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ONIX RIFT


It's a world of heroes, villains , monsters and magic. An action RPG influenced by the greatest RPG era, the 90's. Secret of Mana, Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy, all the heavy hitters that we all know and love were the inspiration to Onix Rift. a cliche of gaming I'm sure that hopefully scratches that nostalgia itch we all long to satisfy.

An unknown evil from another realm seeks to cross the divide of time and space to harvest the power of another dimension, Onix. In a world where technology is inconsistent the power of Onix is not yet known. The world's ignorance causes it to be the target of our antagonists pursuit of power. To bridge time and space is no simple feat, a sacrifice of the host world must be made for the transition to occur.

Our protagonist's daughter is taken and he is forced into a rescue pursuit that will test both his wit and his will. You take control of our hero as he is thrown into the struggle of a lifetime, acquire items, skills, spells and anything else you can to help rescue the only thing our hero has left in this world all while uncovering the dark secrets behind it.

FEATURES
- ABS altered from a tutorial I found on RMN some time ago.
- Custom Magic system.
- Custom Skill system.
- Custom menu system.
- Combat and adventure like you wouldn't believe.

The rules of action

This section is a small explanation of combat mechanics for people that are interested in the technicalities of combat.

100 total Stamina points (Blue bar) Stamina points slowly charge automatically.
100 total Special points (Red bar) Special points accumulate upon hero taking damage.

Action types

- Movement = Standard directional keys.

- 0 Stamina point cost.

- Physical attack = Standard action Z key.

- 20 Stamina point cost.

- Skill = Equipable Special skill.

- Varying Stamina point cost.
- Varying Special point cost.

- Magic = Equipped Enchanted items X key.

- Varying Stamina point cost.
- Varying Special point cost.
- Varying HP cost.

- Item use = Equipped consumables X key.

- 20 Stamina point cost.

Actions can be performed in succession as long as there is available Stamina / Special points. For example, if the action key is pressed a standard physical attack is executed and Stamina is reduced by 20. If the action key is pressed and not released and there is available Stamina a string combination will occur and the hero will perform multiple strikes until Stamina is depleted completely.

If Stamina is full and an Item is used Stamina will reduce by 20 points, you can continually use items until Stamina is depleted, however, Once it is depleted you will have to wait until Stamina has recharged to a minimum of 20 points to execute item use again.

Skill use is handled slightly different. A Skill is equipped through the main Menu, however, the selected skill is not immediately executed.



Skills will only be useable when Special points are charged to 100 (When the Red bar is completely full). Combat and actions will execute normally as though nothing is different. Once the Special points have reached 100 upon pressing the action key you will be prompted to select an enemy within range.



Once the desired enemy is selected the Skill will be executed and the selected target will take the damage.



If no enemy is within range you will simply attack normally until an enemy is in range. Should you have fully charged Special points and you do not want to execute the Skill at that time you will simply go into the menu and un equip the selected skill and combat will continue normally, you will not lose the Special charge. You simply re equip the desired skill when you are ready to use it.

Similar to the player, enemies have stamina as well. Like the player, movement is free along with certain standard attacks. Some enemies have special Skills as well and they operate similar to the player’s, they must also wait to use Skills until their Stamina is full. Keep this in mind when in combat and learning enemies movement / attack patterns.



NOTE

Hey everybody just a side note, I played with this old engine when I was a kid and like so many others there's something about it that makes you want to create your own world to wander in. (Cut to 15 years later) work was slow and I needed a pass time that cost exactly zero dollars. Enter RPG maker 2003 once again into my life. I spent the next year or two playing around on it, I discovered dynRPG, I read and followed numerous tutorials here on RMN and here we are. The point is my game definitely used the knowledge passed down by so many others before me that were awesome enough to make tutorials and help others learn. Thanks to everyone on here that contributed and helped make my project without even knowing it. You people are a bunch of champs.

