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Latest Release
0.2.0 - Jan 27, 2024

Synopsis
Join Amalia, a tracker from the simple orphan colony of Tulron, as she discovers the veiled world of Alcuria in search of her friends.

Links
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Legacy Synopsis
In Starless Umbra, you play as Andoru in a quest to attempt to return home to save your sister after bandits raid your village. This simple task complicates itself quickly, as a strange phenomenon leaves you not only away from your village, but with little direction in a completely new continent.

As you travel, you'll learn the people around you aren't what they seem, and ties begin forming between yourself and others as your past is revealed. Unfortunately, no one can answer the simple question: "how do I get back home to save my sister?"

Latest Blog

2023 Recap!



You can also watch on youtube if you don't want to read!

Hi! Once again over a year has passed since my last update. I figure now’s a great time to reflect and share what I’ve accomplished in 2023.

YEAR OVER ALREADY?

2023 had some setbacks. At the start of the year I was impacted by the tech layoffs and spent the first five months of 2023 finding a new job. I thought I’d get more development time in, but the pressures of securing reliable income constantly loomed over me. Game development for the foreseeable continues to be a side project.

I did what I could though. The new gig is good, and here we are in a new year. Let’s recap some SU dev.



NEW STORY CONTENT & MECHANICS

This past year I focused primarily on content for the second of the game’s five planned acts. Act 2 adds four new dungeons centered around a new hub town. All mainline cutscenes, dungeon maps, and mechanics are in. And yikes there are just so many small mechanics here and there that start to conflict, despite my best efforts to maintain some semblance of control over my scope. For example, having characters follow you with a basic pathfinding algorithm is great, till you have swimming, and levers to raise/lower water levels, and all sorts of interactions. These things get complicated (and buggy to be honest) quickly. But these systems are coming together and make multiplayer quite enjoyable.

On the character customization side, I’ve added a passive ability system. This is inspired by FF9’s ability system with a few tweaks. Passives have a set of triggers (I deal damage, I use a specific elemental attack, my party member is defeated, a battle begins, etc) and then an outcome as a result of those triggers occurs: usually a buff or stat boost at the moment. You have a set number of points to equip passives, but in another twist on the FF9 abilities formula, you can unlock more slots by exploring and interacting with the environment. This is a dumping ground for lots of worldbuilding and character development. The goal here is to add a bit of depth to character-building with fun ways to experiment and get creative, without cramming it in the player’s face.

COMBAT SYSTEMS

One recurring piece of feedback I received was that combat felt boring at times. SU had a distinct lack of resources. No SP? Few items? This was more out of hesitancy to implement new systems without giving it proper thought, but I’m finally moving forward with a few combat tweaks.

First, I’m experimenting with SP as a character stat. This is not a currency for abilities, but instead something more akin to hunger. It determines how much HP you recover after battle and slowly depletes after every enemy encounter. It’s replenished most easily by drinking water. But water of course requires a container to store it in, so you can’t simply purchase 99 bottles of water and be done with it. Instead — as another resource of sorts — the team will collect empty bottles. Bottles may be filled with various liquids, like potions, ingredients, and of course water.

In an effort to be more environmentally-friendly, the party saves their empty bottles after consuming water to refill later. That’s right, this is straight out of early Zelda, but the benefits this system provides solve many of the traditional problems I had with items in RPGs. You hoard them, never use them, and they just clutter your inventory. By providing meaningful choices to the player when shopping I hope to combat item hoarding. For example, I have 5 bottles, do I bring 5 waters? Maybe I bring 3 waters and 2 monster energy drinks that don’t replenish as much SP but boost my movement speed. As an added bonus, the system slots right into the game’s trading mechanics. (You trade empty bottles for filled bottles. Using a water bottle is just removing that consumable, then giving the player an empty bottle back.)

Players also have four additional secondary action slots in combat. Accessed by holding space bar (or a trigger on controller), these will be a variety of equippable combat tricks, items, and most interestingly, combos. Combos are special attacks players can create using any combination of learned skills. For instance, you might have an attack that deals frost damage and freezes an enemy briefly. Another character has an attack that launches a fireball. Because that frozen enemy is now ice element, the fireball does extra damage.

This is a lot of new mechanics for an otherwise simple battle system. I might tweak the rate at which I introduce them. I might also drop some of these if they aren’t fun or are needlessly complex. The goal here is to provide more long-term, dungeon-scale resource management to the game, and drip-feed new mechanics to make combat more interesting and engaging.



NEW ARTISTS

I’ve hired a few artists to help on the game, mostly because if I try to do this all myself who knows when I’ll finish. This is part “WOW MAKING A JRPG SOLO IS HARD” and part I actually have to be very deliberate with what little time I have for development. (I get ~1-2 hrs a night after my daughter goes to bed if I’m lucky). Spriting over a sketch to get character portraits that look barely passable take me a full week’s focused time. It’s just not sustainable and I believe in the vision of the game enough to get help.

puking rabbit has sprited monsters for all of act two. These are far more expressive and polished than I’ve been able to ever do.

Iamsako is sketching and spriting in-game portraits. Their attention to detail from sketch through to pixeling and anti-aliasing the portraits is inspiring.

1800animeschool, aka keifurisu returned to do my game’s title screen. You may remember (https://rpgmaker.net/games/407/images/20111/) (https://rpgmaker.net/games/407/images/16458/) from the rpg maker 2003 version of the game. I feel like the new title screen symbolizes a slow maturity and natural progression of ourselves as artists.



