FADE

FADE - Character Biography




ROTH

Age: 20
Occupation: RPG Adventurer
Alignment: Chaotic Good
Strengths: Helps out people. Determined. Not easily scared by most things (definitely not by skeletons).
Weaknesses: Helps out people only when offered a decent reward or if he feels like it. Lazy at times. Scared of spiders.
Likes: Adventure, Daydreaming, Drawing, Baseball, Hitting stuff.
Dislikes: Books, Reading, Waiting, Spiders, People making fun of his hair.

Roth is a born adventurer. Despite having lived most of his life in one of the most remote and boring towns in existence, Roth has somehow managed to still get into plenty of trouble over the years and experience more excitement in a single day than you and I will have in a lifetime.
With both his parents gone, Roth has been forced to take care of himself since he was a child. At young age he started to take up the job of Village Adventurer, completing tasks and jobs for the people living in Beta Town whenever they were too lazy to do stuff themselves. This has gotten him into some strange and unexpected situations, such as pushing people into tar lakes, fighting off flipping ninjas, journeys through space and time, racing on cows, and more.
In his free time, however, Roth likes to take it easy and he gets easily lost in thoughts as he daydreams away. And suddenly wakes up hours later, realising he has been sitting in the same spot all that time, doing absolutely nothing. He also likes to draw comics and cartoons that he secretly sells. His comic series "The Battlers" is crazy popular and there are entire stores dedicated to selling solely Battler comics. Though these places are often mistaken for empty warehouses, as the comics are completely sold out before they are even released, resulting in permanent empty store shelves.
Needless to say, this has caused his ego to grow out of reasonable proportions. He now likes to call himself the "God of Thunder" even though he isn't able to cast more than a puny electric spark. His friends have to keep reminding him that he isn't really the God of Thunder. If only Roth would listen to them.

Before he set out on his grand adventure, Roth lived in the SMASH-HOUSE. A wooden shack large enough to fit him, his younger brother (Thieme) and best friend (Rage) inside while still having room left for a TV, several holes in the floor leading to underground caverns, a stove and a long wooden table. The SMASH-HOUSE was his base of operations and was where he spent many a day with his buddies smashing TVs, playing baseball with whatever object they could find, punching and kicking Jiggs, arguing with Henk & Jan (two talking skulls) and competing in burping contests.
One day, while on a job for the local mad scientist who needed a test subject for his new dimortation device, Roth had managed to find blueprints of a huge airship, powered by four mythical Essences. After somehow managing to collect all four required Essences, Roth had convinced the scientist to build him the airship as shown on the blueprints to allow him to leave Beta Town and set out on a grand adventure.

After finally leaving Beta Town, together with Thieme and Rage, Roth was just happy going wherever and doing whatever comes on his path. But while shooting cannonballs at birds to collect meat for Rage who was hungry, he managed to anger the Prince of Darkness, who then destroyed Roth's statue of himself in a fit of rage, and then proceeded to set their airship on fire, forcing Roth's party to make a crash landing in the middle of the Dusk Woods, far away from civilisation.
While Roth's adventure didn't start off particularly well, he isn't going to feel bad about it. After all, he's still on an adventure, and whether that be in the air or on the ground, that shouldn't matter. An adventure is an adventure to Roth. Losing his airship is merely a setback, one that the Prince of Darkness is going to pay for some time.

In combat, Roth is a competent and well-balanced fighter, not sporting many weaknesses. Roth wields the powers of lightning, and even though he can't cast more than a puny electric spark at the start of his adventure, he's bound to learn many more. Utility-wise, Roth focuses mostly on helping to restore mana to either himself or his friends. This can be of great help to accelerate the party's damage output through the use of spells, which are typically stronger than physical attacks.

FADE - Demo V1.5

-Added one new area, dungeon and house.
-Added multiple new monster encounters.
-Added 2 more mini-boss fights and 2 more boss fights.
-Added skills for higher level Heroes.
-Added additional equipment pieces.
Auras are introduced in this version. Auras go into the helmet slot, and while equipped, they will grant your Hero with a power that will activate itself during combat. The activation trigger is determined by the Hero's Speed stat, so the higher Speed your Hero has, the more likely it is for their equipped Aura to activate.
-Added additional animations to some monsters.
-Added signposts, now readable from any direction!