- Thanks to Cherry for DynRpg
- Thanks to Kazesui for the Text plug in
- Thanks to Don Miguel for this crazy enduring engine
- Using bought and paid for Times fantasy graphics along with a bunch of personal creations and edits.

Latest Blog

Onix Rift video 05: Status effect graphics/ functionality



Hello everyone. In this video the big topic is the implementation of status effects. How they work in game and how they are presented to the player graphically. Also touches on added menu quality of life features and the direction the world map is going. I hope you guys check it out and enjoy.

Posts

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Looks neat, I've subbed so I can keep an eye out for a download!
Kaempfer, awesome my first sub. Cheers, I'll probably do another one of these blog posts once I upload it. Maybe I'll check out one of your game pages and give ya a sub as well.
dragonheartman
Developer, Starless Umbra / Heroes of Umbra
2966
Looks like a very charming game; looking forward to giving this a whirl.
Ulevo, dragonheartman, thanks for having a look at my simple game page. I think tomorrow's the day I'll post this bad boy on here.
dragonheartman
Developer, Starless Umbra / Heroes of Umbra
2966
I just noticed you use DynRPG as well; really incredible stuff. Looking forward to it!
dragonheartman, yes sir. when I found out about it and that it expanded the picture limit and then latter that there was a dyn patch for picture text on screen it was the way to go for sure. It's been a blast playing with this thing again. I had a look at your game pages. Starless umbra makes my project look like my 4 year old made it haha. Nice work bruh.
Alright, I played up to the crystal caves where I had to stop because the crystal enemies kept stunlocking me and then just bashing into me over and over until I was dead.

Here are my notes from my playthrough:

  • It's spelled eyrie or aerie, erie is the name of a lake
  • There is no indication that you're near a save point, maybe make the player glow or something? Also, add a confirm when you select "menu", because it's very easy to hit the wrong key and quit immediately
  • The interior of your house is broken, it shows wonky HP values and the second time I entered I started swinging my sword over and over without any button presses
  • The dog cutscene didn't trigger the first time I entered the map, I had to leave and then bump into him over and over for it to play
  • The hurt animation is too slow. You just sit there for way too long every time you take even minor damage.
  • The edge pan is too close to the edge of the screen. It makes it hard to see where the heck you're going

Here are my general notes:
The combat is pretty cool and I love the animations that are everywhere, and the custom movement is a nice touch even if it is a bit janky sometimes (around map teleports especially). The mapping is OK, but there is very little contrast in most areas so they are very monotone in general. For instance, the tops of the cliffs and the bottom of the cliffs are both green, so it's mostly just a field of green with little grey bits (the rocks and cliffs) indicating the borders. The combat felt pretty good for the most part and the guy's movement with the sword is cool and quite fluid. The game felt a bit aimless (at the least the part I played). You're in an area outside a town, and you need to get the power on, but none of this is hinted at or mentioned except by one NPC. It also doesn't seem to serve much of a plot purpose; you need to turn on the power to get the sword, so the kid won't block your way. Why not have an obstacle you can only remove with the sword, or a bridge that won't lower until the power is on, or something? Tie the gameplay with the story. Time fantasy graphics can be pretty desaturated, I actually really liked the colours on the test2 map a lot (yeah, I poked around in the project; it's pretty funny that you left the whole old project in there!). The opening cutscene was really cleverly done and looked great.

Overall I'd say you've got a pretty fun base for a game, I'm surprised at how good the movement and combat was, custom Rm2k3 systems don't usually feel so smooth. The story needs a bit of beefing up, namely how the player fits into it. If you work on making it more clear what the player is supposed to do (especially tying plot and gameplay together) and work on refining things, I think this could be a real winner.

edit: I should note I played this on the second version you uploaded
author=Kaempfer
Alright, I played up to the crystal caves where I had to stop because the crystal enemies kept stunlocking me and then just bashing into me over and over until I was dead.

