MEWD'S PROFILE

I had macaroni and cheese today, which made my day day totally awesome as well as the preceding week in advance.

I try to look on the bright side of life when I'm not being a defeatist cynic.

The last week had me the sickest I've been in years, if that counts for anything. But it was a good excuse to play through Paper Mario: Thousand Year Door and Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes. So it evens out.

So I was wandering around the pit with my new bestest pal ever Thom, and about ten slimes totally jumped us and thrashed us so soundly that the coffin maker is going to have to pull over time in tonight.

I will miss you, Thom. You brash, upstart hooligan.

Thanks chieftain.

author=Ultimaodin link=topic=227.msg2935#msg2935 date=1188520727
Is that little red riding hood?

...OMG I just thought of a killer idea for a storyline.
Wait I'm already juggling too many. Lets see 6 altogeather if you count the forum game. :o


Anyway it doesn't sound all that bad. A tad cliche but nice.

For a battlesystem a simple aim and strike abs would work nicely. You know similar to LOD where you have to line up the squares to deal more attacks. (in this case more damage)

However it would seem minigames would be more appropriate to your storyline.

Well, it's certainly a hood at least. The titular one, precisely.

I really don't see mini-game intensive stuff working for the tone I want here. I'm certainly going to need to invent some interesting puzzles if I'm not going to be combat intensive, but I don't want anything to undermine the melancholic sincerity I am hoping to capture.

It's far easier to start projects than to finish them. I hope you can successfully juggle your work load. That is a whole heck of a lot.

I am assuming LOD refers to Legacies of Dondoran, since that's the only game on this site that fits the acronym. I'll give it a look, since I don't quite understand the system you are suggesting.

author=kentona link=topic=227.msg2931#msg2931 date=1188512038
REFMAP resources, though overused, do offer a HUGE and exhaustive database of sprite resources. Given what you are after, and the fact that REFMAP has some good forest-y chips, I think they would work. At least for now.

I'll put some thought into the gameplay side of things, and see if I can't come up with something for you. I like thinking about such things. If I come up with anything, I'll post it here.

Good luck with this. The resource gathering stage with Anna I think could be expanded to be a good interesting chunk of the game, if done right.

I tried to google REFMAP (Along with RPG Maker) and I am finding it massively ambiguous what resources this refers to. Please pardon my ignorance. I get the imperssion that it refers to First Seed Material's stuff. I may be wrong.

Suggestions are appreciated. Thanks for any invested brain juices.

Okay. How about a real life discussion about an actual game in development? Our activity here is pretty minimal, so I am offering my own project up as a conversation piece. Mainly because I really need to get back into it and I have an easier time brainstorming when I have people to bounce ideas off of. Please allow me to exploit you all.

Actually, I'm wary of mentioning my project at all because I don't want to JINX my game before it actually has a backbone of content to back up any hype. So let me make it perfectly clear that this project is ENTIRELY in pre-production. There is no actual GAME yet. Just a laundry list of ideas, a time line of events, and a couple concept art pieces that were graciously provided by a friend who may or may not actually commit to working on the project with me.

(As a side note, I appreciate all feedback and suggestions very much, and will consider them, but I reserve the right to be a stubborn jackass about my artistic vision. Just a heads up. If I am dead set on making a game about collecting elemental crystals, sliding tile puzzles and bloated religious symbolism, no amount of criticism will deter me.)

My project is called Vanishing Hood. It is a story about a brother and sister, Aduin and Anna respectively, who live with their father in a earthy, isolated peasant village in your typical post-feudal world. The mother of the family has abandoned them, and has left them all emotionally unstable as a result. The father, guilting himself over her having left, is unable to contain his volatile emotions and acts out in anger frequently. Anna suppresses her insecurities by trying to take charge of everything, trying to grow up too quickly and trying to fix any imagined fault her mother might have taken with her. Aduin simply withdraws from life, unwilling to participate in anything. He becomes the object of teasing and bullying because his friends are frustrated with his refusing to participate in anything, and Anna becomes a dominating guardian for him.

Near the start of the game, there comes a point where Anna decides that she and Aduin need to run away from their volatile father and find their AWOL mother. Anna takes a hooded cloak that belonged to their mother, in spite of protest from Aduin who feels that Anna could vanish from his life in the way his mother did. Anna takes them and stealthily runs away from their village in the dead of night, without really knowing where they are going or how far it will be to get there. Snow begins to fall heavily, and as they travel for an undefined amount of time, Aduin falls deathly sick from the cold.

Lost deep within a forest, Anna finds an abandoned cottage, or alternatively a cave. A portion of the game begins where she tries to tend to the sickly Aduin; gathering firewood, food, herbs and dealing with whatever creatures she encounters deep in the forest.

Skipping some sequences I will save for the game itself, Aduin awakes much later revitalized, only to discover that Anna is nowhere to be found. Now alone and lost deep within a maze-like snowcapped woodland, Aduin has to overcome the elements and struggle to survive while searching for his vanished sister. His only clue for a long time being the hooded cloak, abandoned and half buried in a snow bank.

That's all I'll reveal, although I have much more of the story planned out. I'm really trying to go for a melancholic fairy tale air to this game. While not implied in the description, there will be a number of mischievous and dreadful creatures in the woodlands; primarily a favorite fantasy creature of mine, Goblins.

The game layout is shaky. I plan for this to have a sort of Metroidvania air to it. The cottage/cave you start out in is sort of a home base while the bulk of the game takes place in this forest that stretches in all directions and has paths blocked by obstacles that need to either be solved or require a tool or skill to surmount. I would like survival to be a big theme of the gameplay, but I'm not sure how much would be practical. If I require the player to gather food and maintain body warmth, it might be mostly frustrating in the long run.

My BIGGEST problem with this game concept is that I am not sure how to handle the gameplay exactly. I do NOT think this will work as a turn based battle RPG, not much of a traditional RPG either. Combat is not really the focus here so much as puzzle solving and exploration, but I imagine I am going to need some combat. I've considered Zelda like combat, but I've never found that to work well in RPG Maker and doubt I have the skills to pull it off well anyway. I'd like to conceive a half-decent inventory use system for the game so that puzzle solving is not handled primarily by dialog prompts. I've been really halted with production because I'm insecure about what to do for the meat of the gameplay. If I can't decide on THAT, it's really hard to weave story into the gameplay to make it relevant to what is going on.

Also, I have some delusions about recruiting people for graphics/music/programming. I would rather like to be able to have custom menus, charactersets, maybe even some custom tiles for puzzles or face set; a haunting soundtrack twinged with mystery, longing and uncertainty, and some custom systems to compliment gameplay that isn't primarily about combat.

Then again, that's kind of spoiled of me, since EVERYONE would like that sort of stuff for their project. I will probably have to make do with whatever I can manage myself. I really love this idea though, so I keep throwing hissy fits hoping to be able to do stuff outside my skill set.

I was fortunate enough to be graced with the following concept art by my friend Rose Cote. I am hoping I can maybe coax her to contribute face-sets or maybe a couple cutscene illustrations for the project, but it's looking ambiguous.