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Christmas Updates

Merry Christmas! Hope you're staying healthy and handling the holiday season well. I have more updates for you today. Let's dive straight in.

Much less "prototypey"



Stats + skills are now awarded on level up. Items and equipment exist now. Enemies are balanced and positioned around the maps in ways that make more sense. Monsters currently never respawn! I'm going to experiment with this and see how it might discourage grinding and item hoarding. Combat will be more challenging but less frequent. Chests actually award items. All in all it is beginning to feel more like a "real" rpg.

More Menus



I've built out simple inventory, equip, skills, hotkeys, and save/load menu screens. These are far from polished, but the high-level functionality exists.

Misc Systems



Toasts now show up at the top of the screen when someone levels up, casts a spell, or finds an item. Secondary dialogue and tips appear unobtrusively along the bottom of the screen.

Juice



I've added some animations, particle effects, sounds, etc in an effort to make things look and feel a little more satisfying.

A Boss

I've implemented a boss prototype with some more challenging skills. It's still in the balancing/sprite design phase so I'll share more when that's complete.

What's Next?

I'm still marching towards a prototype some time early 2021 with the first 20 minutes of gameplay or so (fingers crossed). I'll be sharing that on discord first when it's ready. I've also started a twitter account specifically for game updates. Please check them out if you're interested in more.

Thanks for reading and take care.

Posts

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I can't see the particle effects image, but those other screens look really cool! I like the implementation of toasts, especially while moving. It makes it look very dynamic!
dragonheartman
Developer, Starless Umbra / Heroes of Umbra
2966
author=zaeran
I can't see the particle effects image, but those other screens look really cool! I like the implementation of toasts, especially while moving. It makes it look very dynamic!
Thank you! I've always felt dialogue in RPGs needed to be concise, but there's a lot of opportunity lost for character development (as an amateur writer anyway) within the dialogue. This was a good compromise, and it does not slow down the pace of the game. It is somewhat distracting during combat, but I think that can be balanced by slowing down or even pausing the dialogue within combat, still tweaking that a bit but I'm open to ideas.
Yeah it's probably the biggest argument for voice acting in games is telling the story Nier style while letting you fop around. Lot of AAA games kind of mess this up by making you slowwwwwwwly walk through what is clearly meant to stall for dialogue which already just feels like a cutscene anyway.

Text only you have to contend with what the player is paying attention to though and making sure the text can't last until the next cutscene/pivotal thing. I kind of like the idea of FF9's prompted scene system combined with this, where you can choose whether or not to "play" a dialogue scene as you run. Sorta like listening to an optional audio log but with the text counterpart.
dragonheartman
Developer, Starless Umbra / Heroes of Umbra
2966
author=Darken
Yeah it's probably the biggest argument for voice acting in games is telling the story Nier style while letting you fop around. Lot of AAA games kind of mess this up by making you slowwwwwwwly walk through what is clearly meant to stall for dialogue which already just feels like a cutscene anyway.

Text only you have to contend with what the player is paying attention to though and making sure the text can't last until the next cutscene/pivotal thing. I kind of like the idea of FF9's prompted scene system combined with this, where you can choose whether or not to "play" a dialogue scene as you run. Sorta like listening to an optional audio log but with the text counterpart.
Totally agreed. I think having some guidelines here as to what I consider a cutscene (mandatory, plot progression + maybe some character development/worldbuilding) vs secondary dialogue (character development/worldbuilding) would help out tremendously.

FF9 and Tales of Symphonia did this really well. The secondary cutscenes were there, and they did give a break from the main gameplay, albeit interruptingly so. They have to be somewhat "ignorable" by design, which is really tricky to get right for me. This is good stuff to think about, thanks.
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