TOOLING

The way I was doing spritesheets was not at all scalable. I’ve leveraged Aseprite’s json exporter, written a parser, and then reimplemented character animations. Now a character sprite doesn’t need an entire texture page to itself. This is relatively minor from a player’s perspective but man I just want to show off what a good texture packing is capable of.



NINTENDON’T ASK ME HOW MUCH I PAID FOR A SWITCH DEVKIT

SU will target switch at launch. I pitched it to Nintendo. I’m an approved developer! From the start of development, I’ve taken a controller-first approach to input, and the couch co-op nature of the console makes it a perfect fit. The game is totally playable with a single joycon, so you can play with a friend without an additional controller.

SO WHAT’S DONE? WHAT’S NEXT?

Act 2 is basically playable from start to finish now. I’ve done three solid playthroughs and caught most of the hard crashes. Story-wise, this bit of content was particularly difficult for me to write. Certain scenes aren’t quite as impactful as I like, and the character-to-character dialogue didn’t write itself like Act 1 did.

There’s a lot of holes for side-content: an optional dungeon in an abandoned church, a hot springs side quest and so on. It’s always a balancing act between polishing existing content and charging ahead with the story and writing, but this is a massive amount of material. My last playthrough clocked in at a bit over 6 hours, so Act 2 roughly triples the amount of available content.

I’ve updated the public demo with a cleaned up Act 1. If you’d like to support me and get access to the newer stuff while supporting my dreams of finishing this thing before I retire, please consider subscribing to the Alcuria Games discord server or donating on kofi.

For 2024 I’ll continue to slowly and diligently chip away at game content. Features and polish will come but the core pieces are already here. The biggest challenge for me at this point is writing and implementing a cohesive, meaningful story: turning ideas and plotpoint wishlists into a concrete narrative. I’ll continue working on that and hopefully not get too sidetracked by shiny mechanics or minigames.

Stats
14,489 Words in script
1,013 Commits (snapshots of the codebase)
154 Maps
576kb Database (skills, cutscenes, player data, etc in plaintext)


I think about this line from SoulBlazer at least once a week.
  • Production
  • 2 of 5 episodes complete
  • Commercial
  • dragonheartman
  • GameMaker Studio 2
  • Action RPG
  • 02/20/2008 08:51 PM
  • 02/01/2024 04:45 AM
  • 01/01/2030
  • 899813
  • 352
  • 17854

Posts

This may be trivial, and not actually added yet, but I got the Alodos Tower Pass, but I still can't enter it, so I'm wondering if this is a bug, or if Alodos Tower is even fully made yet...
dragonheartman
Developer, Starless Umbra / Heroes of Umbra
2966
Yeah, there is unfortunately a few minor things like that that aren't yet implemented.

My hope is that if people are really into that they will hang onto their saves for future updates (I update fairly regularly) this stuff will be accessible. :)
So, is being Featured everything you ever hoped or dreamed?
Happy
Devil's in the details
5367
Slight problem: Other of my two characters died somewhere in the first dungeon, and since there's no access to any resurrection items whatsoever, I get auto Game Over on the puzzle part that requires two characters, and I'm unable to continue the game any further. :/
Good work. It's nice to see a decent rm2k3 game these days. I'll play further through it and give a better review when I can.
dragonheartman
Developer, Starless Umbra / Heroes of Umbra
2966
kentona, I am loving it! So far Ch6 downloads have just about exceeded Ch4+5 combined download count. I've been wanting to actually promote this a bit more and this was a huge step in the right direction. Plus the amount of feedback I've gotten has been a great help as a developer.
THIS
IS
SPAR- oh wait, I meant
WIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINNNNNNNN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I just died. OF EXTREME EXPOSURE TO AWESOMENESS! Awesome game, I just barely beat the prologue and THAT was even hard. Just to let you know though, it is impossible to die on the map. Only in battle can you die. So on that little lava puzzle with the dissappearing platforms it's impossible to lose. Same with the knife throwing game. GOOD GAMES, BTW!
Nice game but.....
The puzzles are very fun but some are complex...
dragonheartman
Developer, Starless Umbra / Heroes of Umbra
2966
Redd/Covenent, are you playing on Normal mode? Normal mode is challenging. Easy mode is basically for playing through without any puzzle/minigame struggling. So in a way they are supposed to be a little complex.
Max McGee
with sorrow down past the fence
9159
The amount of time and dedication you've put into this one project is super impressive.

1000 maps? Holy shit!
dragonheartman
Developer, Starless Umbra / Heroes of Umbra
2966
Thanks. :)

Yeah 1000 maps! (Well 974 right now)

About 300 of them are older versions of maps I've now revised. I plan on adding them as some sort of secret dungeon, where memories of my past efforts haunt me and scare players.
knife battles!!!! The coolest thing since sliced bread! Well. . . Maybe not.
dragonheartman
Developer, Starless Umbra / Heroes of Umbra
2966
well you can't have sliced bread without knife battles. :)
Dragonheartman, I really know a good designer when I see it. You've actually made a standard RPG Maker game fun. Anyone can slap together a game with pre-made parts or assemble a nicely machined game engine, but to design a game is a totally different skill. If you've ever seen any of my posts on the internet, you'll know I'm serious and wouldn't say something like this unless I meant it.
A game with an emphasis on fun? Man, I have to play this!
I....HAVE....GOTTA....PLAY....THIS...GAME!!!! Thats what everyone should be saying... *Clicks download button*
Umm.. I started playing this again and went to the temple in Chapter 2. The one with the Egyptian theme. I got to the boulder race and can't move past the second room (the one after you start the race by hitting the switch). If there is something obvious I'm missing please tell me.