Here are my notes from my playthrough:

  • It's spelled eyrie or aerie, erie is the name of a lake
  • There is no indication that you're near a save point, maybe make the player glow or something? Also, add a confirm when you select "menu", because it's very easy to hit the wrong key and quit immediately
  • The interior of your house is broken, it shows wonky HP values and the second time I entered I started swinging my sword over and over without any button presses
  • The dog cutscene didn't trigger the first time I entered the map, I had to leave and then bump into him over and over for it to play
  • The hurt animation is too slow. You just sit there for way too long every time you take even minor damage.
  • The edge pan is too close to the edge of the screen. It makes it hard to see where the heck you're going

Here are my general notes:
The combat is pretty cool and I love the animations that are everywhere, and the custom movement is a nice touch even if it is a bit janky sometimes (around map teleports especially). The mapping is OK, but there is very little contrast in most areas so they are very monotone in general. For instance, the tops of the cliffs and the bottom of the cliffs are both green, so it's mostly just a field of green with little grey bits (the rocks and cliffs) indicating the borders. The combat felt pretty good for the most part and the guy's movement with the sword is cool and quite fluid. The game felt a bit aimless (at the least the part I played). You're in an area outside a town, and you need to get the power on, but none of this is hinted at or mentioned except by one NPC. It also doesn't seem to serve much of a plot purpose; you need to turn on the power to get the sword, so the kid won't block your way. Why not have an obstacle you can only remove with the sword, or a bridge that won't lower until the power is on, or something? Tie the gameplay with the story. Time fantasy graphics can be pretty desaturated, I actually really liked the colours on the test2 map a lot (yeah, I poked around in the project; it's pretty funny that you left the whole old project in there!). The opening cutscene was really cleverly done and looked great.

Overall I'd say you've got a pretty fun base for a game, I'm surprised at how good the movement and combat was, custom Rm2k3 systems don't usually feel so smooth. The story needs a bit of beefing up, namely how the player fits into it. If you work on making it more clear what the player is supposed to do (especially tying plot and gameplay together) and work on refining things, I think this could be a real winner.

edit: I should note I played this on the second version you uploaded

Awesome Kaempfer. I can't thank you enough for taking the time to play as long as you did and give me your feed back.
  • Thanks for the spelling correction, it will be addressed
  • The save point stone actually flashes white when you are within the save radius, however now I know it is not obvious enough and I will indeed re write the event to have another indicator that is more obvious.
  • The house serves literally no purpose at this point so I paid little attention to it before posting the game. That was a mistake on my part as I should have taken more care to check for bugs in the house. It will be addressed
  • The dog scene is a new one to me. It is a parallel process so it won't trigger until you are right beside the dog. If you leave the map before the dog exits to the following map it will reset and you will see the scene again as to make sure the player doesn't miss the event. I have never experienced a problem with it so I will definitely investigate this issue. Thanks a ton for bringing it to my attention.
  • Hmm, the hit animation. Believe it or not I never considered it would be too long. This is great to know. I have some new animations to draw it sounds like.
  • I will play around with the screen pan a bit. I took a few cues from secret of mana when I first started the project (along with treasure chest animation which is something else I'm probably changing as to make it more unique.) that I personally really liked but I anticipated people not being crazy about the screen pan.

The map contrast issues I have also noticed myself. I will put some thought into this, however it is not too high on my priorities as I am doing my best to move this along and at least get this thing to a finished state... some day haha. It is noted though and I appreciate ALL your notes.
Edit: actually I just had a look at that test2 map and that's a pretty simple solution that helps. I just might follow your advice and adjust maps to fit that template. Good on ya.

That's a really good point of interest about the power task. I really like your idea about the bridge as well. That would probably fix the entire beginning tying it all together. You the man, Send me the invoice and you can just write for me! haha.

