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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
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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
  • 899928
  • 352
  • 17855

Posts

dragonheartman
Developer, Starless Umbra / Heroes of Umbra
2966
Nothing yet!

I'm keeping quiet. Things are moving around a lot and nothing ever seems to be final.
Tau
RMN sex symbol
3293
Hiatus? This game, fuck me. I never thought I'd see the day.
author=Tau
Hiatus? This game, fuck me. I never thought I'd see the day.


my thoughts exactly!
Hiatus doesn't mean cancelled though, as stated in dragonheartman's blog on his official website.

In short, he's basically needing all the help he can get because of his frustrations with RPG Maker 2003 (Yeah, you know how buggy RPG Maker 2003 is...)

Read his blog to find out more.
benos
My mind is full of fuck.
624
wtf cannot even press the download section. Or any section for some reason. Stupid browser.
dragonheartman
Developer, Starless Umbra / Heroes of Umbra
2966
I should have a mirror soon. I actually can't update my site right now because my friend (who hosts the site) is having dns issues.

Maybe this URL works?:

http://rpgmaker.net/games/407/downloads/1176/
I finished playing the new demo. The new additions to combat through dynRPG certainly made things a lot more enjoyable. I thought the first bosses' gimmick was pretty interesting, deliberately managing your character's focus to achieve a goal that didn't involve killing the main boss.

The way dungeons were constructed was really cool as well. I liked how they were more about overcoming obstacles and minigames rather than fighting a horde of random battles to the end. The knife throwing minigame was probably my favorite so far. But the partner segment was rather well made as well.

I can't say much about the narrative however, as it seems to have barely kicked off. I was ultimately disappointed to see the 'To be continued' screen after escaping the forest. But, I'll be looking forward to future releases now. Surprised I didn't play this game before actually.
dragonheartman
Developer, Starless Umbra / Heroes of Umbra
2966
author=Skie Fortress
I finished playing the new demo. The new additions to combat through dynRPG certainly made things a lot more enjoyable. I thought the first bosses' gimmick was pretty interesting, deliberately managing your character's focus to achieve a goal that didn't involve killing the main boss.

The way dungeons were constructed was really cool as well. I liked how they were more about overcoming obstacles and minigames rather than fighting a horde of random battles to the end. The knife throwing minigame was probably my favorite so far. But the partner segment was rather well made as well.

I can't say much about the narrative however, as it seems to have barely kicked off. I was ultimately disappointed to see the 'To be continued' screen after escaping the forest. But, I'll be looking forward to future releases now. Surprised I didn't play this game before actually.
Thank you for all the kind feedback! I'm glad you found the changes the the battle system enjoyable--I spent a lot of effort on them. Hopefully releases will be more frequent now. :)
Just played this. Your tweaks to the battle system were neat and I liked the knife throwing minigame. I had fun--looking forward to more.
The new demo was phenomenal. I was upset that it ended. Keep it up, DHM!
dragonheartman
Developer, Starless Umbra / Heroes of Umbra
2966
Thanks for the positive encouragement. I've started on chapter 1 development, by the way. Diablo III also came out so I won't say any words on a release just yet... :)
TFT
WHOA wow wow. two tails? that is a sexy idea...
445
yeah dude, i played this today. like, i appreciate the detail and effort into everything.

it is really hard to get a vibe for the game, because its exceptionally well done in terms of mechanics and mini games or whatever. the pacing is really weird. like, i just kind of breezed through the text, the two characters in your party were really hard to enjoy. like, idk the intro is very hard to get into.

overall i think it is really impressive in terms of design mechanics. the battle system is a really nice improvement. the edits are very well done. lots of animations. i p much did the disco dance several hundred times. like, i cannot put my thumb on why i can't get into it, maybe it is the setting at the start i am not sure.

it's just an incredibly weird introduction. it's just one of those situations where its very difficult to introduce the "cool" factor with bandits raiding a village basically. like, it would be cool if they rode in on dragon/wolf hybrids and just started throwing spears into the buildings. even stuff like that is underwhelming because you can't do very much with the setting.

like, have a cutscene sideview of these animated black images of the bandits riding while the background is fading from sun to darkness and the bottom can have some kind of backstory to get you pumped. idk man, like i said great mechanics, great details. keep it up.

