to a deadline, which I set for the 15th of this month.

Which I managed.

So maybe I should tell you a tell as to how Enelysion came into this world.
This probably will make it my longest blog post yet, so bear with me. =)

October 2010:

Yuney cancels her fangame; Phantasy Star: Beneath a New Light, after 1.5 years of dev, ditches XP and gets VX.

Late November 2010:

Yuney is browsing through some Fire Emblem artwork of a game she has never played before. It is called Path of Radiance, and she sees a real neat looking outfit of a Lord of whose name is still unknown to her at that point. His name is Ike.


Said artwork that I came across. Ike is also the most over-rated Lord in FE history.

Yuney thinks to herself: "Say, that guy has a cool outfit. Maybe I'll draw it, but not him." Little did she know that little drawing would signal the birth of Laine Alexandra Fisher. XD She sketches in a few more details, writes up a couple of notes on the drawing and leaves it as is.

December 2010:

Starts messing around with stuff in VX after getting the demo of Battle Engine Melody and strings together a couple of maps. yuney doesn't get very far with stuff, but still experiments. At that point, the Tankentai battle system was all the rage for VX games, so yuney decides to jump on the bandwagon. She becomes seriously inspired after playing the demo of Adela Isra ( inspires mapping ) and A Dust Tale ( inspires yuney to use Fire Emblem portraits ), and resolves to make a game. The awesome looking but completely average Valkyrie Stories: Escallion Rising inspires her as well with regards to overall presentation.

This would stick with her well into 2014, where the snazzy-looking menus of Tristian and its in-game help files would be inspired by VS: ER and A Dust Tale.

January-March 2011:

Yuney continues to develop her gam, doing research on Celtic, Greek/Eastern sounding names/myth and decides to call her game Enelysion. She begins editing Fire Emblem portraits to represent her characters, and at last; Laine, Patrick, Cillian and Siglud are ready to make their first foray onto rpgmakervx.net.

The game topic is born on February 17, 2011.

The game becomes popular quickly, and even in its demo state, was still praised
for its visuals and music selection even back then. yuney never did use commercial game music, after all.



Early build of the game.

24 March 2011

Enelysion makes its way onto RMN.

Mid-late 2011

The game undergoes several revamps because yuney is not happy with her maps and a bunch of other stuff she can't remember now. Yuney comes across her favourite-ever RM game at this point as well. It is merely called Linus.


How can I forget Clyve's comment when he said that Pat's weapon looked like a stick of broccoli. :D Tankentai, with the Adela Isra inspired HUDs.


Tankentai with not-so-big numbers.


Bastard. There was at one point, an FE-art build of the game and an original art build.

Battle-system evolution

Late 2011-Early/Mid 2012

iEntry starts causing trouble for vx.net. Many, if not all, the regulars start a mass exodus to the then newly opened RMW. After 630+ replies over at vx.net, Enelysion's topic finally migrates to RMW.

By this point, the game is completely unrecognisable from the early March 2011 build and has racked up some nice reviews over at RMN.

May 2012

Ronove from Star-Stealing Prince fame offers to do a skill exchange with yuney. I do some interior maps for her and she does the lineart for the new portraits that would soon replace yuney's current ( and horrible ) custom art versions. The FE portraits have long been scrapped. Tankentai is scrapped and yuney starts using the awesome BEM ( Battle Engine Melody ) for Enelysion's base battle system. Laine goes from resembling Lucia from Fire Emblem to Lightning of FFXIII due to a design change. The noblewoman look would go on to be recycled for the titular Lady of the Lion, Tristian.


Fast forward >>> >>> to September 2013

RMW in yuney's opinion starts becoming a cesspool of poor games and a lack of inspiration. She tries to get feedback for the latest build of the game ( Volume I, which clocks in at just over 6.5 hours ) and becomes frustrated and a tad depressed. The general population become more interested in acquiring 'Likes' and getting lots of profile views, because its probably an indication of how popular you over there.

Feedback for games in general slow to a crawl, an explosion of resource makers come into the fray and RMW in yuney's opinion, becomes more of an art site than a gam dev site like RMN. She slowly starts becoming less and less active, while becoming MORE active at the land of Aremen.

Fast forward >>> ??? ( Early-mid 2014 )

Yuney has sort of hit a valley in gam mak production. She's depressed. She wants to
give up completely. Enelysion's production has but ground to a halt. yuney thinks
of retiring from gam mak altogether. She tries to go a fully custom route for Vol II and tries to make it a separate game but stops.



Black Tempest custom build.

And then two wonderful reviewers by the name of Addit and nhubi save her. RMN literally saves yuney's gam mak pursuits and for that, she is eternally grateful. Her spark is back. She gets to work on Vol II asap. All she wanted was some feedback, and she got it. Some may have wrongly interpretted it as 'attention-whoring'... yuney is not an attention-grabbing snot, nor does she EVER, EVER plug her gams.

17 October 2014 - mid October

The final ( or not ) version of Vol I AND II is released on RMN. Yuney gets some more valuable feedback from Neok of Alter Aila fame and Red_Nova of RoI fame. She is very happy and thankful for their help and resolves to make a clean, bug free final release.

Late October 2014

Yuney announces that a Redux version of the game will be released.

Early November 2014

Enelysion hits 250,000 profile views on RMN. yuney is tired from all the testing, but still pushes on. Rpgmakervx.net dies.

Mid November 2014

Yuney starts finishing up testing the Redux version of Enelysion, which will be slated for release on the 15th of November 2014.

So yeah. A four-year chapter does indeed come to a close soon. I want to thank every single one of you for your support, encouragement and general awesomeness.

And for those of you who are nominating my baby for GOTY 2014 for the Misaos, thank you. It means the world to me. :D If I can get just one Misao, then I will be walking on air.

This is yuney, signing out and off to take a well-deserved rest.

I will be uploading a new download for the game soon. Yes, its more painful for me from a bandwidth point of view ( I only have a 2GB cap per month, whereas; comparison-wise, my buddy in down under gets around 300GB a month ;_;) but judging by the number of game downloads to patch DLs, it seems either most people are too bloody lazy to download the patch and replace the data folder, or I needed to have sorted all that out beforehand (as if I'm not doing enough already -_-).

So yes. A fully patched version of Enelysion will be available soon, and I hope to God it is the last one, because I REALLY want to move onto other stuff ( like the MOG graphics event, play some other RM games like RoI and start working on Tristian again ). The project alone has already taken 4 years of my life. No more.

Yuney over and out.