I'm glad you checked out the project, I'm more than happy having people checking out my work. Dude, that's pretty astute of you to notice the entire old project haha, that's awesome. So pretty much there is the entire dungeon after you get off the eagle aerie (Notice the correct spelling.) That dungeon is in those older maps, they just have to be updated with certain events and graphics. I was learning the engine and those old maps have all sorts of systems that I reference when implementing certain things into the game so I often bounce back and forth between the OG project and the current one. If I ever complete the game everything will be cleaned up. Thanks for the props for the opening scene. I hoped people would notice the effort.

A couple questions for you if you ever read my reply;
  • What level were you when you entered the caves? Leveling up is pretty quick but I think level 3 is minimum right now for going into the cave and surviving. I'm not against changing that balance which is why I'm curious what level you were when you entered the caverns.
That's too bad, the cave has the first official boss of the game I would be excited for you to check out. There's also some monsters after the cave I would be happy for players to encounter as I am pretty proud of them.
  • Did you get a chance to use any Skills or did you never get to learning any of them?
I think if you were pleased with the combat so far the skills feature is where the combat system really starts to shine so that's another feature I'd be really interested in someone's take on.

I can't thank you enough for the time you took out of your schedule to play what you have and giving me your thoughts of what you played is more than I could ask for. Thanks a ton, I have some stuff to work on it sounds like. You da man. Cheers dude

Side note on the custom movement: one thing I've learned implementing the 8 direction movement is a touch event will not recognize the hero is there if he moved onto it diagonally. This is why I've made teleport events as collision events. It still has it's problems. You picked up on them pretty quick lol
I actually really like the hurt animation, I just think it's too long to see every time you take damage. Maybe when you take critical damage or certain monsters (big ones) could do it? Or a result of a big hit/special enemy attack?

Send me the invoice and you can just write for me! haha.

I write for a living so be careful what you wish for ;D
dragonheartman
Developer, Starless Umbra / Heroes of Umbra
2966
I'd echo most of Kaempfer's sentiments. Most of those are minor, thankfully. This is a fun little game.

I have some raw gameplay footage of my first session with minimal commentary that might be useful for focus testing or something. Hope it's helpful!

Dragonheartman, this is just the coolest thing. I can't say how much I appreciate you taking the time to record a play through. I've taken most of kaempfer's notes and am currently working on the lack of direction you dealt with. An extra cut scene here and there tying gameplay and story together a little better. It's really funny you mentioned the rtp music, I decided to go with it early on because rtp songs are nostalgic for me. It's awesome that's the first thing you picked up on. I'm glad there's others out there that it doesn't induce a gag reflex on haha. Dude really, I love the video, it's super helpful, It's already got my wheels turning. You da man. I'll be uploading another update in a week or so I believe. It'll have quite a few changes in it to help guide the player along a bit better. Again I appreciate the time you took man, really this is great. You guys make me glad I decided to share this project even though it's not in a finished state.
Edit: you just got yourself a new youtube subscriber.
dragonheartman
Developer, Starless Umbra / Heroes of Umbra
2966
I'm really glad we could provide you with some feedback and really looking forward to more updates in the future! I also developed plugins for DynRPG way back so if there's anything you're curious about I'd be happy to help.
That's awesome, I appreciate the open book approach. Actually, since you mention it, in gamemaker you can declare local variables within an object and track that objects x and y values right there within the event itself. 2k3 it seems you have to burn up valuable variable resources to achieve this. Did any of you dynrpg OG's ever achieve anything similar within 2k3 using comment commands? Just curious. When I started playing with gamemaker it stuck out to me because in Onix rift tracking coordinates is critical for everything and it's a bit of a process making sure 2 reusable variables aren't being used at the same time on any given map.
dragonheartman
Developer, Starless Umbra / Heroes of Umbra
2966
It's a little awkward but one way you can achieve that with vanilla 2k3 is with variable referencing -- if you're unfamiliar with them, they're sorta like pointers in C. Basically, you can set a variable to an index to some other variable, eg say 0001:Ref has the value 150, you can set some value to Variable Ref 0001:Ref and it'll return whatever is in variable with ID 150, not the value 150 itself stored in 0001:Ref, if that makes sense.

