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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.

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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.
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Posts

author=dragonheartman
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. :)


Wow that so cool of you.
Anyway I'm trying my hand at digital art, anime mostly I hope I can be apart of a team some day (when my skills improve) and make cutscene/character animation.
DHM, I played through the release today and I loved it.
Though I like all that you've done with the story, in terms of direction, and pacing, I must say I like how you are introducing and developing characters.
I especially like what you've done with Reene as a character, she seems to have alot more depth and she was definitely more fun to play with, even in the comparatively shorter time you control her.

I did notice a couple mapping errors, notably at the castle, some of which just seemed like event layering issues, but all were minor

Also do you plan on re-implementing the gem syystem you had a couple of versions ago or have you finalized the method of character progression?

Anyway, I loved the release, look forward to chapter 2 and keep up the brilliant work.
dragonheartman
Developer, Starless Umbra / Heroes of Umbra
2966
author=zaeran
DHM, I played through the release today and I loved it.
Though I like all that you've done with the story, in terms of direction, and pacing, I must say I like how you are introducing and developing characters.
I especially like what you've done with Reene as a character, she seems to have alot more depth and she was definitely more fun to play with, even in the comparatively shorter time you control her.

I did notice a couple mapping errors, notably at the castle, some of which just seemed like event layering issues, but all were minor

Also do you plan on re-implementing the gem syystem you had a couple of versions ago or have you finalized the method of character progression?

Anyway, I loved the release, look forward to chapter 2 and keep up the brilliant work.

Thank you! I think the gem system was either hit-or-miss with many players, and it felt like it added a level of unnecessary complexity. I'd still like to add the gems back in, but it would be more for a statbuilding/passive mechanic rather than something layered atop the skills that already exist.

As far as Reene is concerned as a character, I'm glad you enjoyed using her!
Obviously with her losing her abilities, she won't be as bossy/arrogant. (I have Lynia for that role.) She's not going to fall for the typical RPG female protagonist pitfalls though, if I can avoid it. Her backstory is more developed and interesting now too.
Aha, I have feedback as well.

Firstly, a few bugs/things I noticed:
-During the wolf escape/carrying Andoru puzzle, you can inadvertently block the path ahead/the block in the water if you place Andoru down in a certain spot (because you have him move one space in certain directions once he is placed on the ground. What I mean by this is that you place him, run all the way around and push the block into the water to create the path, and then you cannot step on the block because there's something in the coding preventing it. I guess it's not that big of a deal but you can waste a lot of precious time with this, and technically you'd be able to step onto the block and just press enter to pick Andoru back up anyway. Hopefully that makes sense. Also, I feel that there should be some sort of reward at the end, considering winning and losing ends with the same result..

-When eating in Arkor (first scene of Ch1) there is a typo: "how important your sister means to you." I feel as though it should be "How much your sister means to you."

-The chest in Arkor doesn't do your fancy new spinning animation.

-After the event with the bounty, the bounty sheet is back on the wall even though Reene took it and ran off. Also, during the crowd scene, a faceset is used for a man with blue hair (and rightfully so, he is one of the arkor npcs) but he is nowhere in the crowd, so it doesn't make much sense.

-I'm confused about the squats system. Is it supposed to be impossible at a certain point unless your stamina is higher? I got stuck somewhere between 7 or 9/20 and it just wouldn't go up anymore no matter how much I spammed enter.

-In the wastelandy world map battle background, one of the slimes is sitting on the tree. Just a little awkward.

-There's no sound/bgm for the hidden area on the world map.

-I'm guessing a lot of the monsters only have two movement facings (left and right) because you'd have to completely draw new up/down ones, right?

-I love how fast paced and zippy the battles are. I found myself enjoying them quite a lot (this is making me want to use dynrpg!).

-I'm going to miss the old version of events, but I suppose it's interesting how you are developing Reene now. She's more of a bitch though, which I'm not sure how I feel about. Old sweet Reene ftw!

-Though, with all of the changes you are implementing... it almost makes me wonder if there were even plans/plot/revelations in terms of what happened.. I mean in previous releases the church burnt down and Andoru blacked out, resulting in Clydan's cryptic "I can't tell him what happened." That mystery was always one of my favorites that I wanted to solve/figure out, but with the countless changes you're adding it's making me feel as though there never were any solutions or truths to be found/truths that you had planned out at all. It seems like they were just mysteries for the sake of mysteries and hooking the player. Cruel!

