Project Questing

In my original plan, all three characters were supposed to have skills based on their personality quirks. Larc is based on gambling, Doc based on talking, and Maria based on drinking. I did not like how Larc and Doc's direction were going and Maria was a little too convoluted. In light of this, I decided to revamp everyone's skills.

For the most part, Doc will have minor changes. Being the traditional healer, he gains skills through leveling up and for the most part heal the party. Simple, boring, but easy to manage.

Larc's skill set has completely changed. Instead of being the gambler, I designed him to be the meat shield of the group. At his disposal will be "tank" skills. He's able to provoke enemies and cover allies when they are weak. These abilities will cost no mana, but they have a cooldown to prevent spamming these abilities. On the offensive end, he will be able to stun enemies and debuff them. In order to balance the offensive skills out, I made them cost mana and limited his mana pool for at most 1 skill for lower levels. In order to regain MP, the player will have to use those defensive skills I was talking about earlier. I hope players will realize that Larc's skills are best used for good opportunity instead of spamming to their heart's delight.

For the most part, Maria's functions remain the same. She'll be the main damage dealer through charging her MP and unleashing her abilities. (Well, her normal attacks are the highest in the group too.) But instead of having her abilities being able to be unlocked right off the bat, I wanted to spread them out. Now, players will have to find certain drinks that will unlock skills and recover MP. To use drinks, players will have to use the "Tools" skill. To use her unlocked skills, players will have to use her "Blitz" skill. Yes, that is an homage to Final Fantasy 3/6.

Once I get the basic structure of battles, it should be easy to finish chapters 1 and 2. All that would remain is balancing battles. Hopefully, I strike the right chord instead of having the damn combat too difficult.

Been awhile, huh? Progress on Questing has slowed to a crawl. Work and my computer dying are the main culprits. Although it does not help dedicating most of my time to extracurricular activities. However, all is not lost, I have a brand-spanking new laptop to help my cause.

Right now, my goal for an end of the year release has become a fantasy. With that new fangled RPG Maker around the corner, I feel like my focus is starting to slip away even further.

Prior to my RPG Maker vacation, I have done a lot of work on Chapters 2 & 3, but the target chapter 4 hasn't been touched. The dungeons and the towns are not designed at all. I have written first couple of acts, but that's it.

My attention will be focused on finishing up chapters 2 & 3. The cut scenes are practically done and the dungeons are finished. All that's left is to implement combat. Although it may seem like easy street, it's not. Balancing the numbers is a chore and implementing unbroken boss battles is tough.

Within the next few weeks, I hope get some significant work done. At the very least, I would like to get Chapter 2 out of the way.

Work on the game has slowed down for a bit. I'm probably going to take it easy for a while until my passion is renewed again. It's a cycle that continues all the way through. Hard work -> Take it easy -> Take a break -> Back to hard work. Time varies between steps, but I've gone through this cycle a few times. Maybe others go through this as well.

So far, I've been writing and planning. Cut scenes for chapters 2 and 3 are practically finished. The dungeons are almost done, but they need to be polished, so they look pretty. I got the basic skeleton and puzzles finished, but a basic skeleton doesn't look too good when you play through it. I'm saving those for later.

For Chapter 4, I came up with a good scenario. All I need to do is type out the screen play and I could get going on working on it. I'm hoping that this will explore the lore behind the world these characters live in. I also hope to tie in the stories between the first few chapters so that they are connected in some fashion.

I've been planning a battle system revamp for Larc. I was thinking of giving him two modes of combat. Being a tank and being a gambler. Tank mode would be the normal stuff like taunts, agro building, damage mitigation, etc. Gambler would be a little more interesting. Instead of the system I have now, skills will be randomly given to the player after each turn. For the first turn, you might get an underwhelming skill. For the next turn, you may get an awesome skill and so on and so forth. As you gain levels, the randomness becomes less and less. After a certain point, you could retain all the awesome skills. I'm still planning these out. I might not even implement those, but I'm sure something will change up because Larc's skill set is a little dry at the moment.

I still have a long ways away from getting another release under my belt. My target date for release is sometime near the end of the year. I hope that'll be enough time to polish everything.

With the release of Chapter 1 out of the way, I've been slowly working on the next few chapters. The first episode was a nice learning process for me. As you can tell, the first dungeon was my first dive into RPG Maker VX. Gosh, looking at it makes me a sad panda. Thankfully, I don't have any dungeons with that bad a layout.

There was one thing that really bothered me about chapter 1. It was how closed off the last few moments of game play were. Once you reach a certain point in the demo, there was no way back to town or back to the field. Thankfully, I took into account if the player were underlevled or poorly equipped, but there's going to be more instances were I can't keep doing that. I remember playing Final Fantasy Tactics and I was completely stuck at one part. The battle was so difficult, I could not beat it with my current set up. There was no way to grind or buy my way out of it. I had to start over from the beginning.

In future releases, I'm opening up the design a bit more. You can freely exit dungeons and go back town or where ever you want. The only exception would be if you're at the cut scene before a boss. I don't want the game to suffer from non-stop battles and cut scenes. I want players to explore, buy supplies, check out the extra stuff I'm implementing, and take a breather every now and then.

Another feature I'm putting in is revisiting old dungeons. That may seem like an odd feature, but bear with me. Because I had no world map or traveling system, there wasn't a good way to get the player to the dungeon they visited. After you complete chapter 2, it will unlock the feature. It will be intertwined with the lore of the game so it's not just a plain system.

Something changing from chapter 1 is the battles specifically Maria's skill set. Her auto attacks were outdamaging her skills, which defeats the purpose of her system. I'm increasing the damage with her skills as well as tweaking a few things to make it rewarding for a player to charge her up.

My next release is going to include three chapters. Two of them will be about the same length as the first. Maybe even longer. The last one is going to be significantly long. I want that story arc to be the first real test for these characters. I hope to make it compelling enough for the player to sit down for 3 hours and finish it. I have a lot of work done on chapters 2 and 3. Finishing those up won't be a problem. Planning and executing that last one is going to be a lot of work.

When I was close to releasing chapter 1 of my game, WIP announced that he was shutting down the site. When I wrote a long rant about the site and predicted my last post on the site, Holbert had stepped in to reverse the closure. Weird coincidences these past few days. =|

Whatever happens in the future, I'll make sure I'll put up a download soon. =X