Iniquity and Vindication

It's been a while since I paid any attention to this game, but I've been working on it as for the last week as part of the Revive the Dead event going on this month on RMN. The goal of the event is to take a game you stopped working on and revive the project and finish it. Since I had done maybe two days of work on this game in the last two years, it definitely qualified.

Over the last nine days I've done about 40 hours of work on Iniquity and Vindication.

Spent all day today replacing placeholder ripped tiles with original tiles instead of making new content. This is probably not the best way to get a lot of visible progress done this month that I can actually show off.

But hey! Not-so-visible progress!

Old tileset:


New, suspiciously similar tileset:


Still need to redo the conveyor belts and one or two little things, then I'll have legal rights to actually use all the graphics in... this particular map.

The massive number of rips in this game and my inability to sell the finished product when I'm done was definitely a major contributing factor to my losing motivation to work on this game. The gameplay was so good; it deserved to be a real commercial game and not just a shitty collection of Tales of Phantasia rips.

With any luck, that'll be the end result.

Most of the characters in I&V have skills that combine together in fun ways, but aren't particularly unusual. For some of the characters though I wanted to do some crazy stuff. This is one of them. The first tank character you get on your team.

Permelia is a creepy little girl ghost. This all works together wonderfully because:
1) Her ghost characteristics make for some really unusual tanking ideas
2) Creepy little girl ghosts make the best ghosts, FACT
3) The idea of an eight year old barefoot girl in a nightgown being the tank for your party of action movie heroes is hilarious to me



If she's hard to see, it's because she's semitransparent. The dark background I'm using for my game page makes it hopefully not too bad, but here's a fake screenshot of what she would actually look like in battle in the game:



You can't actually get her in that dungeon, but I don't have the enemy graphics finished for any of the dungeons that she really is in, and showing those dungeons off isn't the point of this blog post.

The way her tanking works is somewhat bizarre and I'm still working on it. Especially I'm still working on representing it visually, but also on trying to come up with a few more interesting skills she can use to interact with it. The basic idea is that Permelia is a ghost, though. This means:

Permelia is totally immune to physical damage, under normal circumstances.
This is the part that seems wildly unbalanced, when taken on its own, considering the large number of battles where enemies will not use any magic at all. However, countering that...

Permelia always counts as dead, for the purposes of a Game Over.
I mean, she is dead. Literally. But this means that if she's the only party member remaining, you get a Game Over immediately. If an enemy only uses physical attacks, she'll never become unable to fight, which is a huge advantage, but you can still lose.

Permelia can't be healed under any circumstances.
She has more HP than other characters to make up for this, but it's definitely a penalty. She'll rely on defensive buffs to survive, and you may have to turn on and off her tanking strategically to keep her from dying too soon. You get fully healed and revived after each battle, but it won't be unusual for her to get KOed a lot more often than other characters. She'll almost never last through a boss battle, but she'll be extremely useful while she lasts.

Permelia can possess other party members, taking damage in their place and gaining access to their skills.
Here's the tanking part. She can possess one character at a time. She gains access to their primary skillset when she is possessing them. The possessed character can still act also and isn't limited in any way. Any offensive skill that would hit the possessed character hits Permelia instead (including area attacks). She can release the possessed character any time she wants, which refills her MP.

Physical attacks can hurt Permelia when she's possessing a party member.
She has a body at this point, so she does actually take damage. I mean if the enemy is shooting at James's or Veris's body with bullets, SOMEONE should be taking damage, right? She's the one who takes the damage. This sort of draws on the popular video-game mechanic that, when someone in your party is possessed or mind-controlled by an enemy, you can stab them in the face until they get better, and they often suffer no negative effects from your assault.

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So, for example, if Permelia possesses Veris, she'll be able to use his blue magic spells, but not Meditate or Analyze, which are special commands. As long as Veris is possessed, you'll have two characters capable of using Thunderbolt (to keep the enemy lightning-weak much more reliably), two characters capable of using Restore (though neither Permelia nor Veris will need it cast on them, since Veris can't be hurt and Permelia can't be healed), and two characters capable of using Guard (making it possible to keep the entire party buffed with this defensive spell, which is usually difficult due to its duration). If an enemy attacks Veris it'll hit Permelia instead, and if they use an area-attack it'll hit her twice since she'll take the hits for both Veris and herself. After five or six rounds she'll probably run out of MP and need to relinquish her possession of Veris.

She has some other skills of her own that she can use, too, but so far they're kind of dull. I might replace them if I come up with cool ideas that make more sense thematically.

Right now I'm still working on visually representing the possession. I have her moving to the same spot as the character being possessed, and then disappearing. When she attacks, a ghostly version of that character moves out from the possessed character's body and attacks while the possessed character stands still. When she's struck, you can see a ghostly version of Permelia being briefly knocked backwards out of the possessed character's body, and then getting back in. I think it gets the point across but I'm open to suggestions of how to show this better.

Recently, I've been giving this game a little love.



I've gotten some help from Unity, who created the map for the final scene in the demo, and also made some graphics for me. Among those is the sprite for Rayna, the third playable character.

Rayna is a slightly eccentric paranormal detective. She's curious, obsessive, missing a few screws, and nerds out when encountering new supernatural phenomena. She's attracted to the mystical artifacts that James and Veris have stolen, and initially meets them after using a homemade device to detect the energy James's sword is emitting. Then she somehow convinces them to go hunt ghosts with her.



She carries around an arsenal of ridiculous gadgets and even worse plans, which have no right to work anywhere near as often as they do. A few of the things she has in that giant backpack are useful in battle - you can obviously see her firing some sort of ray gun there, and the bottom animation is her using an artifact called a Hex Grid to cast magic spells, which is where most of her abilities come from.

After four or five months of quite frankly barely touching this project, I've recruited some help from Unity and resumed work. Order of business number one was to create the transitional cut scene between the prison transport ship and the following dungeon, the haunted courthouse.

The cut scene in question for your viewing pleasure. I would give some context, but... it seems pretty self-explanatory, honestly. The giant red button mentioned is the one in this screenshot.



With the prison transport ship finally totally done, I'm focusing on the haunted courthouse now, so expect some screenshots of that hopefully coming soon. It'll involve one new major party member, Rayna, who's basically a ghostbuster, and one new minor party member, Permelia, who's a secret for now.

There were a couple minor bugs and one major one in the demo - the major one was that if you flipped the switch in the room with the acid vats, and then left the room before lowering the ladder, it would become stuck and unable to be lowered. This was fixed through the magic of using scripts instead of stupid events to modify when things are shootable.

In between working on UOSSMUD and pretending to work on UOSSMUD while I'm actually playing World of Warcraft, I've been working on outlining the third dungeon, the prison transport ship. I had a general idea in my head, but sketching out the general flow of the rooms and puzzles before I start mapping is becoming more and more important as the dungeons get more complex. I ended up moving a couple of the puzzles around after I'd placed them, so I'm glad that was just a matter of dragging an MS Paint picture of a switch around instead of redoing the puzzle events and scripts. At this point in the planning, the third dungeon looks something like this:



Forgive the terrible, terrible quality. I promise the actual dungeon will look a little nicer than that image. Like, it might be that image plus three fog overlays and a lightmap. ;) No, but seriously. You can see the first two rooms of this dungeon at the end of the demo!