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About the game
FADE is a direct sequel to my first game, BETA. The story picks up shortly after the ending event from the first game, and continues to build on the established main characters from the first game, as well as introduce new characters later on in the game. It is not required to have played the first game, though.
FADE stands for Fun, Adventure, Danger and Excitement. These are the 4 key-words that are the basis of my game.
  • Fun - The most important aspect of my game. It's supposed to be fun, and funny as well.
  • Adventure - The game revolves around the player going on an adventure. To explore places, and to meet people within the game world.
  • Danger - There will be villains. There will be treacherous locations. There will be challenges for the player to overcome.
  • Excitement - The game must offer enough variety in action, fun, story, everything to keep the player interested.


Planned features: - (subject to change)
  • A fun story, with lighthearted dialogue
  • Several different characters to join your party over the course of the game
  • A simple, yet deep, turn-based combat system
  • Equipment changing the looks of your character sprites and facesets
  • Several dungeons to explore
  • A variety of out-of-combat minigames, challenges and puzzles
  • Signposts readable from any direction!


Even though FADE is a sequel, it is absolutely not required to have played BETA in order to enjoy, or to understand what's going on in the game.
For those who have played the first game, there'll be an option before the game starts to fill in the actions and choices you have made in the first game. Those choices will carry over to stuff that happens in the second game. Example: If you got to befriend Eldin in the first game, she will be your friend in this game.



Plot & Main characters
PLOT

After helping the people in Beta town, Roth was rewarded with a huge airship, made by the scientist. Together with his li'l bro, Thieme, and his best buddy, Rage, the three of them have set out on an adventure! Not long after departing, they pick up Eldin, a friendly girl from Beta Town. She has lived most of her life in her parent's house, and has always dreamed of going on an adventure.

Suddenly, the Prince of Darkness appears! He doesn't appreciate the group of adventurers flying around that close to his home, and launches an attack on the party and the airship. The chaos summoned by the Prince of Darkness causes heavy damage to the airship, forcing it into making a crash landing. It is there where the real adventure starts... (dun dun dun!)

ROTH - THE THUNDERGOD

Roth is the game's main character. He's the leader of the Battler trio, and a pretty relaxed guy with a witty attitude most of the time. In battle, Roth controls the powers of lightning and electricity to shock his foes.

THIEME - THE KINGPIN

Thieme is Roth's younger brother. He likes to sleep, a lot. Besides sleeping, Thieme is interested in exploring the unknown, learning new things, and meeting people from other parts of the world. In battle, Thieme uses the power of earth to do his bidding.

RAGE - THE DRAGOON

Best buddy of both Roth and Thieme. Rage is a cool guy, a hothead, and has a heart of gold. He likes to act all big and bad, but everyone knows he has a soft side too, specifically for women. In battle, Rage likes to turn up the heat, using fire and flames.

ELDIN - THE LADY

Having lived most of her life inside her parent's house, Eldin has always dreamed of going on an adventure. Her time has finally come to do so. Eldin is a friendly person, with a positive outlook on life. In battle, Eldin wields the powers of light to smite her foes and to protect her friends.

PRINCE OF DARKNESS

The Prince of Darkness lives in the Castle of Darkness, located in the Shadepeak Mountains. It is there where he plots his next evil plan. Some of the things he dislikes are RPG Adventurers, people who mispronounce his real name, and finding hairs in his soup.



The current demo for the game is around 3-4 hours long.

Credits
As the game is still in development, and subject to change, a complete list of credits will be added once the game is completely finished.

Plugins:
  • Cherry
  • Cerberus
  • Dragonheartman
  • PepsiOtaku

Latest Blog

Rage's Skillset


Aura of Fury: Grants targeted ally Attack+ for x full turns and cures Sleep. Restores 2 MP to Rage.
0MP
A powerful Aura that is especially effective on allies with the ability to attack more than once per turn. The question here is, do you spend a turn buffing up an ally's Attack for several turns, or forget about it and just bash in the enemy's face with your axe?

