UNITY'S IDEA DEPOT

I recall talking over some ideas involving a tactics sci-fi mecha game with you, and half-thinking, maybe, we could get together on that. Though, considering the responses and feedback I'm seeing, well, frankly, I don't think it's gonna happen!

*Edit: This... does have to do with the McBacon Jam, right? Right?

I'm gonna go ahead and dump another idea in the depot here. And then some.

author=unity
And here's where my mind get blown! Combining the Choose Your Party idea with this, having Sci-Fi equivalents to FF1's classes... that's just too awesome! Taking an exploration game and giving it the deep customization of class combinations and the research and tech upgrades... BLAM! AMAZING! :DDDDD OMG OMG OMG AMAZING!

Aaaaah, now I have waaaay too many thing I want to do! But less than before, I guess, because of combining? XD

And holy shit this post got huuuuge!

speaking of huge posts

Ok, so when I first came back to RPG maker this year (this was back in maybe May, June, July, August sometime around then) I was working on this game called Impetus. I didn't upload it to the site or anything and I haven't promoted it at all and at the time I told myself I was doing it just for fun/just for practice. I hadn't done any RPG Making for 2 full years so I was trying to re-learn RPG Maker and to learn the pecularities of Ace.



Impetus was an exploration-focused choose-your-class-at-the-beginning science-fiction roguelike-like dungeon crawl set on a large civilian/commercial orbital space station called Atlas Station that had just been impacted by a mysterious planetoid called Leviathan. The planetoid was filled with living biomass and alien bioweapons so the impact didn't just massively damage the station, it also unleashed a ton of alien monsters and a deadly alien plague

Overall, Impetus was not set anywhere near Earth or in a galaxy where anyone remembered Earth or knew anything about any of Earth's cultures or customs. I wanted to create a setting that felt a bit more like 'high tech fantasy in space' with a total made-up culture and society as an intentional contrast to all of my other scifi stuff which has been much more grounded in the future of our reality.

It had a bit of voice acting at the beginning (recorded by my girlfriend LOL) of the intro. So I actually wrote a script for the intro sequence:

<GNN LOGO APPEARS WITH JINGLE>

<FADE IN ON NEWS ROOM>

<NEWS GRAPHIC: CRISIS ON ATLAS STATION>

NEWSREADER: We now return to our ongoing coverage of the crisis on Atlas Station. If you are just tuning in to this breaking story, yesterday morning a planetoid approximately the size of our moon appeared, moving towards Cassandra Gemini at alarming speed.

<NEWS GRAPHIC: LEVIATHAN>

NEWSREADER: Sometime last night, this celestial body--which government briefings refer to as "Leviathan"--impacted Atlas Station, Cassandra Gemini's largest orbital platform where nearly a million citizens live and work.

<NEWS GRAPHIC: ATLAS>

NEWSREADER: Casualty reports are still coming in at this time, and the names of the dead are not known, but casualties are thought to be in the hundreds of thousands. Atlas Station suffered major structural damage upon the impact, the extent of which is unknown, but as of this broadcast has maintained its orbit. Leviathan, the rogue planet, appears to have become fused somehow to the station's superstructure.

<NEWS GRAPHIC: BAPHOMET>

NEWSREADER: Numerous civilian reports of vicious, "dragon-like" creatures alighting from the disintegrating planetoid Leviathan and attacking or abducting Atlas Station citizens remain uncomfired at this time. The most recent government press release decries civilian holocam footage of these creatures as a hoax, and denies the veracity of reports that these monsters have attacked citizens on the surface of Cassandra Gemini.

<NEWS GRAPHIC: DROPSHIP>

NEWSREADER (Receiving Breaking News): This just in! I'm receiving a late breaking report that the Planetary Governor was making an inspection visit to Atlas Station at the time of the tragedy. His current whereabouts are unknown. The Regulators, an elite special forces unit, has been dispatched to Atlas Station to locate and secure Governor Markov. We will keep you updated on additional developments as they unfold...

So, in the beginning you choose your class as either Assault Trooper, Griefer, Silhouette, or Biomechanic. At the start of the game it's strictly a one-character RPG deal (I was using a side-view ABS and I was happy with how it was looking and playing) as your shuttle/dropship crashes and you crawl away alone but my intention was that later on you'd gradually meet up with the three other classes you didn't pick and you'd have a complete balanced team by the end of the game. Each class would meet the other classes in a different order and different places (a little like the earlier RE games in that respect).





