• 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
  • 899960
  • 352
  • 17855

Posts

Is the full release gonna be put up soon? I've been looking forward to playing the whole game for years and haven't heard any news since 2013...
One of the best RPG Maker games, I highly recommend it.
One of the best RPG Maker games, I highly recommend it.
One of the best RPG Maker games, I highly recommend it.
I'm excited to see this project is still alive and well after so many years. ;p It's always had a lot of my respect. Just serves as a testament that Rm2k3 games can still be great in the right hands (and with enough time and dedication!).
dragonheartman
Developer, Starless Umbra / Heroes of Umbra
2966
On Win8 with my i7 ultrabook fullscreen gets a staggering 25fps due to some filtering algorithm I can't figure out how to disable. The game runs like butter windowed, but the point is 2k3 is just really hard to work with these days. Heroes of Umbra still takes precedence, as it's a much easier project to tackle and it's already feature-complete.

I'll revisit SU in, let's say, the start of 2015. Ideally it'll be something that I can be even more proud of, without ripped and edited resources from obscure SNES JRPGs? Who knows. I'm still around though and working on stuff.
Hey dhm, any idea when you will be able to release the next chapter?
I loved the game. I played on easy, but I think the other option would be all right (I chose that because I have played some ridiculously unbalanced games recently). The gameplay and story were pretty straightforward and catching, I couldn't move away from my PC for a long time. All the "minigames" were nice, except minecart which was lagging and thus unplayable. But that could be problem with my quite slow PC. I liked the battle system too, idea with EP increasing is good. I was pretty pissed off, when the game ended abruptly :) Hopefully development will continue on this one. Thumbs up!
author=ExecutionGlitch
I figured out why the font was wonky- turns out I didn't have the actual font installed. Ooops.
1. Did you installed the rm2k3 runtimepackage? Most issues with missing/crappy fonds are, in my experience, missing rtp's... just google you'll find it for sure... Thats why I have pre-installed all rtp's for all rpg-maker versions: VX,VX ace, rm2k,rm2k3 and some add-ons I dont remember yet. I NEVER had any font issues at all...

2. Be sure to install the fonds that are included in the gamefolder. Just double-click them.

3. Try to download the game again. Its always possible that files are missing due to connection issues or something familiar...
I cant read my font.... is there a way to fix it? Or is it supposed to be like that?
I cant read my font.... is there a way to fix it? Or is it supposed to be like that?
Ever since I saw some random clips of this game when I was looking through Youtube I was interested. Now that I've actually read and seen other screenshots/videos etc. I am so excited for this game. I hope you stick through with this. I'm probably gonna wait when you release all chapters until I play it, but good luck to you ;)
dragonheartman
Developer, Starless Umbra / Heroes of Umbra
2966
author=Tau
I'd love to hear something about this game man. It's been too long , were all in suspense here!
I'm working on the final dungeon for Heroes of Umbra then I'll hop back on this. :)
Tau
RMN sex symbol
3293
I'd love to hear something about this game man. It's been too long , were all in suspense here!
author=dragonheartman
Yeah! I need to fix up some ugly and awkward dialogue in the first few chapters.
Currently that's still in planning; using 2k3 is burning me out so I want to make sure all the dialogue is written before I stumble around implementing cutscenes.

Around chapter 4 and beyond I am pretty happy with the game so relatively little will change from that point on. There's just a ton of plot-holes that need cleaning up.


Do you have any plans to release chapter 2 in the near future?
dragonheartman
Developer, Starless Umbra / Heroes of Umbra
2966
author=Linkis
This ain't right :(
Downloaded and began playing. Realized I tried this game before...
Had to stop shortly after leaving town because I simply could not find my way
around due to the RMK3 graphics.

Not knocking the game at all. Just the graphics...

Wish it had been make in XP or Ace...
I can see them fine :)

Good luck with your game dragonheartman, looks like it will be a lot of fun for those who can see :)

Try turning off overlays or increasing your display brightness. When I started this project XP and Ace didn't exist.
Linkis
Don't hate me cause I'm Cute :)
1025
This ain't right :(
Downloaded and began playing. Realized I tried this game before...
Had to stop shortly after leaving town because I simply could not find my way
around due to the RMK3 graphics.

Not knocking the game at all. Just the graphics...

Wish it had been make in XP or Ace...
I can see them fine :)

Good luck with your game dragonheartman, looks like it will be a lot of fun for those who can see :)