Halloween Flop

So creating even an extremely short RPG in a month is not something I am capable of. Or maybe the lesson is I am not capable of crafting a custom battle system in a month. Haha. Either way, I have a feeling the next contest entry we do won't be an RPG.

But just because we didn't make the deadline doesn't mean this is dropped. We'll finish this up over the next few weeks and post it once it is finished.

To make this post more than just "oh hey we failed the deadline," I'm going to talk a bit about the game. List format because I'm having difficulty forming it into a coherent paragraph format.

-Battles revolve around the classic rock-paper-scissors, only it's astral-undead-magical. Astrals cannot be hit by physical attacks, but are weak to magic. Undead have no means to damage astral beings, but are effective against the living. Magical, which are living, are weak to the powers of the undead, but deal significant damage to astrals. I'm not sure why I felt the need to write out that basic triangle.

-Your party consists of one of each type: Agatha the witch, Delila the vampire, and Bobby the ghost. Each member has six skills, although one is not available at first.

-There are no levels. There is no equipment. There are no items. There are only these skills. Everyone and everything has 100 HP and maybe 100 of their other points if applicable. The idea was to keep it simple for the deadline, but we'll see how balancing goes.

-Each type has a different cost for skills. Magical has a limited MP pool. Undead gains BP points over time. Astral must use their own HP.

-Every battle is a three vs three format, and each one is unique (or at least, the characters are). There is a total of 8 encounters. We were originally going to have some mook battles, but then we designed the "bosses" and they called for companions and well, I don't want to say much more than we had fun. Sidenote: You are healed after every fight. (probably)

-The plan was to have you pick the order your team executes their actions in. I've been flip-flopping on how I want this to work though. The original plan was the order you enter them was the order they executed (you could switch whose action you were selecting somehow). The second plan was to have a window after you had select all the skills where you'd just select the order by clicking them in order (if that makes sense). Also, allies and enemies would take turns. So you'd have all the ally moves and then all the enemy moves.

-On the graphical side of things, to go with the simple approach, we wanted to try our hand at a gameboy-esque color palette. Instead of green, however, we went with orange for a more fitting tone. We also designed everything at 320x240 with 16x16 tiles and doubled it. But that's more Maki's domain, so I don't have much to add except I had fun making the title screen.

I think that's about it for now. I hope that at least somewhat made sense. This probably won't be the best thing Maki and I have put out, with so much focus on a weak area of ours, but I hope it will have charm. The gameplay part is still very much in development (I never even finished coding the battle system T.T), so I will gladly take comments and suggestions.

Unrelated P.S. Wreck-It Ralph is amazing, and you should all go see it.