Burn: Deals moderate Fire damage to target foe and has a chance to inflict Burn.
12MP
Slightly less effective than the elemental versions of his friends' Skills, due to Rage's low Mystic stat, but the chance to inflict Burn still makes it a strong choice.

Magical Flame: Restores some of Rage's MP and cures Poison.
6MP
The same as Eldin's Mystical Light Skill, and essential if you plan on keeping Rage to continuously cast Spells.

Wildfire: Deals more damage to all foes when there are more foes on the battlefield, up to a maximum of 5.
15MP
Arguably the strongest multi-target spell in the main party's skillset. Should obviously be used on a field full of enemies.

Heat to Health: Doubles Rage's HP for x turns.
8MP
Rage already has the highest base HP of the main party, but clearly that's not enough for him. Doubling his health is Rage's way to survive powerful attack striking his face. Note: When sacrificing HP, the amount gets taken off by counting from Rage's base HP value, not his doubled value from Heat to Health.

Dragon Grinder: Strikes the target foe with the power of Dragons.
18MP
Simple and to the point. Rage has no need for fancy effects on his ultimate attack. Just hit the enemy with all your might and hope they die from it. Great to use as a finishing move.

For The Greater Good: Healls all allies. Cuts Rage's HP by 20%.
12MP
Rage's way to contribute to the party in a meaningful way that doesn't involve bashing in the faces of enemies. His allies will be healed for a decent amount, but Rage himself will lose 20% HP, and can potentially down him if you aren't careful. But it's all for the greater good!

No Pain No Gain: Cuts Rage's HP in half. Boosts Attack and Mystic by a huge amount for x turns. Can be cast only once per battle.
12MP
A mighty power-up that does inflict serious damage onto Rage himself, this Skill shouldn't be used without some pre-planning. The effect only lasts for several turns, so make sure to get the most out of it!

Fists of Fury: Fists of fire and flames. Can be cast only once per battle.
12MP
Rage's second Elite Skill, making you choose between this or No Pain No Gain. Much like Thieme's Blackrock Cannon Skill, this replaces the equipped weapon with a more powerful option. In Rage's case this makes his fists burn with flames of fury, making his regular attacks stronger than ever.

Rage is built to dish out large amounts of damage, but that doesn't mean it's the only thing he can do. Applying Fury buffs might arguably be even better than attacking himself in some cases, and with For the Greater Good, he can even assist Eldin in keeping the party alive. While his Elite Skills are both geared towards offensive play, one is for a big short term bursts, the other is better for long, drawn out fights.
Rage's weakness is the ability to keep himself alive. His HP is high, but he'll burn through it quickly with his mediocre Defences and when sacrificing HP for the greater good.
  • Hiatus
  • Milennin
  • RPG Tsukuru 2003
  • Adventure RPG
  • 03/08/2013 03:21 PM
  • 03/22/2024 03:30 PM
  • 01/01/2025
  • 137619
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Posts

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Alright. The demo for the second game is out. Time to take a look. :)
I'm gonna look into playing the demo too. The artwork improved from the last game, and I love the sprites.
author=Clareain_Christopher
I'm gonna look into playing the demo too. The artwork improved from the last game, and I love the sprites.


