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Finding a Voice

  • Scourge
  • 02/01/2018 02:10 AM
  • 1766 views
Hi all! First, a quick progress report to start things off.

Since last week, I've had the time to completely map one more dungeon, which was a doozy. It's much more puzzle-focused than previous locations, which is good but also means I probably spent more time on it than I'd have liked to. However, it's a 'cool' location in terms of gameplay and design, so it was worth the work. I've also mapped the remaining town, which just leaves a single dungeon left to work out on this side of things.

Regarding 'cool boss fight' that I mentioned in a previous release, I've found a script that can do most of what I need done for the battle, so now it's just a matter of doing some things through events that the script can't handle and then a lot of testing.

The last foe is the writing. I have an outline for plot, so I'm not concerned with the big picture, but the actual creating events and giving them things to do will take some time. You all might be happy to know that this chapter is much more linear than the first, so bye-bye backtracking (except for one brief sequence near the end).

There are some minor tasks that still need completed, but I'm feeling confident about that end of February/beginning of March release, provided all goes well. (All will probably not go well.)

Anyway, back to the title of this update. Some of you might have noticed Liberty raising some - extremely valid - concerns regarding the game feeling slightly derivative. These are concerns I agree with. So, in order to help this game find its voice, I'm going to give the characters a voice.

Not literally, they won't be voice-acted, but the major heroes (Marcia, Errol, and two others) will actually have lines and a personality and all that jazz. Someone on another site suggested this originally, but said that all characters should. Due to the extreme amount of customization, that's not going to happen, but giving the central characters personalities is something that I think can help this game start to stand apart.

I have other ideas in the pipeline, but that's the only change I'm really sold on at the moment. This will be, hopefully, applied to the next release, so you might actually want to play back through Chapter One!

As always, if you have feedback regarding the game, please let me know!

Posts

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im happy to see how its all going, and im happy that the main characters will have dialog, that was something wich bothered me to be honest, now if it was me (wich you arent, and im not saying you should be) i would DEFINETLY make dialog and even backstory for all the possible characters, that is because 1: with such a diverse and customizable cast each personality doesnt need to be super contrived or anything, it just needs to be interesting or fun, and 2: im a mad man who takes pleasure in categorizing and coming up with many variations of the same thing (in this case variations of party members), so it would not require a lot of efort or even time for me to do it, since i would think those things up to distract myself and kill time whenever i found myself bored or simply not thinking a lot at the moment, but as i explained that is not a trait most people share, but who knows? if you wouldnt mind i might even come up some rough backgrounds, personalities and dialogs for each character after playing through each chapter and then just giving you all of it, again, if you wouldnt mind me intruding on your project.
Scourge
I used to make games. I still do, but I used to too.
1605
author=SoulAuron
if you wouldnt mind i might even come up some rough backgrounds, personalities and dialogs for each character after playing through each chapter and then just giving you all of it, again, if you wouldnt mind me intruding on your project.


I really appreciate the offer, and I think I'm going to decline. I'm a bit of a control freak when it comes to writing and this project as a whole and I would feel uncomfortable outsourcing any part of this project. I even debated whether or not to ask for testers instead of just doing all the testing myself for a long time.

I agree that writing backstory or dialog for all possible characters would be great, and I think it's a bigger task than most people realize. For example, there are 12 base classes, plus the 3 hidden classes for a total of 15, not counting the three master classes. Let's ignore those for now.

15 classes? Well, that's not bad at all! That's only fifteen backstories/personalities/whatever to develop!

That's partially correct.

There's 15 classes and each one can be male or female.

Okay, so 30?

Not quite.

Say someone chooses a Male Black Mage for Marcia and then another male Black Mage for Errol. If those two Black Mages have the exact same backstory and personality, that's not realistic. So then we would need 30 for each hero, totaling out at 120, not counting the master classes, which would then add another 24. That's 144 unique personalities and backstories. I'm a solid writer, but I'm not that good. This isn't a professional undertaking. It's a hobby, and one I enjoy, but I'm not getting paid to spend hours and hours creating all those characters. And even just doing the bare minimum would be a lot of effort towards a comparatively minor area of the game; I'd rather focus my energy on the bigger items. That's not to say that, someday, when the game is much closer to completion, I wouldn't come back and add this, but all signs point to it never happening.
author=Scourge
author=SoulAuron
if you wouldnt mind i might even come up some rough backgrounds, personalities and dialogs for each character after playing through each chapter and then just giving you all of it, again, if you wouldnt mind me intruding on your project.
I really appreciate the offer, and I think I'm going to decline. I'm a bit of a control freak when it comes to writing and this project as a whole and I would feel uncomfortable outsourcing any part of this project. I even debated whether or not to ask for testers instead of just doing all the testing myself for a long time.

I agree that writing backstory or dialog for all possible characters would be great, and I think it's a bigger task than most people realize. For example, there are 12 base classes, plus the 3 hidden classes for a total of 15, not counting the three master classes. Let's ignore those for now.

15 classes? Well, that's not bad at all! That's only fifteen backstories/personalities/whatever to develop!

That's partially correct.

There's 15 classes and each one can be male or female.

Okay, so 30?

Not quite.

Say someone chooses a Male Black Mage for Marcia and then another male Black Mage for Errol. If those two Black Mages have the exact same backstory and personality, that's not realistic. So then we would need 30 for each hero, totaling out at 120, not counting the master classes, which would then add another 24. That's 144 unique personalities and backstories. I'm a solid writer, but I'm not that good. This isn't a professional undertaking. It's a hobby, and one I enjoy, but I'm not getting paid to spend hours and hours creating all those characters. And even just doing the bare minimum would be a lot of effort towards a comparatively minor area of the game; I'd rather focus my energy on the bigger items. That's not to say that, someday, when the game is much closer to completion, I wouldn't come back and add this, but all signs point to it never happening.

that is perfectly understandable, i realized how many unique characters would be made, and precisely for that reason i was never expecting you to do it, its just that when i said i liked to come up many variations of a similar character i meant it, but if you dont want others taking part in your game development then there is nothing more to it, regardless i will keep in tune to see what comes up next :)
Scourge
I used to make games. I still do, but I used to too.
1605

that is perfectly understandable, i realized how many unique characters would be made, and precisely for that reason i was never expecting you to do it, its just that when i said i liked to come up many variations of a similar character i meant it, but if you dont want others taking part in your game development then there is nothing more to it, regardless i will keep in tune to see what comes up next :)


Thank you for understanding! If you would like to take a more active role, I could always use another tester. I appreciate the support.
Hey, this is great to hear. I do recommend also redesigning some parts that are more derivative than others (say, the class images which are very, very similar to HR and could be seen as actually being taken from the game and edited) and a few maps that feel extremely similar (the starting castle, for example, is very similar in layout).

That said, I'm glad you're actually considering these things and how to make your game stand out as it's own entity. If you'd like, I'd be happy to help with whipping something up for the class descriptions that will look like they don't belong to someone else's game.
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