Wee Hero Demo

So, I’m fairly satisfied I cleared away all the bugs and other smaller things that needed polishing up (although items and weapons are still yet to be renamed).  I imagine there’ll be a few things I missed, but pretty sure that if there are any, they’ll be smaller things (with any luck!).  If anything like that gets found though, I can fix it and update the demo.

Anyhoo!  The demo.
The demo covers the first island: Nuirmu.  This includes three dungeons, fourteen bosses (all but one are optional) and multiple paths to reach the end of the Demo; any or all of which can be taken to get there.
Reaching the end of the demo gives an option to play about a bit by getting instant level ups, free materials and items etc as well as an option to randomly fight a boss.  There’s also a “Boss Rush” option to fight multiple bosses all one after the other!

Hopefully it’ll be better balanced and more polished up than the Alpha Test (there are plenty of small things that have been changed!) but anything found or any ideas towards the project are welcomed; just get in touch.

RMN Link

Mediafire mirror

Second Wave Alpha: Wee Hero

So I’m fairly certain it’s ready for some hardcore balance and bug testing now.  I’ve been through it a couple times looking for anything major and am pretty sure it’s all cleaned up and ready to go.  Now it’s just a matter of finding the balance issues and problems that only fresh eyes will be able to spot.

So, to that end, I’ve compressed a demo ready for Alpha Testing outside of the couple of us that have been staring at it every day.

The Alpha Demo for Testing can be downloaded here.  It will be up on RMN as well as soon as the site decides it likes me again and will actually let me upload it.

Notes about this Alpha:

• Any report is helpful at all.  I’m not expecting a huge bug report full of every tiny detail that went missed.  Just try and have fun (with what’s there) if you can and let me know if you see anything that needs fixing, or have a suggestion to make [something] better or improved.
• I clocked about 1hr30 on my last playthrough, but I knew exactly where to go to check everything and rushed a fair bit to get everything possible checked.  Playtime may vary depending on what you do or where you go first.  I don’t expect you to go through the whole thing; any report is useful
• Saying that, the “end” of the Alpha is at the Tower on the far east side of the island.  There are three methods to reach it, any or all of which can be taken.  Once at the tower, you will have the option of levelling up, receiving materials and gold, and fighting random bosses without penalty.  This is mostly for fun, but does allow testing of things at a faster rate.
• There are 8 bosses; every single one of which is optional in the sense that you do not have to fight a boss to reach the Tower, however some bosses will block the way through other paths.  Not all bosses have to be fought even when encountered, however.  They vary in difficulty greatly, especially depending on level and gear.
• There is a Ship that can be acquired to sail around the island at a much more leisurely pace than running through all the maps again.
• There are virtually no flavour NPCs or fluff in the game yet.  It mostly consists of relevant (shops, inns etc) or tutorial NPCs and bosses.  In the third village there are some pointless NPCs though.
• Not everything has a purpose built in yet.  There are a few things that can be found or seen that seem to have no purpose whatsoever: you’re not blind, they just don’t have it yet.  Examples of this are the house to the upper left in the Village Centre, and the “Old man walking down the path” random-map, who doesn’t say anything yet.
• The two real dungeons are both pretty linear and single-directional right now.  They will have split-paths and dead ends added to them later, but were just left as a straight path for the time being during the testing phase.
• Material collection and enemy difficulty curves might be a bit wonky with the random settings for pickups and the dynamic enemy levelling, so it might feel schizophrenic depending on what you do.  Hopefully it won’t be too bad, but do let me know if something specific or extreme occurs.
• There’s no shame in giving up on the Malevolent Lady

But aye!  Thank-you to anyone who does check it out.  Hopefully it won’t disappoint and will continue to improve from these tests.  Shouldn’t be long before getting a legitimate Demo out with all the bells & whistles

Wee Hero

So I’ve been out of commission for the past few months.  A fairly long story to be sure, but suffice it to say that some meds I was prescribed interfered with my creativity…a lot.

I’ve been having trouble thinking and coming up with ideas or even just thinking creatively at all.  Drawing blanks, white noise and mental blocks are what I’ve been working with, so haven’t had much luck progressing with anything.

But it’s been a while and I’m now on new meds to essentially try and counteract the old ones and I’m being encouraged to “train my brain” in essence.  Forcing creativity isn’t good, especially not for the state I’m in right now, so instead of trying to pressure my mind into working at what it just can’t do, I’m instead just taking time to indulge an old idea that’s I’ve at least got some fresh ideas lying around for.

So we have “Wee Hero”.

This is pretty much an experimental mix of different ideas thrown into one non-linear open-world/exploration-driven RPG.  And I’m making an effort to take those terms very literally, rather than just tagging them as attraction points.  When I say non-linear, I mean you can skip most dungeons, there are alternate routes to the ends of the area, equipment is attainable via any route and you’re given no set direction to go in; just left to your own devices.
Open-world/exploration is the main focal point, as the game is driven around collecting crafting materials (the method for creating weapons and armour), there are plenty of random maps/events scattered around the place with varying degrees of usefulness and a cool Fog of War effect is layered over the world map and dungeons, encouraging the idea to actually explore every corner of the world (as opposed to taking a quick glance over the map and realising that nothing is to be found).
RPG?  I do not mean the typical JRPG where you are told who you are and have no control of your growth, weapons, stats nor even most decisions the character makes.   I mean you choose your own backstory (and thusly, starting stats), you choose which dungeons to enter, you choose which weapons and armours to craft, and which medicines to make, and you choose whether to take karmically good or bad options when presented with most situations.