I was really concerned with your decision to continuously backtrack and with how long it would take for you to actually get to the ending, but I am really enjoying the tweaks and gameplay additions. Awesome job. Being a veteran player though, the new plot is bound to sting a little.
author=Stedar
-I'm confused about the squats system. Is it supposed to be impossible at a certain point unless your stamina is higher? I got stuck somewhere between 7 or 9/20 and it just wouldn't go up anymore no matter how much I spammed enter.

I assume that after a certain amount of squats you have to tap the confirm key much more frequently. What I did was tap both Z and Enter at the same time to increase frequency. With that method I've completed it 6 times
dragonheartman
Developer, Starless Umbra / Heroes of Umbra
2966
author=Stedar
Aha, I have feedback as well.
...

Thanks, Stedar! Much appreciated and very helpful posts.

Regarding the squats minigame, yes the more often you do it the easier it gets (as the NPC suggests).

In the past, yes, you're correct. I was very vague with the mysteries because I myself wasn't sure of the plot. I didn't have a very clear ending for the project. Now, years later, I finally do. So while that particular mystery doesn't pop up at this segment, it's certainly part of the plot. It will just be introduced in a more meaningful way, hopefully.

Regarding Reene:
Certainly she's very proud of her abilities, but as she says at the end of the chapter, she realizes that it made her blind. This event at the end of the chapter will be the start of the more classic, humble Reene. She's going to come out of the situation humble and grateful.
Bugs:

--> When you are facing the last thief in the knife throw challenge, Andoru sprite holding the knife vanishes after a millisecond. You can still throw the knife though.

--> Later in the cave, when Andoru and Clydan stand on the two triangles to open the path to the next area, the animation still plays even if one of the player has stepped away from the triangle.
(It isn't making much sense; let's try again)
After the blockage has been cleared by stepping on the two triangles, the animation of the blockage opening still plays when the player crosses the triangle.

--> A mapping (passability) error: http://i.imgur.com/JuzoGeE.png

--> Can't level up past Level 7 (EXP: 5623)

--> Andoru never completely heals after a level-up, ie, when the character level-up, their HP is restored to its max value. But in Andoru case, it's always two point less. (85/87 or something like that)

--> When you first enter the mountain, a cutscene plays in which a man falls into a river. If you try to talk to his other partner, he doesn't respond and if you enter the map again, he is no longer there. So maybe you forgot to hide / delete his sprite?

(Not a bug, but you can't talk to the chef after he teaches you cooking. It looked weird because he is the only NPC who goes silent.)

Anyway, I love what you are doing with the game, but on the other hand I hate it because I want to play the game till the very end. Decisions, decisions. I still remember finding the game on Kobras Realm and loving it, and hating the fact that the game was cancelled.

EDIT:
You don't get any prize after you do 20 squats.
He just tells you to come back after you've learned to cook and he would teach you a good post-workout recipe. And if you talk to him again, he will repeat the same thing about doing twenty pushups for a reward.
(You do get the recipe if you've learned cooking)

If that was intended, I feel cheated. :-p
dragonheartman
Developer, Starless Umbra / Heroes of Umbra
2966
Much appreciated! Thanks for playing.

--> When you are facing the last thief in the knife throw challenge, Andoru sprite holding the knife vanishes after a millisecond. You can still throw the knife though.
Fixed and scheduled for 9.0.1b

--> Later in the cave, when Andoru and Clydan stand on the two triangles to open the path to the next area, the animation still plays even if one of the player has stepped away from the triangle.
(It isn't making much sense; let's try again)
After the blockage has been cleared by stepping on the two triangles, the animation of the blockage opening still plays when the player crosses the triangle.
Makes sense. I'll fix that.

--> A mapping (passability) error: http://i.imgur.com/JuzoGeE.png
Fixed in 9.0.1b

--> Can't level up past Level 7 (EXP: 5623)
Feature; the amount of exp you get diminishes as you get stronger. To get more exp you need to go to harder dungeons. In other words, your exp is scaled to the difference in level between your party and the dungeon level (hidden value).

--> Andoru never completely heals after a level-up, ie, when the character level-up, their HP is restored to its max value. But in Andoru case, it's always two point less. (85/87 or something like that)
Likely because VIT and LVL now both add HP. I'll do a proper heal after the level up.