Thanks.=P I'd appreciate it if you could leave some feedback after playing the demo.
author=Milennin
author=Clareain_Christopher
I'm gonna look into playing the demo too. The artwork improved from the last game, and I love the sprites.
Thanks.=P I'd appreciate it if you could leave some feedback after playing the demo.
I'll upload a video tomorrow. The first boss in your game is HARD, and I semi-love it.
Dude's a cheap-ass punk though.
Freakin hentai monsters. Don't think I'm puzzled as to why Prince of Darkness would do that to my main characters.
author=Clareain_Christopher
author=Milennin
I'll upload a video tomorrow. The first boss in your game is HARD, and I semi-love it.
Dude's a cheap-ass punk though.
Freakin hentai monsters. Don't think I'm puzzled as to why Prince of Darkness would do that to my main characters.
Thanks, and yeah, I realise I made the boss too difficult. He'll be toned down in future versions. I hope it's not too bad, since it's such a short demo, and the boss fight is pretty much the end of the game so far.
And lol, the monster design wasn't intended to be related to hentai (I don't care for it), but I knew some people would think it is, when I was drawing it.xD
Subbed just because I want to see a game where your looks change based on what equipment your wearing.
I am download number 2 in FADE V1.2. The reason for fanservice is weird. Maybe we will have a beach level in the game and the swimsuits are foreshadowing that. (I'd hate to imagine the only reason for swimsuits is to have black tentacles ripping clothing off.)
Well, the reason for the fanservice is cause I thought it would be hilarious as a story element. Like, how many games strip their heroes of their gear and make them start their adventure in their underwear?xD But I also want to give the player the freedom to do with their outfits what they want, and reflect that in the character sprites. I don't like it in games when I take all items off my characters, but the hero's sprite still shows his regular outfit.
And if a person wants to play the whole game with the characters in their underwear, he deserves the right to do so (even though it might get pretty tough later on xD).
Played through the demo. Fun so far. Now Ill finish more of beta to have more answers to the start questions. Just curios how different does it make the game?
Marrend
Guardian of the Description Thread
21781
author=bigtime
curios


I now have to post "Fine relics and curios!" whenever I see this mistake. Not that I don't know what you meant to say, but!
author=bigtime
Played through the demo. Fun so far. Now Ill finish more of beta to have more answers to the start questions. Just curios how different does it make the game?


There'll be differences here and there, but don't expect a complete different game. Differences will mostly be dialogue related, and a few events. The biggest difference will be with Eldin, depending on whether you become her friend in Beta or not.
There'll also be references made to stuff that happened in Beta that'll be easier (but not required) to understand if you've played the game.

Glad that you enjoyed the demo.=P
There are two major problems within the first 20 min.

First, no title screen besides a default blue one.

Second, there's major lag in that forest. Check to make sure there aren't a ton of parallel events processing.
author=bulmabriefs144
There are two major problems within the first 20 min.

First, no title screen besides a default blue one.

Second, there's major lag in that forest. Check to make sure there aren't a ton of parallel events processing.


How's a title screen an issue for an early demo? That's probably on the bottom of my priority list.

Yeah, there's a few events running in the forest, but it doesn't lag on my computer (admittedly I have a pretty decent PC). Do you play in full screen? Because that seems to help smoothen the FPS for me.
It's slow even on my faster computer. And yes, this is fullscreen.

What events are there, and we can see if this can be delagged.

Also, your AttackBlock code gave me an idea on how to make things weak only to elemental weapons or to make ghost enemies. The code is a bit different from yours, but thanks for the idea. (Also, you don't need to have it set to 999. I set it to 0, and it worked too)
There's only 1 extra parallel event running on the map, and it's not even a large one. There are tons of graphical events all across the map for mapping purposes, though (total of 800+ events on that forest map). Could that be a potential cause of slowdown?
Technically you could remove a lot of them, but it would make some parts of the map look a little incomplete...

And NP, hope you can make something cool with it in your own game. I set it to 999 just for lolz (cause I can!)
Uhhhh, yea that could be an issue.

I have only one comparable event, a puzzle modeled after that Zelda puzzle where you have to only touch each floor tile once (9:06). That's almost as many tiles, since it's the big room version. And yes it does become choppy. Any you can merge/trim?

Well, I'll look at the page myself later and see if anything can be simplified for slower computers. Also, I'm liking your game so far. This the latest demo?

I'm watching Columbo right now.
It could be possible by merging some common multiple layer tile combinations into 1 tile, but I'm already at my limits of what I can place on the chipset file's secondary layer. I think I could fit in 2 more tiles, though, that could probably remove at least ~50 events. If you've had a look at the map, you've seen there's also a ton of events used on the monster agro system, and a whole bunch around the 2 slopes.
edit: I've just had a look at the map, and replaced a fair amount of graphics events with tiles now. I think I can move a few more tiles from secondary to primary layer to probably shave off another 40-50 or so graphics event (coming to a total of ~100-150 less events on the map). I have no idea how much of an impact it would actually make on computers that experience lag in the area.
I've another map right after the forest with a large amount of events, too (around 650 total), I'll work on minimising the numbers on there as well, so hopefully you get a better experience on there once I update the demo.
By the way, is there a way you could perhaps check your FPS while you're playing? I just used Fraps with FPS overlay in my game, and it runs at a steady 60FPS in every area.

