I was working on Lionheart today. Really. I ran into a frustrating snag where the victory music keeps playing on the map after the battle is done so I had this other window open where I was chatting with unity about some of her "rainy day" game ideas and then for reasons I don't fully understand all of this just kind of came out of me organically into a random forum post like giving birth or some shit.

So I figured rather than leave it buried in the forums I'd share it with you here.

Because the alternative would be making another game page and eff that who wants makerscore amirite?

To prevent confusion let me state that this blog concerns a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT GAME THAN LIONHEART. A game that while it has an hour and change of gameplay (four times that if you play as all four different classes) will probably never see the light of day.



Ok, so when I first came back to RPG maker this year (this was back in maybe May, June, July, August sometime around then) I was working on this game called Impetus. I didn't upload it to the site or anything and I haven't promoted it at all and at the time I told myself I was doing it just for fun/just for practice. I hadn't done any RPG Making for 2 full years so I was trying to re-learn RPG Maker and to learn the pecularities of Ace.

Impetus was an exploration-focused choose-your-class-at-the-beginning science-fiction roguelike-like dungeon crawl set on a large civilian/commercial orbital space station called Atlas Station that had just been impacted by a mysterious planetoid called Leviathan. The planetoid was filled with living biomass and alien bioweapons so the impact didn't just massively damage the station, it also unleashed a ton of alien monsters and a deadly alien plague

Overall, Impetus was not set anywhere near Earth or in a galaxy where anyone remembered Earth or knew anything about any of Earth's cultures or customs. I wanted to create a setting that felt a bit more like 'high tech fantasy in space' with a total made-up culture and society as an intentional contrast to all of my other scifi stuff which has been much more grounded in the future of our reality.

It had a bit of voice acting at the beginning (recorded by my girlfriend LOL) of the intro. So I actually wrote a script for the intro sequence:

<GNN LOGO APPEARS WITH JINGLE>

<FADE IN ON NEWS ROOM>

<NEWS GRAPHIC: CRISIS ON ATLAS STATION>

NEWSREADER: We now return to our ongoing coverage of the crisis on Atlas Station. If you are just tuning in to this breaking story, yesterday morning a planetoid approximately the size of our moon appeared, moving towards Cassandra Gemini at alarming speed.

<NEWS GRAPHIC: LEVIATHAN>

NEWSREADER: Sometime last night, this celestial body--which government briefings refer to as "Leviathan"--impacted Atlas Station, Cassandra Gemini's largest orbital platform where nearly a million citizens live and work.

<NEWS GRAPHIC: ATLAS>

NEWSREADER: Casualty reports are still coming in at this time, and the names of the dead are not known, but casualties are thought to be in the hundreds of thousands. Atlas Station suffered major structural damage upon the impact, the extent of which is unknown, but as of this broadcast has maintained its orbit. Leviathan, the rogue planet, appears to have become fused somehow to the station's superstructure.

<NEWS GRAPHIC: BAPHOMET>

NEWSREADER: Numerous civilian reports of vicious, "dragon-like" creatures alighting from the disintegrating planetoid Leviathan and attacking or abducting Atlas Station citizens remain uncomfired at this time. The most recent government press release decries civilian holocam footage of these creatures as a hoax, and denies the veracity of reports that these monsters have attacked citizens on the surface of Cassandra Gemini.

<NEWS GRAPHIC: DROPSHIP>

NEWSREADER (Receiving Breaking News): This just in! I'm receiving a late breaking report that the Planetary Governor was making an inspection visit to Atlas Station at the time of the tragedy. His current whereabouts are unknown. The Regulators, an elite special forces unit, has been dispatched to Atlas Station to locate and secure Governor Markov. We will keep you updated on additional developments as they unfold...

So, in the beginning you choose your class as either Assault Trooper, Griefer, Silhouette, or Biomechanic. At the start of the game it's strictly a one-character RPG deal (I was using a side-view ABS and I was happy with how it was looking and playing) as your shuttle/dropship crashes and you crawl away alone but my intention was that later on you'd gradually meet up with the three other classes you didn't pick and you'd have a complete balanced team by the end of the game. Each class would meet the other classes in a different order and different places (a little like the earlier RE games in that respect).



Individual Details:


Ostensibly your objective besides to meet up with the other members of your squad was to rescue Governor Markov but that setup was purely meant as an "excuse plot" for an exploration and combat focused roguelike/dungeon crawl. See, the cool thing about this game was that every map was exactly 17x13 and every map was complete modular. Basically, I made maps as puzzle pieces that could be reusable with set connections. Every map was like an individual piece of a jigsaw puzzle that could be assembled different ways. So you'd have repeating areas with slight aesthetic differences, like corridors and stairwells and elevators and residences, grocery stores, pharmacies, cafes, banks, pawn shops, gun shops, hydroponics blocks, engineering blocks, operations and security and so on.

Trigger Warning: Absurdly gigantic image.



I did all of that with an eye towards somehow making it into a REAL roguelike, i.e. whenever you started a new game the overall game map would be a completely different configuration of those components. But I never actually was creative or skilled enough to figure out a way to event or code that. Anyway the station was going to be INSANELY MASSIVE (and ideally different every time) consisting of two towers with six decks each and a causeway connecting them in the middle. Keep in mind that each of the 12 decks would consist of 40-60 modularly connected maps full of monsters and treasure.



There was tons I liked about this project. I thought the battles looked great and I liked the way I had the skills and character customization set up (players could use skill points to buy both active and passive skills), I had the random treasure system all set up, there were on touch encounters that could be avoided with various field-map skills I'd evented, cameras that could be blinded with chaff grenades or slipped past with a cloaking device, and every single locked door had like four ways to open it: finding a keycard, using an autohack tool, placing a demolition pack on the door, or hacking it if you were playing as the biomechanic.

I kind of gave up on this project for a lot of reasons. By the time I got down to the second deck of the first tower the mapping and map connection process of my "little just for fun learning project" felt insanely tedious--WAY TOO MUCH GAM FOR ONE MAN TO MAK, so to speak. I had no idea how I'd actually implement roguelike map randomization and permadeath and I wasn't even sure that I wanted to push those random elements. More importantly, I had no idea where I was going with the story (or the world-building) beyond the initial hook, so the idea of writing up audio-logs and in-game notes to build up the story and setting in epistolary form seemed daunting. Ultimately, I was much more excited about the team of Regulators I'd created and the slick ass character select screen I'd made and the underlying game systems than the actual mission I'd given them, which wound up leaving me kind of cold. And then, most importantly of all, Lionheart and its still invisible sister project Grand Grimoire came along and became my labor of love. So since then Impetus has languished silently in profound non-completion, with a ton of work done.