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Game released: download it here!

Concept: Nightmare is a game I created with a self-imposed challenge in mind that I got from other members of the RMN community on the slack chat. The idea is to create a game in 9 hours, where everything is restricted to 9. The game was also made in 9 hours, yet is still a complete - albeit short - game.


Plot: You are Antony. From when you were little, your dreams were filled with nightmares. Phantoms, spirits and otherworldly beings haunted your imagination ever since you were little, and there's nothing you have managed to do about it. As you've grown older, things have only gotten worse. You look towards every night with dread and anxiety. You can barely get 2 to 3 hours of sleep per night, and it's affecting everyone around you.

The dreams progressively worsen, the nightmares become more intense. It seems to rise to a breaking point where dream meshes with reality. Your every day life is filled with hallucinations due to your lack of sleep. But this time... this time, things will be different.

As you feel your body relax and you fall asleep. Once again, you wake up in a nightmare version of your own town. You can feel the familiar darkness pour in through the windows of your house. But for some reason, it's different. The nightmares seem scarier now, as if they can actually harm you. You walk around in search of a means to end this nightmare, before it engulfs your mind entirely.


Features
* Traditional turn-based combat
* Optional combat challenges, where fighting several troops in a row results in bonus items!
* Mix of on-screen encounters and chance encounters!
* All normal troops are completely randomized in their enemies.
* Another offering of Gredge109's single-actor combat system.
* 9 maps, all of which are 9x9
* 9 Weapons and Armors
* 9 Items
* 9 Enemies (including two dummies, so 6 you'll fight. I kept to a hard limit)
* 9 Skills and States
* Made in 9 hours
* The title of the game itself has 9 letters. Did you realize that? Yeah, I just blew your mind.
* 9 characters (includes PCs and on-screen enemies).


Instructions

Due to time constraints, there are no tutorials in this game. I'll explain the mechanics here.

Guard

The guard skill regenerates MP. It's a small percentage, but when you've gotten strong enough to where you can sustain some weak enemy's blows in combat, you'll be able to regen quite a bit of MP.

Skills

Your character begins with the Rejuvenate skill. Yes, I realized it's misspelled in-game. The Rejuvenate skill heals a large portion of your health, and cures all negative ailments and de-buffs on your character, and begins health regeneration for 4 turns. It's a powerful heal spell, but because of it's powerful nature, it takes quite a bit of MP to cast. It's also the most costly spell in the game.

There are, however, additional skills you will have access to. These skills are tied to weapons. This means that it's important to read the description of your weapons carefully as you get them. You will acquire weapons which feature one skill at first, and eventually work your way up depending on what additional content you complete. Armor, too, will have different capabilities. Some grant more physical defense, while another may grant more magic defense or agility, and another yet will guard against some Poison damage. Similar to the weapons, the armors will gradually increase in utility as well.

Hunt System

While traveling from one location to another, you will see the option to Hunt. Hunting allows you to engage phantoms of the nightmare in combat. After beating the enemy, you have a high chance of finding a bonus item. In some cases, you can even encounter a Treasure Chest, which holds a second item! However, some of the chests are booby trapped: they could contain a poison trap, or even worse. It is a nightmare, after all. Nevertheless, I am sure your judgment will decide whether it's worth the risk to open to pass-up a treasure chest while hunting. Oh, and you can potentially hunt endlessly for experience gains, items and coin, if that's what you so choose. As you progress to more difficult maps, so too will the hunting result in difficult enemies. If you love grinding in games, you'll feel right at home with the Hunt system.

Hex System

Another combat related system is the Hex system. It contains a series of battles which result in a special item at the end: most of the time these are weapons or armors, and one of them even holds a special key item. Most of these are simply a series of battles with the enemies scaled to the difficulty of the area in which they are found: others, however, may have "conditions" attached. You'll see what I mean when you encounter these. The Hex system, however, is mostly optional with the exception of a couple battles: the rest can be skipped, if you so choose.



Come and see how I managed to pull off a combat system with only 9 enemies, skills and states, and let me know how I did. Download it here!

Latest Blog

Welcome to Nightmare!

Greetings! Feel free to download the full game right here.

This is to serve as both an announcement, because the game is now released, as well as a brief Q&A about the game itself!



What is Nightmare?

Nightmare is an RPG created with a theme of 9's: 9 characters, 9 weapons, 9 items, 9 enemies, 9 maps all 9x9, and made in 9 hours (kind of). It is rather short, and shouldn't take you more than a couple hours to beat, tops.


Is this a horror game?

Despite its name and dark atmosphere, it is not a horror game. It is an RPG.


Are you SURE this isn't a horror game?

Pretty sure.


Where did you get the idea for this?

Uh... don't ask. I actually wasn't supposed to make this, but it's too late.


Nine hours of development time?

Yes! Kind of. See, I couldn't finish the game nine hours straight due to several appointments and other business along the way, so I split it up. I used a stopwatch on my phone, and would start it and stop it every time I wanted to make progress on the game.