This helped me a lot, because it made me realise how many objects I could simply move to the primary layer without affecting the quality or functionality of the map and frees up a lot of space on the secondary layer (which seems to fill up really fast for me).

Glad you're liking it. Yeah, the current demo ends at the campfire at the end of the forest map. I'll have a new demo up some time (would be ~1 month at the earliest I'd guess) which will introduce a few new zones + dungeon.
I think I arrived on the problem.

At least a third of your events are dedicated to overhead tiling. This makes a ton of tiles that shouldn't be there, if you can tile edit better (for example, when a plane crashes, it clears all brush near it, so those trees should actually cap instead of extending one more time. Then, there's also the size of the map. You could probably split out the map into four sections if you made smooth transitions and lined stuff up.

The ship area being one. Dropping down from the ship, the main wandering area being the second. The hidden areas (like Captain Nuts), and some of the other stuff being a third. The boss tree, campfire and shadow boss areas being the last. If you split it, areas will receive less strain from parallel events.

Which brings me to our final issue. I saw what appeared to be the parallel/auto events in the corner. They're universally done locally with code. There are two problems with this. One, it's cycling events over and over several times per second (Open Menu ON/OFF is a good example), and more importantly, they're doing so locally. I have a ton of non-very-common common events, as I figured out something. When I put stuff directly on a map, it does the loading on the map, which means while the screen is being refreshed, it's pooling resources trying to handle events. On the other hand, replacing all these with just the name of "common" event, and End Event Processing, like so:

Call: OpenMenuToggle
End Event Processing

Pretty much this cancels out lag. I think it's because the computer in question does the process separately, and not as part of the local processes, like handling monsters. I'm not sure, but I do know that cutting that stuff out and into a common event not only made for a generally easier edit, since I could across the board change stuff, but except for stuff like parallax events (which doesn't seem faster regardless of what I do), was generally much faster. So, common events should solve the lag problem.

I can't check FPS (also, that might be the FPS of the video recorder, not of the game). But I know it was more or less okay during the opening ship events, got slightly choppy midway through the forest wander, was okay during the tree battle, and right about the point where we faced the big shadow again, and the towels getting laid down, etc, things slowed to such a crawl that even text was choppy.



Yeah, I just did another round of tile cleaning on the forest map, and have been able to get rid of most of the overhead tiles now. I think the total amount of events on the map now has easily been cut in half, maybe even more than that. Wish there was an event counter...

I'm not going to change anything about the current map size, as the goal for my game is to give that sense of being in a whole world instead of travelling from square to square (much like a Pokémon game). I do realise the forest map is quite large... I plan on making any future maps smaller than this one from now on (also to save time on mapping).

I doubt the few extra parallel processes are causing trouble on this map. I just checked, and there are only 3. Both of which get de-activated at a certain point, most likely early on during your time on that map (one at reaching level 4, the other when getting low on HP). The third parallel process is the Shade Cloak, which is only active by activating an item.
The menu ON/OFF thing is an auto-start event on both pages, not a parallel process. It activates only when opening and leaving the Menu. A common event wouldn't work very well, since it does different things, depending on what map you're on (and in some cases also different events on the same map).

The FPS on Fraps does show ingame FPS. It shows a drop to the 40s during the start of a battle... probably due to loading all the combat data. Any way, the main FPS drop seems to occur during the campfire event. Maybe it's the glow effect that's going on during that scene.
That's weird... I didn't get any lag in battle. It was wandering the map that was choppy.

I'm gonna test without them.

There's one possibility that could be happening. If you say it slows stuff down during battle, maybe occasionally, stuff sort clogs up, so to speak. Try having some after-battle thing shut stuff off.

The only other thing I can think is cutting down specifically on the Berry code by doing it internally. It's rather hefty, as is the Level 4 Notification.
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