SaGa 4 (FFL4): The Far Ages

Hello there and welcome to the Far Ages Blog,
As my current project is slowly taking shape, I try to post a progress report every know and then to keep you people interested. Please note that I removed the previous blog entry and a few pictures, due to the fact that the game changed a lot during the past weeks.

Status Report
Right now, I am very happy how this project is evolving. Although progress is slow (as my job and family effectively keep me from working on far ages), its steady and every building stone is set with care and pre-planning. So far, I got enough pieces together to call it a "foundation" for future development. Everything is patched, the exfont is almost ready and I ripped enough graphics to provide me with a relieable gameboy-style character, monster and tileset database.



Quick Insight 1: Prolouge and Intro
So, I got the 15 minute prolouge, the title screen as well as the (whopping 30 minutes) intro ready. And I am somewhat proud of it. Usually when I play RPGMaker games, most of them are missing a prolouge at all or it is either badly written or badly designed. I tried to adress every aspect by mixing scrolltext and image slideshows with actual cutscenes. There is a lot of background story that has to be transported to the player, as cosmology and world-history plays a big part in my game (as well as politics and religion) - so the intro is lenghty at times, but worth watching! of course there is a skip intro option.



Quick Insight 2: Grange City
I completely reworked the capitol city of the first planet. As the beginning chapter is taking place in the city alone, it needed a major overhaul. I reduced the size of the city and concentrated on the most important places instead of reaching out into every corner of it. By adding more detailed maps of the really important places, i keep the walking routes low and focus on action instead. but the city is not boring at all: i added a pletoria of NPCs with interesting (!) dialogs as well as tutorial NPCs wich explain you the various in-game systems step by step (wich is really necessary as there are many sub-systems and they vary a lot from what you know from regular rpgmaker games). Please note that the graphical part of the city is still WIP and might change again in the future (it was built on decaying sky-scrapers of the past - by the way).



Quick Insight 3: The Sewers
Some of you might still remember my sewer screenshot i posted a while ago. well, the sewer dungeon is just below Grange City and it is the first major dungeon of the game. And it is HUGE! Its a whopping 9 sector dungeon with 70x90 map tiles each (altough the maps are only filled partially). It is also a multiply entrances and exits dungeon you wont be able to solve in one go. not only one but a few quests are taking place in that dungeon that features 2 different elevation levels as well as touch encounters, a maze like structure and a dark enviroment. see the picture below for all of its glory.



Thanks for reading, watching and commenting. I try to keep my updates at a few but at a steady pace. The more time I spend on promoting this behemoth of a project, the less time I have to develop it. So i decided to rather work on it instead of talking about it!

Stay tuned, it may be monochrome - but the word "Vast" describes it well.

(In my next blog entry I explain you some of the ingame systems)