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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
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  • dragonheartman
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  • Action RPG
  • 02/20/2008 08:51 PM
  • 02/01/2024 04:45 AM
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Posts

I don't generally give much attention or energy to demos (30 minutes to a max is usually what I allot for a demo), as more often than not I find I'll just have to replay all the way once the completed version comes out, however, I will say this is shaping to be a very interesting game. The knife throwing bit was handled very well.
dragonheartman
Developer, Starless Umbra / Heroes of Umbra
2966
author=supremewarrior
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.
This will be fixed in the next version! :)

author=amerkevicius
I don't generally give much attention or energy to demos (30 minutes to a max is usually what I allot for a demo), as more often than not I find I'll just have to replay all the way once the completed version comes out, however, I will say this is shaping to be a very interesting game. The knife throwing bit was handled very well.
I'm glad you found interest in this short little demo! It definitely has taken a lot of effort to get where I am, even though I don't have a lot to show anymore.
DHM! I have always kept tabs on this game, even when I wasn't active in the rpg maker circuit anymore. I remember when you used to help me out on IM with my event processing problems :-P I am so happy to see that you still actively work on this game! I've cleared my schedule for tonight so I can sit and play this :D
dragonheartman
Developer, Starless Umbra / Heroes of Umbra
2966
author=the_nackster
DHM! I have always kept tabs on this game, even when I wasn't active in the rpg maker circuit anymore. I remember when you used to help me out on IM with my event processing problems :-P I am so happy to see that you still actively work on this game! I've cleared my schedule for tonight so I can sit and play this :D
I miss visiting ASP! Thanks for checking up and I hope you enjoy it. It's a shorter play now, for better or worse.
Hi, how many chapters have been planned for this game?
dragonheartman
Developer, Starless Umbra / Heroes of Umbra
2966
author=tofu21
Hi, how many chapters have been planned for this game?
Exactly 9!

If you count the prologue, 10.

7 of the 9 are done. The first couple need some tweaking to match the consistency of the plot in later chapters.
Adon237
if i had an allowance, i would give it to rmn
1743
Ohh just for fun, can you explain your title for me? I mean are there ever stars in an umbra?
Downloaded this a few hours ago and i like the gameplay :)
But my only concern is how can i make this game windowed cuz i disliked full screen (i want them to be 600x480)
Try pressing F4 or F5 or Alt + Enter?
Thanks for answering, Tofu :)
This is the first RM game i played and i just know RM existed few hours ago so idk about keys used in this type of game.
Sure, no problem! =) Btw, if I'm right, the same commands can be used for most or all other RPGmaker games.
How can i cross the area in the cave that requires stamina? (i stuck at there :( )
author=dragonheartman
author=tofu21
Hi, how many chapters have been planned for this game?
Exactly 9!

If you count the prologue, 10.

7 of the 9 are done. The first couple need some tweaking to match the consistency of the plot in later chapters.


Okay, I hope you'll get some help then so you can finish the project with more speed! =)
Tau
RMN sex symbol
3293
Happy Birthday dhm, your still the man even on hiatus.
dragonheartman
Developer, Starless Umbra / Heroes of Umbra
2966
Thanks, Tau! I'll be back in swing before you know it.
Adon237
if i had an allowance, i would give it to rmn
1743
Huzzah! I can't wait for the finished product!
Wow this looks so professional, how long before its done?
dragonheartman
Developer, Starless Umbra / Heroes of Umbra
2966
author=VirtualVampire
Wow this looks so professional, how long before its done?
I wish I could say. :(

I will say it's in progress, and releases should be fairly frequent (quarterly?). I've got a lot planned after the PC release too.

Thanks for checking it out!
author=dragonheartman
author=VirtualVampire
Wow this looks so professional, how long before its done?
I wish I could say. :(

I will say it's in progress, and releases should be fairly frequent (quarterly?). I've got a lot planned after the PC release too.

Thanks for checking it out!


Cool, I wish you could make this game for the DS or Vita, I think if companies like Sony started to support the makers of indie titles the gemming community would better off for it. Anyway considering the amount of work your putting into this you should put the game on steam and charge money for it. If you're good at something never do it for free.
dragonheartman
Developer, Starless Umbra / Heroes of Umbra
2966
author=VirtualVampire
author=dragonheartman
author=VirtualVampire
Wow this looks so professional, how long before its done?
I wish I could say. :(

I will say it's in progress, and releases should be fairly frequent (quarterly?). I've got a lot planned after the PC release too.

Thanks for checking it out!
Cool, I wish you could make this game for the DS or Vita, I think if companies like Sony started to support the makers of indie titles the gemming community would better off for it. Anyway considering the amount of work your putting into this you should put the game on steam and charge money for it. If you're good at something never do it for free.

If I do all of the graphics myself (eventually I'd like to, or at least commission someone) I may consider it, but I don't really want the money. I'd rather have more people play it. :)