The Mists of Maderaan

So this might be a surprise to some (all?) of you, but I am still working on this. My hectic work schedule limits my time, but progress is still happening. One of the main reasons that I haven't show off much work is the fact that I have been working in a non-linear fashion. As a motivation booster, I have been working on whatever I'm interested in at the moment, so I have a lot of work done, but not all of it fits in linear way conducive to a demo. Still, I thought it was time to do a status update. I've revamped some of the pages. You can check out some character sprites and descriptions in the revamped Characters section and see some screens and a shot of the new world map in the World section. Expect some other new shots soon as I continue to revamp the page.

In the meantime, for those of you who are interested, here is where things are at...

The game is divided into Part 1 and Part 2. All of my work has been on Part 1 (though Part 2 reuses almost all of Part 1's maps, so that when Part 1 is done, about 70% of the maps for Part 2 will be done). Part 1 is 6 Chapters long and probably about... 10 hours of gameplay or so? All percentages are obviously estimates, but still:
Chapter 1: All done
Chapter 2: 80% of cutscenes, 90% of maps, but only 10% of optional content/sidequests done
Chapter 3: 30% of cutscenes, 75% of maps
Chapter 4: 10% of maps
Chapter 5: 40% of maps
Chapter 6: 80% of maps, 40% of cutscenes

Pretty much all of the gameplay (chests, monsters, etc) is set up in all working maps, subject to rebalance. No NPCs are done for towns (ugh, not looking forward to THAT day)

So, yes, things are happening but no, I'm still not releasing anything yet. One day, though... In the meantime, I'll try to resume regular updates.

So I was in the midst of putting together the battle events that hold the slight modifications I made to the DBS and talking to some friends about it... Who promptly pointed out that my system was a little too static. Characters learned all their skills through level except for spells.

I've played around with it all, and I think I have a system (about 90% coded right now. Still playing around with some balancing and interface concerns before finalizing) that will allow a lot of customization while still being simple and operating mainly out of the dbs and dms.

The basic idea is that characters each learn spells based on their personal aptitudes in the different schools of magic.

Characters also are defined by class archetypes. Each character has their own title or whatnot that I use to keep track of them in the class tab in the database - these are unique. But they also get a general class archetype. There are 7 of them. 3 generic (Warrior, Rogue, Mage) and 4 unique for characters with special skills or special plot importance (Cleric, Bard, Whisperer, and Battlemage) Each archetype has a list of active skills that they can purchase and learn, so you mix and match. Each character in each archetype has different stats, different spells available, and different equipment, so not all skills are perfectly suited for all its members.

Finally, all characters can learn (nearly) all passive abilities, which affect their stats in battle, as well as their basic abilities, resistances, affinities, etc.

Spells, active skills, and passive skills are all rather hard to acquire. Teaching every character every ability he or she can learn will be incredibly time consuming and inefficient. Teaching 4 characters all the abilities will likewise be ineffective because of frequent party switching. That way, I think players will spend a lot of time wondering about skill/spell/passive/equipment/stat synergy and it should hopefully make the skill system interesting without being unwieldy.

Check out the abilities tab to have an idea of what is in store for players. Please feel free to share thoughts/ideas/criticisms. Particularly, any passive abilities that sound useless, or any passive abilities you would have wanted to see but aren't currently available (keep in mind rpgmaker2k3 limitations, please!)

Edit: Making the abilities tab available would have been useful... Please excuse the length/awful formatting/info dump. A lot of this is taken straight from my internal documents.

Hey all!

Despite the lag in updates, I'm still working on this game. Had sort of a busy schoolyear, but I've got nothing but time this summer, so hopefully I can get some decent progress in.

I've updated the character profiles section with more info. Info on six more characters is forthcoming, as soon as I get the energy to type some more up. In the meanwhile, check out the profiles. Most of the info is battle related because I didn't want to spoil too much, but hopefully some people fill still find it interesting.

So general update first:
I am still working on this. HOWEVER, the semester has been crazy. I thought giving myself until december for a release of Chapters 1 and 2 was about 2 months too many, and right now it feels like 2 months too few, if not more. So this is a good news, bad news deal. I haven't had the time to finish the 3 remaining dungeons of Chapter 2. I also won't have time to finish them this month if I want to finish retouching some of the scenes, dialog, and dungeon design in Chapter 1.