Corfaisus
"It's frustrating because - as much as Corf is otherwise an irredeemable person - his 2k/3 mapping is on point." ~ psy_wombats
7874
author=TFT
yeah dude, i played this today. like, i appreciate the detail and effort into everything.

it is really hard to get a vibe for the game, because its exceptionally well done in terms of mechanics and mini games or whatever. the pacing is really weird. like, i just kind of breezed through the text, the two characters in your party were really hard to enjoy. like, idk the intro is very hard to get into.

overall i think it is really impressive in terms of design mechanics. the battle system is a really nice improvement. the edits are very well done. lots of animations. i p much did the disco dance several hundred times. like, i cannot put my thumb on why i can't get into it, maybe it is the setting at the start i am not sure.

it's just an incredibly weird introduction. it's just one of those situations where its very difficult to introduce the "cool" factor with bandits raiding a village basically. like, it would be cool if they rode in on dragon/wolf hybrids and just started throwing spears into the buildings. even stuff like that is underwhelming because you can't do very much with the setting.

like, have a cutscene sideview of these animated black images of the bandits riding while the background is fading from sun to darkness and the bottom can have some kind of backstory to get you pumped. idk man, like i said great mechanics, great details. keep it up.


Simply put, make a game just like yours.
TFT
WHOA wow wow. two tails? that is a sexy idea...
445
yeah, well i am trying to give the guy constructive feedback from what i've experienced. instead of just circle jerking him, and going "heh gg bro props". and just leaving it at that.

the difference is i truly appreciate what he has created. do you think i would go out of my way to write that for it to translate "just copy me bro". i gave him examples because it might perk his interest vs "HEH G8". i cannot expect someone like you to grasp the concept of indie devs bouncing relevant ideas or concepts off each other to improve their craft, so lol.

it's kind of funny dude, because i thought about dropping a hiroshima burn on you, but then i realized, people like you are pretty much the reason why this site is so bad.
dragonheartman
Developer, Starless Umbra / Heroes of Umbra
2966
Naw it's true, it's like you are dropped into the action but you don't actually witness any of it. I had ideas for having bandits hop in and mess stuff up but ultimately it never got executed because I have to try to balance what changes I put in, otherwise this will never get finished.

It's already something jumping back and redoing so much at about 85% completion, but I do know the importance of the intro. I might make some slight changes down the road but I really want to have more content-wise because I do feel the gameplay will pull you in while it is my goal that the storyline/characters will eventually follow, if that makes any sense. The storyline is honestly not meant to be terribly complex, but at the very least my priority was to make it presentable and clear without some of the inconsistencies in flow the older version had.

Will I change up the intro? It's inevitable, but it's finally at a point where I feel okay with it. Your comments have been noted, though, because as you said I am trying to make this the best I possibly can. It's just I do want to move on to other things in the future and if I do that I might not get to everything I want... I'll gut it and save it for another project (or a remake in three dimensions!!)

Jokes aside, I do appreciate you taking the time to write up some feedback. It is helpful.

tl;dr, it takes me a really long time to make a decent game.
dragonheartman
Developer, Starless Umbra / Heroes of Umbra
2966
And honestly I've also learned so much in terms of game design decisions, characters, and so on that it would be much suited for a new game I feel rather than trying to retrofit it into a project that is for lack of a better words a big (nearly!) ten-year-old mess under the surface. It's a mess I am happy with though. ;)
author=Corfaisus
Simply put, make a game just like yours.

You mad? He's stating feedback very nicely, and you're being sarcastic for no reason. Go away.
Corfaisus
"It's frustrating because - as much as Corf is otherwise an irredeemable person - his 2k/3 mapping is on point." ~ psy_wombats
7874
author=eplipswich
author=Corfaisus
Simply put, make a game just like yours.
You mad? He's stating feedback very nicely, and you're being sarcastic for no reason. Go away.


I was in no way being sarcastic.
dragonheartman
Developer, Starless Umbra / Heroes of Umbra
2966
The more I think about it, the more I want progress over perfection. There's no need to argue otherwise about what this will shape into or what it can be compared to. Let's just see where it goes.
I got some weird error that said "Zero battle id" and then another error message popped up but forgot what it said, then it went back to the title screen.