The only downside is, I reset my phone halfway through, not remembering that it would clear the stopwatch data. Before that, my memory is foggy. "Was that 4 hours and thirty minutes, or 3 hours and forty minutes?" This means that I either finished the game in 9 hours, or perhaps I added an hour and some change onto the length of development. So, despite my best attempts to keep to a strict 9 hour development time, I most likely went a bit. Once I realized that I likely went over the 9 limit, I took a little time to do some brief editing to dialogue and events.


Where's the tutorial/instruction?

Due to time constraints, there are none. Which means the instructions will be found on the main game page instead, explaining the mana regen and weapon-ability system.


What was the best way to streamline development?

Common events! I used several. They drastically reduced the time it took to make a game like this.


Hey, I keep running into random battles while traveling!

Sorry buddy, you're rolling snake eyes: the chance encounters while traveling are random yet unlikely.


What was the most difficult part of development?

The Hunt system I implemented. It was painful to try and quickly squash bugs near the end of development. The code isn't really clean for it: I had to come up with something that would stop the event from permanently looping once a chest was opened, and I couldn't seem to find where the loop was taking place (one condition checks if the "chest" switch is on, then shuts it down, then jumps to a label for an extra item, but then it would loop around and act as if the "chest" switch was still on). This became a pain, but I think I got the bugs ironed out.


How many endings are in this game?

Due to time constraints, there is just one.


What about 9 different endings?

You're killing me.


Will you be continuing development on this game?

If feedback is positive and people enjoy what's here, I may continue development through an un-restricted version of the game (exceeding the self-imposed limit of 9).


Is there anything you wish could have been added?

Yes, quite a bit, but development time made me pick and choose. For example, I wanted to add a bit more to the segments between maps, such as when you're traveling: I wanted to add NPC's that could be encountered, as well as different random events that took place depending on where the player was going. The remnants of this system is found in the Look Around command between town: it only shows a text description of the area.

Posts

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Welp, there goes that event idea. Good job. Gonna have to figure out something else now.

Looks great, though.
Awe, I only meant it as a side idea. I didn't mean for it to shut down the event.

I'm sorry.
It's fine, it's just not as fun when people don't take part together and/or take the ideas that were worked on specifically for that event. It is just two weeks away, after all. There'll still be an event but it won't be the 999 one that was planned.
Sorry, it just really inspired me for some reason.

I can go ahead and remove this page, and maybe submit it again after that event has finished. I don't think too many people have seen this yet so it's not too late.
Don't be silly. You worked hard to create this. We'll just come up with something else instead.
Interesting. I've always found the concept of dreams and nightmare worlds to be fascinating.

That's uh... one long HP/MP meter for Antony.

So will I only be using him for the whole game or are any of those 9 characters going to be party members?
author=HikiNeet
Interesting. I've always found the concept of dreams and nightmare worlds to be fascinating.


Thanks! So much more I wish I could do with it.

hat's uh... one long HP/MP meter for Antony.

So will I only be using him for the whole game or are any of those 9 characters going to be party members?


Heh, that bar... I wish I knew how to script so I could fix up the battle screen. As far as PC's go, there's only Antony. The whole 9 chars includes the one pc as well as on-screen NPC's and on-screen enemies.
Ah, that's kind of disappointing since it's not one of those shared dreams. Well, really I'm just bothered by the thought that this might not be challenging since you only have one character to fight your battles and so that limits how strategic battles may be if you can only perform one action per turn.

Then again, Cope Island got around this by giving the soloist additional actions as they progressed further.

I'll just have to see.
author=HikiNeet
Ah, that's kind of disappointing since it's not one of those shared dreams.


That's actually a good idea for a future project.

Well, really I'm just bothered by the thought that this might not be challenging since you only have one character to fight your battles and so that limits how strategic battles may be if you can only perform one action per turn.

Then again, Cope Island got around this by giving the soloist additional actions as they progressed further.

I'll just have to see.


Yeah it may not have quite the challenge I prefer. But I'm curious to hear your thoughts when you get done!
Okay, so I finally got around to finishing it... like 2 weeks later. Short game but considering the 9 challenge, that's to be expected. Battles are easy which makes the NPCs' dialogue about cautioning you to stock up on items and how dangerous the enemies are to be kind of... laughable?

The forest battle background seems out of place in a nightmare since it's quite well-lit in an otherwise dark game. The cartoon-like enemies also don't really fit the atmosphere. Neither is the "funky" normal battle music for that matter.

The dialogue spoken by the phantoms sounded like something a corny stereotypical villain would say, especially the ending.

The equipment wasn't very diverse in effects/skills. I know you could only make 9 of them but still. The chain challenges, while a neat way to reward you, are kind of moot when you get better equipment from fighting plot battles (when the phantoms are released). Not to mention how the start with half your health/no MP penalties are easily subverted with a HP/MP potion respectively.

And speaking of those phantoms, I expected them to all be bosses but only the last one is. Kind of a disappointment to find the first three are just normal encounter enemies. Like when you read: "Three phantoms have taken residence in the Mayor's Manor, The Ruins, and The Town." you kind of expect them to be bosses since it sounds like a classic RPG plot where the hero must go and expel the demon lords from those areas.
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