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"If we all attack one of them at the same time, we'll quickly have an advantage. Killing them one by one will be much easier than trying to confront a whole group directly, don't you agree?"

"Think again. If we all rush at one enemy, we are only going to get in each other's way, we may even accidentally hurt each other. And you don't suppose the others will just randomly flail around if we allow them the room to surround and backstab us, right? Such a move would make us all extremely vulnerable."

"Oh... I hadn't thought of that..."



The Campaign is originally an entry for RMN's "Fundamental RPGology" contest with the goal of exploring unusual possibilties in RPG combat. Consisting of five unique fights, the game introduces and showcases the complex, event-based Team Duel Battle System. Tactical thinking and clever planning are essential to beat the challenges lying ahead.
This game was inspired by a tabletop RPG Campaign played in the "The Dark Eye" system.


Features:
- Fight 1 vs 1 - in a team. Their position on the battlefield decides which enemy a character can attack, which of their abilities they can use and whether items are usable or not.
- No MP. Each of the five team members has their own individual skill mechanic that adds a new layer of strategic risks and possibilities to the battle.
- No typical healing. Mending a body takes time and effort, even when using magic. All healing must happen over time and/or under specific circumstances.
- Death is not cheap. A knocked out character can still be saved - but if one of the heroes recieves the fatal blow, the entire battle is lost.
- Additional features including but not limited to: Injuries, weapon minimum damage, different damage calculations for weapon damage and magical damage, and an optional interactive component which provides a chance for some additional power.

Latest Blog

Time to Abort the Mission

If you are one of the few people who have followed this project for a while, you may have noticed the distinct lack of any sort of update for about a year and a half. The reason for this is unfortunately rather simple: I have done very little work on The Campaign over the course of the past year. And the more time passed, the more I became aware that when I did work on it, I did not get any enjoyment out of it. It's time to face the truth: The Campaign is going nowhere as a project at this point. Therefore, I am cancelling it permanantly.


The Campaign was originally created for the Fundamental RPGology contest, in which it even won the third prize, despite the fact that the contest version was very much flawed in numerous ways. For a long time, I felt obliged to finish a full and improved version that would add all the content I had originally planned, and address the problems the game currently had. And to be fair, I did put a lot of time and effort into trying to make that happen. I rebalanced or completely replaced skills, overhauled stats, added numerous features and visual clues to make the gameplay more transparent, and cleaned up a lot of my incredibly convoluted eventing. And all of that made it even more frustrating for me when it finally began to dawn on me that I would very likely not finish this project.

Why is that? Well, I can definitely say I learned a lot from creating this project: For example, I have become aware that I really dislike having to balance combat. I also was painfully made aware that a huge disadvantage of making a game with very complex mechanics is that after taking a break from it, getting back into it and re-learning one's own "coding" is very exhausting and demotivating.

But the most important lessons I learned are of a different kind. The aim behind creating The Campaign was to build my own battle system in RPG Maker based on events. And I successfully accomplished that mission! Working on this game taught me so much about efficiency in building mechanics, the economic use of variables, long-term planning in resource management, complex eventing in ways that I had never tried before, and taking constructive criticism. Many of the mistakes I made when developing The Campaign I will likely never make again. That is in itself a huge success.

However, I also realised something different, which is ultimately the other main reason I decided to cancel this project: Sometimes, one's ideals and plans do not work out in practice. I still like the basic concept I structured The Campaign around. But I have not only come to see that personally, I simply like turn-based combat less than more action-based systems. It just became clear to me that despite my best efforts, the combat in The Campaign is just not a lot of fun to play. No matter how proud I was of my own work, no matter how pleased with what I perceived to be the originality of the concept: Playing my own game did not feel engaging to me. Taking the perspective of the player, I perceived it as slow, one-dimensional, and simply boring.

Sometimes, an idea only sounds good on paper. Sometimes, a developer lacks the skill or insight to make a potentially good idea work well in practice. Regardless of which is true in this case: A feeling of obligation as the sole motivation for finishing a game that I neither enjoy working on nor think is enjoyable to play is just pointless, and not beneficial to anybody. This game has been a mental burden for me for too long now, and I want to be free of it.

Sometimes, you just have to admit defeat, return to camp to regroup, fill up your HP again, and keep the lessons of this moment in mind on your future campaigns. And that is what I intend to do. I hope you understand.

See you in future projects, everyone!
  • Cancelled
  • NeverSilent
  • RPG Maker XP
  • Tactics RPG
  • 08/18/2014 10:37 PM
  • 06/19/2016 05:21 PM
  • 08/28/2014
  • 23373
  • 6
  • 130

Posts

Pages: 1
unity
You're magical to me.
12540
Sounds interesting! I'll keep an eye on this :D
NeverSilent
Got any Dexreth amulets?
6280
Thank you, unity! I'm very glad to have caught your interest.
My first gamepage... Exciting!
Hi there! As you asked me for your game I though it would be better to give my oppinion here.

I didn't found any tutorial info outside the game. After you told me I searched for them and realized the files where somewhere else... my dumbness here.

I found the archer really usefull, she was strong and had usefull front and back row abilities. It wasn't that clear how to use the arrows, as I could go both fights without using "Quiver" command, missing the opportunity to try those alchemical arrows. Rushan was also a very good character. Akkina was like a defender or so, I learned how to use her in the second battle. Pius was ok in the front row, but I found him useless in the back row. About Beorn... I can't say he was useless, but I managed to go without using him for anything. His medic abilities were not as usefull as I expected. Probably more tough situations or so would have made him shine. I skipped his turns most of the time and found myself using him only in very specific situations.

About the damage inflicted to the enemies, I was clueless about what status I had inflicted to the enemies. I could see their HP going down, but I didn't know if they had 1 or more injuries, if they were stunned or so.

Overall again, I liked it very much!
NeverSilent
Got any Dexreth amulets?
6280
Cool. Thanks a lot, that definitely helps.

Yeah, I made Lea (the archer) a quite strong and well-rounded character on purpose, since she her arrows cost money and she needs to reload. You're right, though, Pius' cooldowns make him pretty underpowered on back row. I'll look into making him more useful. Beorn is a bit tricky. I did have plenty of ideas on how he can be used, but maybe I didn't implement them in a well enough thought-out way.

True, that's another thing I'd like to improve: Being able to actually tell what statuses are inflicted on an enemy. It would be a ton of work at this point however, so I didn't manage to implement that for the contest version either. Hopefully I can find a solution for the full version.

I'm very glad you liked it. Thanks again for the feedback.
If you don't mind can I ask how you managed to make these battles with just eventing?
NeverSilent
Got any Dexreth amulets?
6280
Good question. The answer is: By using hundreds of variables and literally thousands of event commands and conditional branches. Every position has an ID variable whose value defines which character is currently standing there, and an amount of other variables define their current status and attributes. The actions the player can take are defined by autorunning events using button input processings. It's a ton of work to do it that way, and probably not the most efficient way, but it has the advantage of giving me total freedom in design.

Now, I didn't stricly use only eventing. There are three scripts I used for some of the functions that are almost impossible to reproduce with normal event commands. They don't do everything for me and still have to be used in defined ways, but they are still essential.
shayoko
We do not condone harassing other members by PM.
515
cool idea,more interest lies more in the story and characters rather then battles tho.
ill pass on this but keep up the awesome work!
NeverSilent
Got any Dexreth amulets?
6280
Thanks! To be fair, this project simply has no story or real characters because it is only a battle system experiment created for a contest, nothing more. I can totally understand if that's not too interesting for many people.
I do intend to finish this early next year before I start working on a completely new project, though.
Pages: 1