Combine that with the fact that each event has its own unique map ID for that map and you can kinda get similar behavior. So if you wanted to do something similar (eg copy/paste some events maybe without going thru something tedious like updating variables), you could reserve a block of variables to be "local", say 2000-3000, and then use variable referencing based on the event's map id to give you a way to have what you want.

Say you have several enemies and you want to track X/Y positions. You can plop something like this into your event:

(Or better yet, put it in a common event you call from your enemies' parallel process event.)

Now variables 2000 and up will store pairs of X/Y coordinates, without having to go back and modify this block of code for future events. I hope that makes sense. (Assuming you have < 200 events in a map, that means you just don't use 2000-2400 for "normal" event operations.)

You can even take this a step further and keep your enemy events in some specific row on your map, then write some manager event that looks at events in that row (the "Store Event ID" command), getting the event ids, plopping those event ids into another block of variables, then dereferencing those those later if you need to iterate over a series of enemies to get their x/y coordinates (for collisions or something similar).

There's also a tutorial on this topic by kazesui I recommend!

I hope that helps a little! It's a little bit tedious/confusing at first but it's super powerful.
There's just so many things that could help had I known them from the beginning haha. I have a pretty efficient system now. It's similar at least in the way that I have blocks of variables that are used for hero/enemy coordinates and a map pp event that updates enemy's x y coordinates on map. Copy the entire map, paste, rename, change chipset and begin making next map. That's kinda turned into the productive way to do it. Safest way as well. I reference map event 01 and a few others in common events so important for event 01 to be an empty slate and available for reference. I'll check that tutorial out though, I won't say I've wrapped my head around it exactly but that sounds like an operation that could be valuable to no end in the future. What engine are you using for heroes of umbra? Checked it out and it looks pretty great. Well done man, really great stuff. I'm going to check out starless umbra and give that game a run as well. They both look like a lot of love was put into them. Good job dude.
dragonheartman
Developer, Starless Umbra / Heroes of Umbra
2966
Yeah, I think that's a fair way to do it. It'll work as long as you don't need to make too crazy of changes.

Heroes of Umbra I rolled my own engine using the libgdx framework. Would definitely recommend it if you are cool with Java!
Yeah, it works pretty well. Typically every map in a new area has similar enemy's so when I start a new area I just have to program what ever new enemy's I want in that area one time then copy/paste maps for the rest of the area with minimal new eventing to take care of. I find drawing maps to be what becomes tedious to me. I don't enjoy it all that much lol.

Other than rm2k3 eventing, game maker gml (minimal), and fumbling my way through excel macros I have 0 programming languages under my belt haha. For some reason I've always been fascinated by it and have self taught the previous programs out of that fascination. You said "libgdx framework" and my head exploded haha. Your hero's of umbra game is a work of art to me bruh and I'm a cave man eating rm2k3 bone marrow. Java is coffee to me at this point.
Playing the latest version now, enjoying the changes so far. Just beat the first boss, pretty fun although I think I'm overlevelled since I killed him quick. Having a good time, although those teleporting birdmen are annoying as heck. Will update as I get further.
Cool Kaempfer, I'm glad you found some time to check it out. You don't have too much further to go unfortunately, although I have more almost ready to upload I want to make sure I have a decent amount of new content before I upload it as to not update the download with minimal added game play. I noticed dragonheartman blew through that first boss pretty easily as well due to being a higher level than I anticipated a player would be. I've come up with a solution I think, on the next boss I have programmed his HP dependent on the players level as to account for a player that is over leveled. It basically acts on a sliding scale based on a player's current level, so the bosses stats will all stay the same but the HP will be increased as to provide the player a bit more play time wen fighting the bosses. I work pretty hard on the bosses so I want them to have at least a bit of face time with players haha. Now that you're telling me you blasted past him pretty easily as well, I think I'll go back and do the same thing to the Boom Bloom boss HP.
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