• Add Review
  • Subscribe
  • Nominate
  • Submit Media
  • RSS
Latest Release
0.2.0 - Jan 27, 2024

Synopsis
Join Amalia, a tracker from the simple orphan colony of Tulron, as she discovers the veiled world of Alcuria in search of her friends.

Links
website
discord
twitter
facebook

Legacy Synopsis
In Starless Umbra, you play as Andoru in a quest to attempt to return home to save your sister after bandits raid your village. This simple task complicates itself quickly, as a strange phenomenon leaves you not only away from your village, but with little direction in a completely new continent.

As you travel, you'll learn the people around you aren't what they seem, and ties begin forming between yourself and others as your past is revealed. Unfortunately, no one can answer the simple question: "how do I get back home to save my sister?"

Latest Blog

2023 Recap!



You can also watch on youtube if you don't want to read!

Hi! Once again over a year has passed since my last update. I figure now’s a great time to reflect and share what I’ve accomplished in 2023.

YEAR OVER ALREADY?

2023 had some setbacks. At the start of the year I was impacted by the tech layoffs and spent the first five months of 2023 finding a new job. I thought I’d get more development time in, but the pressures of securing reliable income constantly loomed over me. Game development for the foreseeable continues to be a side project.

I did what I could though. The new gig is good, and here we are in a new year. Let’s recap some SU dev.



NEW STORY CONTENT & MECHANICS

This past year I focused primarily on content for the second of the game’s five planned acts. Act 2 adds four new dungeons centered around a new hub town. All mainline cutscenes, dungeon maps, and mechanics are in. And yikes there are just so many small mechanics here and there that start to conflict, despite my best efforts to maintain some semblance of control over my scope. For example, having characters follow you with a basic pathfinding algorithm is great, till you have swimming, and levers to raise/lower water levels, and all sorts of interactions. These things get complicated (and buggy to be honest) quickly. But these systems are coming together and make multiplayer quite enjoyable.

On the character customization side, I’ve added a passive ability system. This is inspired by FF9’s ability system with a few tweaks. Passives have a set of triggers (I deal damage, I use a specific elemental attack, my party member is defeated, a battle begins, etc) and then an outcome as a result of those triggers occurs: usually a buff or stat boost at the moment. You have a set number of points to equip passives, but in another twist on the FF9 abilities formula, you can unlock more slots by exploring and interacting with the environment. This is a dumping ground for lots of worldbuilding and character development. The goal here is to add a bit of depth to character-building with fun ways to experiment and get creative, without cramming it in the player’s face.

COMBAT SYSTEMS

One recurring piece of feedback I received was that combat felt boring at times. SU had a distinct lack of resources. No SP? Few items? This was more out of hesitancy to implement new systems without giving it proper thought, but I’m finally moving forward with a few combat tweaks.

First, I’m experimenting with SP as a character stat. This is not a currency for abilities, but instead something more akin to hunger. It determines how much HP you recover after battle and slowly depletes after every enemy encounter. It’s replenished most easily by drinking water. But water of course requires a container to store it in, so you can’t simply purchase 99 bottles of water and be done with it. Instead — as another resource of sorts — the team will collect empty bottles. Bottles may be filled with various liquids, like potions, ingredients, and of course water.

In an effort to be more environmentally-friendly, the party saves their empty bottles after consuming water to refill later. That’s right, this is straight out of early Zelda, but the benefits this system provides solve many of the traditional problems I had with items in RPGs. You hoard them, never use them, and they just clutter your inventory. By providing meaningful choices to the player when shopping I hope to combat item hoarding. For example, I have 5 bottles, do I bring 5 waters? Maybe I bring 3 waters and 2 monster energy drinks that don’t replenish as much SP but boost my movement speed. As an added bonus, the system slots right into the game’s trading mechanics. (You trade empty bottles for filled bottles. Using a water bottle is just removing that consumable, then giving the player an empty bottle back.)

Players also have four additional secondary action slots in combat. Accessed by holding space bar (or a trigger on controller), these will be a variety of equippable combat tricks, items, and most interestingly, combos. Combos are special attacks players can create using any combination of learned skills. For instance, you might have an attack that deals frost damage and freezes an enemy briefly. Another character has an attack that launches a fireball. Because that frozen enemy is now ice element, the fireball does extra damage.

This is a lot of new mechanics for an otherwise simple battle system. I might tweak the rate at which I introduce them. I might also drop some of these if they aren’t fun or are needlessly complex. The goal here is to provide more long-term, dungeon-scale resource management to the game, and drip-feed new mechanics to make combat more interesting and engaging.