Ostensibly your objective besides to meet up with the other members of your squad was to rescue Governor Markov but that setup was purely meant as an "excuse plot" for an exploration and combat focused roguelike/dungeon crawl. See, the cool thing about this game was that every map was exactly 17x13 and every map was complete modular. Basically, I made maps as puzzle pieces that could be reusable with set connections. Every map was like an individual piece of a jigsaw puzzle that could be assembled different ways. So you'd have repeating areas with slight aesthetic differences, like corridors and stairwells and elevators and residences, grocery stores, pharmacies, cafes, banks, pawn shops, gun shops, hydroponics blocks, engineering blocks, operations and security and so on.

Trigger Warning: Absurdly gigantic image.



I did all of that with an eye towards somehow making it into a REAL roguelike, i.e. whenever you started a new game the overall game map would be a completely different configuration of those components. But I never actually was creative or skilled enough to figure out a way to event or code that. Anyway the station was going to be INSANELY MASSIVE (and ideally different every time) consisting of two towers with six decks each and a causeway connecting them in the middle. Keep in mind that each of the 12 decks would consist of 40-60 modularly connected maps full of monsters and treasure.



There was tons I liked about this project. I thought the battles looked great and I liked the way I had the skills and character customization set up (players could use skill points to buy both active and passive skills), I had the random treasure system all set up, there were on touch encounters that could be avoided with various field-map skills I'd evented, cameras that could be blinded with chaff grenades or slipped past with a cloaking device, and every single locked door had like four ways to open it: finding a keycard, using an autohack tool, placing a demolition pack on the door, or hacking it if you were playing as the biomechanic.

I kind of gave up on this project for a lot of reasons. By the time I got down to the second deck of the first tower the mapping and map connection process of my "little just for fun learning project" felt insanely tedious--WAY TOO MUCH GAM FOR ONE MAN TO MAK, so to speak. I had no idea how I'd actually implement roguelike map randomization and permadeath and I wasn't even sure that I wanted to push those random elements. More importantly, I had no idea where I was going with the story (or the world-building) beyond the initial hook, so the idea of writing up audio-logs and in-game notes to build up the story and setting in epistolary form seemed daunting. Ultimately, I was much more excited about the team of Regulators I'd created and the slick ass character select screen I'd made and the underlying game systems than the actual mission I'd given them, which wound up leaving me kind of cold. And then, most importantly of all, Lionheart and its still invisible sister project Grand Grimoire came along and became my labor of love. So since then Impetus has languished silently in profound non-completion, with a ton of work done.

So what I am getting at here is...I have a lot of stuff of every conceivable kind already done for this kind of thing that we could use. And even discounting that (let's say for instance that we want to riff on this idea for the McBacon Jam and therefore can't use any premade stuff), I have at least already thought about this hypothetical game idea of yours an unbelievably obsessive amount because I was trying to do something with a lot of interesting similarities.

Also what I am getting at is let us make this space planet exploration choose-your-own party game together <3.

@Max McGee Wow, your intro cutscene is so cool. I love how you can use all this professional language to make it sound legit, like an actual news report - something I know I probably couldn't do. It'd be interesting to have voiceover as well. All the best with your project!

Yeah, I'm also reading over Max's post, and it scares the hell outta me. It's like, I got nothin' on that. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if unity chose to work with him over me at all at this point.

I lied. I'd definitely feel a bit sad at first. Maybe even get into a "you're such an idiot" phase. Eventually, though...

I apologize for the white text. As I mentioned in the other thread, I may not have been in the right mind-set to begin with!

Anyway, I'm gonna try and focus on the sci-fi strategy/tactics (with mechs?) game angle for a bit. Now, I'm not going to suggest that graphics are not a concern for me, but, getting the core gameplay down is a pretty big concern! In other words, getting a tactical script. There was a game on here called Synthetic Odyssey that, for all intents and purposes, portrayed pretty much the exact combat system that I would be looking for. In fact, even though Synthetic Odyssey was a VX game, I should seriously get off my lazy behind and google that script! See if there isn't a VX Ace version of it, and what-not!

Do you mean eternally night as in a constant darkness in the world? Or eternal night as in time doesn't move?

If the former, and time still moves forward, you can probably have a time of day night system similar to Persona, where there are multiple phases of the day (evening, late night, midnight, etc.) and just have your crops grow a little with each phase change? That seems like it'd be the easiest way to implement that.

Alternatively, instead of steps, you can add growth based on screen transitions. Going into a house would only cause a few units of time to pass, for example, and have more units of time pass if you're outside town? Like in the wilderness or a dungeon? If your town's layout was similar to Rune Factory 4?