ROOTS'S PROFILE

I'm a professional software engineer. I've spent my spare time over the last several years working on an open source RPG project that I founded.

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Screenshot Survival 20XX

A couple days ago I finished up a home interior tileset I've been working on. I started with an existing design that one of our artists created, and built upon it by making the tiles more repeatable and adding in a lot of variations so you can build different structure shapes. Also added some additional original content. Here's a few shots of it in use (along with some furnishings and other artwork).









If you like it, I made it available for others to use here. Just please respect the license it is provided under.
http://opengameart.org/content/stone-home-interior-tileset

Home interior tileset I've been working on

Finished this work today after making a few more additions. I'm pretty jazzed about the final result. You can download it here (provided you follow the terms of the license). Hope you all find some good use for it.

http://opengameart.org/content/stone-home-interior-tileset




Home interior tileset I've been working on

author=Caladium
walls do have a nice texture. adding variety to wall shapes was a good idea.

try vertical flipping the wooden flooring - so the highlight is at the bottom edge of the boards, like it is for the stone flooring.


Ah, good point. I totally missed that, thanks!

Home interior tileset I've been working on

I've been working on this tileset for about a week and wanted to share what I've got so far. A lot of the original wall designs and texturing was done by a much better artist than I. But that tileset was incomplete, and could only really build rectangular structures. There were also some problems with repeat-ability for certain tiles. So I fixed those issues by creating various corners and other structures to make the walls more dynamic.



That's a mockup of what I've got so far. I'm building maps with it for my game right now and finding some further issues and holes with it that I'm addressing. What do you guys think? I'm pretty proud of the work I've done, even though I didn't start this from scratch.

Once I have the final version complete, I'm going to upload it to OpenGameArt under a permissive license for other projects to use. Things I plan to add include some more wall transitions so you can have, for example, 4-way intersections with interior walls. Also I've completed railing for the stairs that make them look more natural. Other things I plan to include are stairwell doors that can be pasted onto the walls and a wooden railing and ledge so that those wooden floorboards can be used as a loft. I welcome any other suggested additions.

We need to talk about the fan games here after what happened to the Metroid 2 Project

I want to add on a few legal notes here (I am not a lawyer, but I took a law class in intellectual property some years ago). When you own the copyright to something and you don't protect that copyright (for example, by freely allowing others to create derivative works) then you will eventually lose the rights to it. In fact, the owning company can legally take your derivative work and create it themselves. I believe we studied a case where a fan of the Rocky movies wrote a script for a sequel and shared it with the owners, and they just ended up taking the script without giving the fan anything. Scumbag move for sure, but completely legal.


I have absolutely zero sympathy for projects that get shut down in this way. If you are crazy enough to spend years creating a fan game that is a derivative work of another company's IP, you are in no position to complain when they find out about it and shut you down. Ignorance about copyright law and IP ownership is not an excuse to let them continue. If you really want to create a game using another's IP, you need to talk with the owners, pitch the idea, and sign a legal contract with them. Or better yet, come up with your own original IP and make your own game.

Are there examples of a battle system where max HP/MP decreases?

We're going to cap the amount of fatigue that you accumulate to some degree. For example, the max HP/SP can not drop below 10% of the true max. So you'll always be able to use some of your skills, but the more costly ones may become unavailable if you really accumulate a lot of max SP.

It's likely that later in the game there will be more ways to restore fatigue, but in the early game we don't want this, although there is one scripted event where fatigue is automatically restored before the first boss fight. I'm not sure about fully restoring fatigue, but maybe we can have items that restore a quarter or a half of the fatigue you've accumulated. So you can never fully restore your fatigue outside of an inn unless you really use a lot of these items (and they should be costly).

Personally, I dislike it when RPGs regularly have "full restore stations" in the middle of dungeons. When I go into enemy territory, I want there to be a sense of fear where I hope I'm prepared for what's inside, or can make it back out alive if I'm not. If a player grew the expectation that there would be some point in every dungeon where they could use a tent and restore all their fatigue, the battle fatigue design would lose some of it's luster and purpose. Especially if restoration of fatigue was cheap, then a player can simply roam nearby the restore point, use their powerful skills over and over to win battles quickly and easily, and essentially turn the game into an easy grinding fest for level building. I don't want that.