NEW ARTISTS

I’ve hired a few artists to help on the game, mostly because if I try to do this all myself who knows when I’ll finish. This is part “WOW MAKING A JRPG SOLO IS HARD” and part I actually have to be very deliberate with what little time I have for development. (I get ~1-2 hrs a night after my daughter goes to bed if I’m lucky). Spriting over a sketch to get character portraits that look barely passable take me a full week’s focused time. It’s just not sustainable and I believe in the vision of the game enough to get help.

puking rabbit has sprited monsters for all of act two. These are far more expressive and polished than I’ve been able to ever do.

Iamsako is sketching and spriting in-game portraits. Their attention to detail from sketch through to pixeling and anti-aliasing the portraits is inspiring.

1800animeschool, aka keifurisu returned to do my game’s title screen. You may remember (https://rpgmaker.net/games/407/images/20111/) (https://rpgmaker.net/games/407/images/16458/) from the rpg maker 2003 version of the game. I feel like the new title screen symbolizes a slow maturity and natural progression of ourselves as artists.



TOOLING

The way I was doing spritesheets was not at all scalable. I’ve leveraged Aseprite’s json exporter, written a parser, and then reimplemented character animations. Now a character sprite doesn’t need an entire texture page to itself. This is relatively minor from a player’s perspective but man I just want to show off what a good texture packing is capable of.



NINTENDON’T ASK ME HOW MUCH I PAID FOR A SWITCH DEVKIT

SU will target switch at launch. I pitched it to Nintendo. I’m an approved developer! From the start of development, I’ve taken a controller-first approach to input, and the couch co-op nature of the console makes it a perfect fit. The game is totally playable with a single joycon, so you can play with a friend without an additional controller.

SO WHAT’S DONE? WHAT’S NEXT?

Act 2 is basically playable from start to finish now. I’ve done three solid playthroughs and caught most of the hard crashes. Story-wise, this bit of content was particularly difficult for me to write. Certain scenes aren’t quite as impactful as I like, and the character-to-character dialogue didn’t write itself like Act 1 did.

There’s a lot of holes for side-content: an optional dungeon in an abandoned church, a hot springs side quest and so on. It’s always a balancing act between polishing existing content and charging ahead with the story and writing, but this is a massive amount of material. My last playthrough clocked in at a bit over 6 hours, so Act 2 roughly triples the amount of available content.

I’ve updated the public demo with a cleaned up Act 1. If you’d like to support me and get access to the newer stuff while supporting my dreams of finishing this thing before I retire, please consider subscribing to the Alcuria Games discord server or donating on kofi.

For 2024 I’ll continue to slowly and diligently chip away at game content. Features and polish will come but the core pieces are already here. The biggest challenge for me at this point is writing and implementing a cohesive, meaningful story: turning ideas and plotpoint wishlists into a concrete narrative. I’ll continue working on that and hopefully not get too sidetracked by shiny mechanics or minigames.

Stats
14,489 Words in script
1,013 Commits (snapshots of the codebase)
154 Maps
576kb Database (skills, cutscenes, player data, etc in plaintext)


I think about this line from SoulBlazer at least once a week.
  • Production
  • 2 of 5 episodes complete
  • Commercial
  • dragonheartman
  • GameMaker Studio 2
  • Action RPG
  • 02/20/2008 08:51 PM
  • 02/01/2024 04:45 AM
  • 01/01/2030
  • 899597
  • 352
  • 17853

Posts

This is one of my favorite games after only 20 or so minutes. Awesome job!
dragonheartman
Developer, Starless Umbra / Heroes of Umbra
2966
I'm glad you like it. :)
I'm several hours in now. Really great game. The story has me intrigued..can't wait to see how things play out.
I'm a couple hours in. The battle system leaves me wanting more than attack button mashing, but otherwise i am enjoying it. :)
Tasty. Very tasty game. Like lemon meringue pie... Or pizza. Or sushi. I definitely recommend it.
dragonheartman
Developer, Starless Umbra / Heroes of Umbra
2966
@RedAkerston I feel your pain. FYI I'm programming the CBS last. ;)

Nonetheless, please enjoy the rest of the game. Autobattle is there so don't be ashamed to use it for the current releases.
another CBS game. oh dear.
Whoa, this looks like a KILLER APP. Will be checking this out soon. *suscribed*
dragonheartman
Developer, Starless Umbra / Heroes of Umbra
2966
comment=35402
another CBS game. oh dear.
I gotta challenge myself. Also if I don't finish this there won't be a CBS. by that logic I'd like to think of this as a little different than your average CBS game because:

