SCRIPTER LOOKING FOR PROJECT PARTNER

1. Who am I?
I'm a guy in my mid-20s who's fiddled with amateur game making from time to time for more than a decade (though there were some large gaps). I have no aspirations to go commercial with game making but I would like to make a decent finished project at some point.

I specifically like working with Sphere (and now miniSphere a remake of the sphere engine). I'm a somewhat skilled scripter who can make battle systems, menu systems and game mechanics of almost any kind, my abilities in most other game; I also like coming up with new ideas both plot points and mechanics. I have a tendency to make any idea I'm involved in continually grow in complexity and extravagance unless someone else keeps me grounded however my skills in other ares of game development are average at best.

For a variety of reasons some of which should be obvious from the above my own game projects never tend to get finished or even to the point of being a playable demo; however working with someone else I'd like to think I could assist in making something great.


What am I looking for?
I'm looking for either:

A) Someone who'd like to partner with me to work on my current game project (a tactical RPG themed around defending the last surviving human town from a monstrous invasion)

OR

B) Someone who has their own idea for a game that would be best with custom systems and would be happy to work in Sphere to make that game, I will work with them and make their systems/scripts and assist in other ways too.


What's my past experience?
No completed games unfortunately, I'll bring out 3 things I've worked on for now:
1. Porting the Sphere Engine itself to run on Mac (both the original sphere engine and the newer miniSphere - though miniSphere was super easy to do)


2. Pokemon Odyssey - this was a game being made about 8 years ago now for which i was the coder/scripter only, working on this I wrote most of the script for a fully working pokemon battle system, menu system and other things; unfortunately the project collapsed as it emerged that the main developer had stolen someone else's custom made tilesets from their game.


3. My current project (unnamed) as mentioned above this is planned to be an SRPG themed around defending humanity's last surviving town from a monstrous invasion - the project is not far along at all BUT in my progress so far I've made:
- a custom map engine (Sphere's built in enginge didn't do all I wanted)
- most of the battle system including:
-- animation handling
-- zooming in and out
-- pathfinding (for fire emblem style movement)
-- stats so you can attack and kill things (or not if they have too much HP)
-- QTEs for determining if you hit or not
- a 3d animation system (currently used to display spinning rings moving in sort of brownian motion on the title screen
Here's a video of me demo-ing the above:


Potential FAQS:

1. Why Sphere?
Sphere gives me a blank slate so I can make custom systems of various kinds without "default systems" getting in the way. I almost am sufficiently experienced to do basically anything with Sphere (well nothing fully 3d beyond simple animations) but anything else :P

2. Does a potential partner need to know Sphere?
No, no prior knowledge of sphere needed to work with me; outside of eventing/scripting and a few appearance related points the rest of it will be largely the same as RPG maker.


Further information
Any questions ask below if anyone is interested in joining me for my current project and wants more details feel free to ask; alternatively if anyone has a project or project idea that that'd like me to join for give me some details and we'll go from there.

author=Desertopa
What sort of support are you looking for for your current project?

THanks for the reply and, oops I didn't realise quite how vague I'd been...

Primarily I'm looking for someone who'd like to share responsibility for the game and hopefully help wth aspects I'm not as good at.

The things that come to mind immediately are:
1. Mapping & Scenario Design - with an SRPG the combat maps need to work well with the combat mechanics and the battles planned for them; having someone else to flesh out combat scenarios and map them would be great.

2. Writing - I have a bare bones plot, if someone else could work on making this more detailed and/or actually work on a script that would be great.

3. Interface design/feedback - I can write script to display information to the player in almost any format - I don't rate my ability to determine what actually looks good when it comes to this sort of thing though.

4. Testing etc...

I'm not necessarily looking for someone else to do all of the above, they're all things I can do - though they're things I'm not as good at as I'd like to be. Additionally in general if I spend my time writing more of a script then I won't be building more advanced combat mechanics or other system I'd like the game to have - I figure if I work on this solo it will be a year before there's anything worth sharing beyond a tech demo if I have help that could be significantly reduced and the quality could be drastically improved.

author=Desertopa
I'm not likely to be much help with mapping, but I'd be happy to take a stab at SRPG scenario design. And with the completion of Chronicles of Tsufanubra, I could use another writing project to get involved in anyway.

I had a look at Chronicles of Tsufanubra; I don't think this game will be as good; I've got the ambition to match but not the ability at game design and mapping etc - I also don't want to use rips which limits my graphical options.

The one thing I can promise with this game is unique and interesting systems.

I'd also like to make clear that this game is in a very early stage:
- currently I've written maybe 1500 lines of code for the games' systems (And will need to write a lot more)
- I've got just over a page of written story (none of which is in the form it will be in the game but which gives a basic idea)
- and that is basically it, I've made one map for testing purposes that I probably won't even use in the main game

I will also send you a PM with the story information mentioned above; I don't want to post that publicly for now; if you'd like to be involved after reading that information and taking note of the points above then great.

If you could work on (or work with me on) fleshing out some of the story and designing scenarios for some of the early battles whilst I complete the code for the combat system that would be good.