If you want more information on the game, our RPG maker page is here: Hero of Allacrost. Some other noteworthy features about our map/battle design that have implications on battle fatigue:
  • There are no random encounters. Enemy sprites roam the map and engage the player if they move too closely to them.
  • You can't run away from a battle that has started. Instead, you run away from enemy sprites on the map if you don't want to fight.
  • If you lose a battle, you can retry it. You have three total attempts to win a battle. Each time you lose, the amount of rewards (XP, "gold", etc) is reduced if you win on the next attempt.
  • There's no generic "Fight" command. All characters come with a set of skills that consume some amount of SP to execute.

Are there examples of a battle system where max HP/MP decreases?

I'm working on a JRPG that is custom built and we recently designed and implemented a feature that we call battle fatigue. In a nutshell, instead of reducing your HP/SP (we use SP instead of MP) in battles, we reduce the max HP/SP instead. Are there any other JRPGs out there that have a system like this? I've played dozens in my life and I don't recall ever seeing anything like this.


Here are the motivations that we have for our battle system that gave birth to this design.

  • Remove the tediousness of players needing to go to the party menu to heal/restore HP and SP after battle
  • Every character skill should be viable to use in any battle; We do not want players to only use their most basic skills for normal encounters and only their most powerful skills for boss fights
  • The player should be penalized if they use their most powerful attacks too frequently
  • Players should have a long-term strategy to a dungeon. They shouldn't chose actions thinking only about the current battle, but future battles as well.
  • Determine a way for SP to restore naturally during battle so that the player feels encouraged to use more powerful skills regularly in battle



And here's a more detailed explanation about the feature itself.

  • All characters are restored to full HP and SP at the end of every battle.
  • SP regenerates a small amount every turn in battle.
  • When a character loses HP, they accumulate HP fatigue. This fatigue reduces the max health HP of the character.
  • When a character consumes SP (by using a skill), they accumulate SP fatigue. This fatigue reduces their max SP of the character.
  • Fatigue persists between battles, meaning that the more battles the character party fights, the lower their max HP and max SP becomes.
  • Fatigue is only removed by visiting an inn and resting. It is not something you can remove with an item or other readily available mechanic.
  • Characters have two attributes that determine fatigue accumulation: stamina for HP fatigue, and resilience for SP fatigue.
  • A higher stamina attribute causes HP fatigue to accumulate more slowly. The same holds true for resilience and SP fatigue.


There are several implications to player strategy as a result of battle fatigue. If the player is constantly using their most powerful abilities to end a battle quickly, toward the end of the dungeon they'll find that their max SP is very low and they will struggle a little more against tougher enemies and bosses. At the same time, if the player is too conservative with their skill usage and takes too much damage from drawn-out battles, their HP fatigue climbs greatly and they have a lower max HP when they face the tougher enemies deeper into a dungeon. The player must develop a strategy and carefully manage both types of battle fatigue to be successful.


1. Are there any other JRPGs out there that use a similar mechanic?

2. As a player, what are your initial thoughts/impressions about this type of battle design?


I know it's hard to get a strong opinion toward something that is just words and an idea without playing it first, so I'm looking more for just a "gut feeling" sort of impression. We already have this feature fully working in the game, but we still need to do some re-balancing work to fully realize it.

Noob spriter needs project for practice

author=LightningLord2
@Roots: I read through several interesting things about your RPG but I noticed a suspicious lack of enemy behavior in the feature talk - I sure hope there's more to them than just being meatbags with an attack, an HP value and maybe a status effect they induce.


Your concerns are completely true. The enemies are, as you say, currently uninteresting meat bags. We're implementing design changes and balancing at this very moment that will make battles much more interesting (it's the top priority for our team). Our next release (ETA sometime next month) should improve the battle experience greatly. The reason this hasn't happened sooner is due to a lack of people (I was mostly working alone until recently) and map development being a higher priority.

Noob spriter needs project for practice

Take a look at my project and see if you're interested. It's a custom built RPG (no RPG Maker) with a defined visual style and plenty of existing artwork for you to study, learn from, and replicate.

Hero of Allacrost


A few screenshots:






Walkthrough video of our latest release (June 2015)



If you're interested or want to learn more about like what it's working on this project, here's a couple pages of information for you

Screenshot Survival 20XX



Here's a recent video of the state of my game (project page). It's all custom built so it has a different style than the RPGMaker games. Some of the art is placeholder/incomplete, so there are some obvious eyesores here and there.
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