-it will be finished
-it will be thought out
-it will also be finished
dragonheartman
Developer, Starless Umbra / Heroes of Umbra
2966
also it is KILLER MAN I just wish I'd update this. the dl is a year old. :,(
Hey started playing this game last night. Really like all the mini games. However I found a bug when I was playing the mine cart game. I am not sure when It actually happened but I fell to the bottom of the level and instead of it transporting me back to the beginning with a loss of 30 coins instead I could control the cart and float around and gather all the coins up. This was kinda cool at first, but after I finished and then went back to try it again. It was the same thing I couldn't fall off I just floated oncE I got to the bottom. And then I noticed when I went to try one more time that the main charachter said something alot loud Like "Boo Yeah" or "hell yeah" I can't really remember, SO I went to save my game and saved over my file but right as I saved I saw that my levels were all the way up to Level 99 . Oops I am not sure why but that is what I did leading up to it. also I progressed throught the game a little bit until I got the next playable character and noticed she was also level 99. I really like your game alot and was wondering if you could send me a save file right before or after that spot so I continue enjoying this game. I don't really want to play the game at level 99 the whole time kinda takes the fun away from it you know what I mean?
Thanks!
dragonheartman
Developer, Starless Umbra / Heroes of Umbra
2966
You entered the cheat code for max levels somehow. :)

I'll hook you up. And yes that has been fixed but I appreciate the comment! I can message you a save file but it might be faster for you to just restart; that's pretty early in the game. ;)
Lol that is hilarious I am good at those kind of things,
Yeah I got a bunch of stuff to do today, but later tonight I'll just restart If you don't get back to me, plus it'll be fun to do the knife throwing mini game again (That was awesome I hope it happens again!). but not the emoticon one =( lol
Oh I just thought of something, if it was a cheat code is it reversible? And if not would you be willing to PM it to me so I don't "accidentally" enter it in again?

Again Thanks for making this game I have really enjoyed all of its components This game so far is bad ass!
dragonheartman, I have been following you since the earlier versions of Starless Umbra. I must say, your game was once riddled with mediocrity and has since transcended to the ranks of one of the most enjoyable RM games out there.

and this is because of your ability to take criticism, change your ways, and adapt. Your game is a testament to true potential.

I salute you.
Dragonheartman, I have recently downloaded the latest edition of starless umbra after realizing that it is the same as Dragonheart. I was wondering if it is possible to transfer save files from the previous game to the new one, or is everything different?
****SPOILER ALERT****



I had just finished the infiltration of the WOLF headquarters and I had gotten clydan and renee back.



****SPOILER END****
is everything the same storywise until this point?
dragonheartman
Developer, Starless Umbra / Heroes of Umbra
2966
author=zaeran
Dragonheartman, I have recently downloaded the latest edition of starless umbra after realizing that it is the same as Dragonheart. I was wondering if it is possible to transfer save files from the previous game to the new one, or is everything different?
****SPOILER ALERT****



I had just finished the infiltration of the WOLF headquarters and I had gotten clydan and renee back.



****SPOILER END****
is everything the same storywise until this point?
Saves for ch5+ should be compatible, but I have a new release coming in less than a week. If you enjoy the game and don't mind starting over, I think the experience is much better as a lot of the storyline has changed (especially if you are still playing Dragon Heart.)

Thanks for checking this out. I appreciate it.
author=dragonheartman
Saves for ch5+ should be compatible, but I have a new release coming in less than a week. If you enjoy the game and don't mind starting over, I think the experience is much better as a lot of the storyline has changed (especially if you are still playing Dragon Heart.)

Thanks for checking this out. I appreciate it.


So the release date has now been announced ;)
Wow, this was great. Especially b/c you did it with RPG Maker 2003. Knife dueling is sweet.

While in the Prologue though are you supposed to randomly level up in Stamina 5 times? It happened while I was in the cave, and I pressed shift and 'Z' or 'X' at the same time and I started leveling up in Stamina. I thought maybe the game did it on purpose so I could leap over the first gap. What's the verdict?
author=dragonheartman
author=zaeran
Dragonheartman, I have recently downloaded the latest edition of starless umbra after realizing that it is the same as Dragonheart. I was wondering if it is possible to transfer save files from the previous game to the new one, or is everything different?
****SPOILER ALERT****



I had just finished the infiltration of the WOLF headquarters and I had gotten clydan and renee back.



****SPOILER END****
is everything the same storywise until this point?
Saves for ch5+ should be compatible, but I have a new release coming in less than a week. If you enjoy the game and don't mind starting over, I think the experience is much better as a lot of the storyline has changed (especially if you are still playing Dragon Heart.)

Thanks for checking this out. I appreciate it.

So it's been almost a week ( 6 days ) is the demo soming out soon?, im anxious to try this game out but i dont want to restart then so i prefer to wait till the newest version is out for your mentioned reasons in your post.
This game is GREAT! It's definitely among the best RPGs I've ever played, indie or mainstream. The minigames are so fun, but it's a shame that there are some you can't play but once. The game isn't finished yet and it has HUGE potential from what I've seen. I was sad to see "To be continued" but I know that the best is yet to come. I can't wait until this game is finally completed!