That being said, Chapter 1 consists of 5-7 dungeons (depending on how you choose to count) and is several hours in length. Following its quick revamp, I will be releasing that. When exactly, I don't know. My hope is for december, so that I can use January to finish Chapter 2 while taking some of the Chapter 1 criticism to heart.


Now, for the other news: Touch Encounters.
I've decided to add touch encounters to the game. On the one hand, I did it because random encounters are somewhat unfulfilling. On the other, I did it because I had some fun ideas. The touch encounter system is essentially chrono meets lufia.

That's to say, there are some semi-scripted encounters. It's not just all enemies are on the map wandering about, and suddenly they chase you. It gets a bit fancier than that. Some enemies are aggressive, some are cowards. Some hear you coming, others have to see you to chase you. All chase you based on a simple algorithm rather than just "Random Movement" or "Follow Hero" movement. If you manage to evade them, they'll stop chasing you. They might also not wander out too far out from their territory, or not wander into certain areas of the map(for example, some enemy types won't enter shallow water, but some will). They'll also only chase in certain situations, including enemies who don't mind you approaching them, but do mind you approaching their nest. for example.

Also, some enemies try to trick you. For example, there's a shining spot on the ground in the forest. If you go to check it out, bandits pop out of the woods and try to rob you for falling into their trap.

What that means is multiple-fold. For one, all monster graphics are now character-sized. No more big enemies. Secondly, it means that I've had to scrounge for refmap style enemy graphics. While most of the game thankfully uses human enemies, I've had some trouble finding animal sprites. I have goblins and lizardmen and spirits and elementals and all of that. Animals are little bit tougher. Particularly, amphibians and insects have been hard to find. At the moment, I use some Lufia 2 charsets for enemies. I hope to change this (or at least recolor and animate so that they look vaguely right) but if anybody knows where to find some monsters that would fit with REFMAP, give a holler!

I figured I'd start this off by saying a few things about what kind of progress I have made on the game thus far, what I intend to do about releases, and what my general thoughts about this game page are.

Progress
Let me first begin by saying: This is not vaporware. While there's the occasional missing NPC, a few unfinished siequests, and a handful of convos tagged with "REWRITE" comments in the editor, this is where things stand at the moment:
- 3-5 hours of gameplay
- 7 fully coded playable characters
- 5 more 90-100% designed characters(i.e. all skills and spells determined, equipment and stats assigned but not entered into party change and skill tree systems yet)
- 4 towns of varying sizes and themes
- 6/7(Depending how you count) Dungeons/Fields of varying sizes

Ultimately, this boils down to 1/8 chapters done, with the many of the maps, characters, monsters, and dialogue already created for the second chapter.

Release
At this point, the plan, subject to change, is for episodic releases for each chapter. I've been sitting on Chapter 1 because I don't think it's fully representative of the plot or of the gameplay when taken independently from the rest of the chapters. It sets up a lot of things, but the tone and approach are a little bit different since it serves as a prologue. Chapters 1 and 2 will be released simultaneously, hopefully before fall.

The Blog
I don't really feel the need to post constantly with tidbits like "I made a new dungeon today." Frankly, I don't think anybody cares. I might post some indication should a release be on the horizon, but until then, don't expect too many news updates. Instead, I will try to use the blog in two ways:

1. As a depository for some of the cleaned up production materials along with some of the thoughts that went into the product. Particularly, I'll post my thoughts and approaches to different characters and locations. Hopefully, it can serve to a) foster some interest in some of the characters and locations to be seen, and b) serve as an additional source of insight into my intents once the player's experienced them. I'll try to back each of these up with at least one screenshot

2. As a sort of guide. I probably won't post any sort of walkthrough or detailed boss strategies, but I'll likely include some design materials concerning skills, party setups, equipment, etc. along with my personal thoughts on what sort of strategy I'm trying to elicit from the players.

So yeah, I guess this is the first long-winded post of many. I'll also of course keep putting up screens for commentary and critique. You guys have been WAY too nice thus far ;-)

Coming up soon: Character Thoughts: Hugh