-Updated and further stabilised the combat system.
It's so stable now that you'll be able to fit horses in it. Seriously, try to break it now. Spoiler: you won't succeed.
-Updated Speed stat on all Heroes, and Attack stat on Eldin.
Speed stat update was required to balance out the activation of Auras at higher levels. Eldin has been made slightly (very slightly) stronger.
-Removed empty frames on battle animations.
A lot of the battle animations had empty animation frames, causing a delay in queued up actions. Having removed these empty frames should help speed up combat a little bit.
-Lowered the HP on some monsters.
-Lowered the amount of monsters in some encounters.
These two changes should make encounters in the Dusk Woods go by a little quicker. To players who are still frustrated by encounters that take too long, I have 2 tips:
-Use your skills to deal more damage and to accelerate your damage output.
-Use Smoke Bombs to flee from an encounter.
-Animated flowers and bushes to make the world feel more alive.
-Fixed some of Rage's dialogue to make it more in line with his character.
-Made it easier to hit the birds with the cannons in the intro mini-game.

The Book of Combat has NOT been updated in this demo version. It should still be functional throughout the current demo, but does not include new pages. An overhaul of the entire feature is planned for a future demo version to make it less cluttered and easier to edit.

It is not recommended to continue playing on save files from previous FADE demo versions.
If you wish to continue from a later point in the game, please download the "FADE - Save File Archives" on FADE's game page on rpgmaker.net.

If you come across any bugs or glitches, please report them to me on here or e-mail me at: battlers_forever@msn.com

It's been a while since I last wrote a blog entry, but I've been on a break from my game for some weeks and haven't gotten much done. But after this break I'm feeling refreshed and ready to get back to my game for a while again, and I just feel like writing something.

So, in this blog I'll write a bit about a part of game design I really like. It's the little details in the game world. When working on my game, I often focus on the big and important parts, since they take the most time and energy to create. And it's easy to forget that what makes an RPG really fun isn't necessarily, or only, the main path, but it's all the little details hidden in the world around.

This is where my friend, Rage, comes in. I tell and show him everything I'm adding to my game. I let him play through every new part I create, and he helps me come up with ideas to fill up the spots and corners that feel a bit empty or boring. I'll admit that at first I really felt it to be better to create everything myself, but as he started to suggest really good and funny stuff, I've been giving him more freedom to add some stuff to the game himself (through me, of course) It helps creating a more varied game world, with little surprises around every corner, and fill up the empty places.
Even by just talking about my game with him, it's much easier to think of new things to add, rather than trying to come up with everything on my own.
When I created BETA, my first game, I kept development almost completely to myself, and worked completely alone. I'd planned on doing the same with FADE, but it's so much larger and more complex than BETA ever was, it really does help to have someone else come up with ideas as well. Even though I'm still doing all the game making myself, it's definitely starting to feel more like a co-op project now.

One of those little details would be the gramophone, which can be first found in Ray's house. The gramophone lets me add some of the songs I really like, but wouldn't fit as ambient music anywhere, in the game. It's a completely optional thing, but hopefully players can appreciate it.

A short blog entry to introduce a race unique to the world of FADE: fleep.

What are fleep you might ask. Simply put, they are sheep that fly. Well, they are in their most basic form, which is this... cute, innocent-looking thing:

You'll start encountering fleep on the Firaea Plains, the area just south of the Dusk Woods. Further in the game you'll encounter larger, weirder, and more corrupted versions of these animals... (not gonna spoil anything, mwahaha)

The art was done by my friend Rage, and animated by me. He has drawn quite a few monsters so far, his first ones will be making an appearance on the Firaea Plains, but there'll be much more by him in later areas. It helps that his pixel skills are pretty equal to mine, and that his style isn't too different. This helps keeping monster design fairly consistent troughout the game.

The new FADE demo (V1.4) adds a new piece of content, the Dusk Woods dungeon. The dungeon is a way for the player to get comfortable with the combat system and learn how to use their skills effectively. Before entering you'll get a choice to let Eldin come with you, or to go exploring on your own. To go alone should be a little harder than going with Eldin, but either option should result in hopefully a good dungeon experience. The dungeon includes a few hidden treasures, an optional mini-boss that rewards you with your first weapon, and your first real boss fight. A full demo playthrough would probably take anything between 60-90 minutes.
I've had a few people play through it and their reactions were pretty positive, but I always appreciate more feedback and opinions.

For those who have played a previous demo version of FADE, I have added a seperate save file download that'll allow you to skip the whole introduction part of the game (up to the point right after beating the first mini-boss).