--> When you first enter the mountain, a cutscene plays in which a man falls into a river. If you try to talk to his other partner, he doesn't respond and if you enter the map again, he is no longer there. So maybe you forgot to hide / delete his sprite?
I didn't really bother to do something with this. I should give him some dialogue though. (He's not supposed to disappear until you leave the map.)

You don't get any prize after you do 20 squats.
Agh certainly a bug. Will fix so you learn your recipe.
Bugs:
--> Oatmeal is supposed to heal 15 HP but it heals you completely.

--> Sweet Buns are supposed to heal 20 HP, but they don't restore any HP.

--> You don't get any EXP for killing the monster (whose horn you are supposed to take to the king).

--> You don't get any EXP for killing the monster disguised as unconscious NPCs in the Church.

--> (Not sure about this one) You don't get any EXP for killing the monster in the Dream World.

--> Also, another map error (forgot to take a screenshot though): If you stand just beside the (main) gate of the castle and press the confirm key, you can climb up the wall.

Not sure if these are bugs or not:
--> The monsters in the area after the cart minigame die as soon as you touch them. Is it because I was Level 8?

--> The text colour of the recipes listed in Mini-Furnace changed from golden-yellow to silver.

--> Even if you stop playing the game in window mode, it will start in Fullscreen.

author=dragonheartman
Feature; the amount of exp you get diminishes as you get stronger. To get more exp you need to go to harder dungeons. In other words, your exp is scaled to the difference in level between your party and the dungeon level (hidden value).

Makes sense but the monster on the world map stop giving me EXP after I reached Level 7. Maybe drop the EXP they give by 50% or hide the monster if they aren't going to give any EXP?


Can you save everyone in the church? Because no matter how much I tried, I was only able to save two (or maybe three) clergies.
dragonheartman
Developer, Starless Umbra / Heroes of Umbra
2966
If you're not getting any exp, it means you're overpowered, congrats! Yes that also means you'll automatically destroy enemies you touch. (exception: church enemies triggered by the clergymen because those are technically event battles)

I haven't implemented this yet for the world map.

Regarding the church, you can but it's somewhat random how difficult it is to save them. I think there are only five you can find.

Text color of the recipe dictates how difficult it is to make.

Thanks for all your bug reports.
author=dragonheartman
If you're not getting any exp, it means you're overpowered, congrats!


That was unexpected :-p

And, maybe raise the overpower bar a little because the monsters in the cave were still putting up a good fight when I fought them at Level 7.
(And level 8 is pretty easily reachable)

Thanks for the wonderful game.
for some reason attacks do not generate ep for me ...
Is the rest of the advanced systems working for you, kalalas? For instance, are the monsters animated?

If not, you might have hit the same bug I hit at the beginning (seems an issue with Windows 8 64-Bit), it's solved by putting the DynPlugins folder into the game which you can get here.
I finished the latest demo a few days ago and I have to say I'm impressed. The character development has been good so far. Chapter 1 felt like it flew right by. I honestly expected it to be longer

I'm looking forward to the release of the next chapter.
Do you get anything good for beating the wolf meter minigame in the prologue? It seems that the game continues on even if I lose.

Edit: Nevermind, an earlier post said no. Still, it's a pretty fun game so far. Also, is there any way to flee from random encounters?
author=Bugfragged
Do you get anything good for beating the wolf meter minigame in the prologue? It seems that the game continues on even if I lose.

Edit: Nevermind, an earlier post said no. Still, it's a pretty fun game so far. Also, is there any way to flee from random encounters?

It's been a while since I've played the demo (only been about a month but my memory is absolutely terrible :P) when in the battle menu screen scroll to see if there are more options that are out of sight, that is all I can really suggest. If you don't see it there it's not possible to flee :P
I seem to be having trouble in my download
when I go to the first boss battle of the game and you have to use Clyde's yell and stuff I cannot use it ._.
Is it a bug?, cause when I replayed incase I accidently used it to much of it, but it stayed the same ._.
dragonheartman
Developer, Starless Umbra / Heroes of Umbra
2966
When you attack you should generate EP, which can be used to cast Yell.
That doesn't seem to be working as well :| I can attack just fine, but I cannot Generate
Also when ever I pick up a new weapon that teaches me how to use a special attack
I don't get it ._. it stays the same