“Karma?  Moral choice systems?  Pssh!”  I hear you say.  Well scoff at someone else who took binary moral choice systems down the shitter and made it basically a box-checking exercise.  I’m aiming for the realistic approach, oh yes.  There is no good/bad ending to be concerned about, and there are no better weapons for either good or evil actions.  No, this game does not encourage you to be a dirty cocksection and murder innocents to get some “Devil Sword” at the end.
No, this is karma as we know and understand it in the real world.  You are presented with a choice to do good or evil (and either one may or may not have benefits/consequences), but what happens is it affects your Karma.  Now, you can take the evil route and possibly never see any consequences for your actions.  However, the more negative karma you have, the more likely you are to run into various things shitting on you throughout the game.
Those who take the good choices will simply find that the game likes them more.  You won’t even realise it has to do with karma as it happens; the events in question could be miles away from and completely unrelated to your decision, but those who did good will have a happier outcome.  For example, drinking at a well may be fine for anyone normally, but those with bad karma may find themselves taking a sip of tainted water instead.  Of course, you could always take the “neither” option (or just do an equal amount of good and bad to cancel it out) and you’ll find yourself fairly unencumbered by karmic events, either good or bad.  Those with a clean karma will find little happens to them at all, but that’s your choice now, isn’t it?

Anyhoo, now that I’m finished my justification for using bog-standard descriptive words for something I intend to be rather different from the typical games that use such words, let me direct you to the RMN profile where I’ve tagged this up, as it has some pretty screenies and will be where I focus trying to get Alpha Testers and such.  Right now I mainly need to balance out the collectible crafting materials and some of the monsters (as with non-linearity comes a completely schizophrenic difficulty curve).

Alpha Demo shouldn’t take too long to come out, as I’m more or less finished the first continent already. Cleaning up current stuff, one more dungeon to make and flavour NPCs are really all that’s left.

Curing The – Alpha

So, the short got finished at last.  It may be up for some changes here and there, depending on what might get thunk up, but for the time being, we’ll call it finished.  Since I have no experience with horror games and wasn’t putting in enough time to it, working on it solo, it’s become more of an atmospheric exploration game.  There’s the short sub-story of finding the cure, but that’s fairly easy and doesn’t take you off the beaten path too much.  It’s not that hard to find your way through the game as it’s fairly linear, and most of the rooms are there purely for aesthetics sake, but skipping them will probably cause you to not find the cure and finish the game without it.

Saying that, there’s two “endings” to the game, although the only difference is the final text boxes and nothing overall actually gets changed.

Either way, here it is.  It should only take 15~20 mins to go through it all, assuming you read the text and aren’t rushing, and there are some things that are to be “found” and will be easily missed by just pushing forwards, including a secret access to the roof (which contains one of the Notes).  Either way, just a short game for the contests’ sake that I wanted to get finished now before college started, or I might never get it done, so…enjoy!

Demo List

TDS’ Scriptmakin’ Skills – Fog of War

Small update before the main post: have come up with a newer look for the dungeons.  It keeps the 3/4 cross-section view, but now far better allows for deeper dungeon appearances, to prevent it just looking like some really long, weird shaped cave.

Anyhoo:

http://forums.rpgmakerweb.com/index.php?/topic/2687-scripting-services/

So we realised that a key problem with the style of gameplay we’re going for with Colonist is that the entire dungeon can be viewed easily, without making it worthlessly massive, which kind of kills much of the exploration aspect of the game; you can already see which path has the good ore, so why even bother going down the other?

What we needed was Fog of War (a term well known to fans of Age of Empires, Dungeon Keeper etc) so that the dungeon is “blacked out” when you first enter; you’ve no idea what or where anything is, but as you explore you clear the fog (which will remain permanently cleared thereafter) and you can see.  This allows dungeons to be quite small (which is needed for Colonist) without just revealing all the secrets straight away; it also means that coming back for repeat runs (as will be expected of many caves) you’ll also immediately know where hasn’t been explored.

So, since there’s no such VXA script that I’ve ever seen or heard of, I got TDS involved, who promptly turned a problem into an interesting game gimmick.  For anyone needing scripting works, my recommendation falls to TDS, who is not only professional in his work, but to the point and even explains the script both before it’s written and commented on the script itself.  Fantastic stuff!

So now the game has back that dungeon cave excitement for exploration and in the doing so, have a nice unique feature for the game that not many others have.  Looking good so far, am excited to get the demo out!   Screenies will be up soon!

Colonist is coming along nicely (+DotI updates)

Ahh, how the concept has advanced from a mini-project as it was.  We’ve come up with a few new innovations to put towards the game and plan on giving the story a bit more depth, since it’ll be focussed around the few characters involved and lack of combat.  As well as this, we’ve introduced a new section in the levels; between the Village and Dungeons, there’ll be a small “Exploration Map” which will have little real purpose other than to just give a bit of a break between the village and your caves, but will also provide some things such as materials to be collected and secrets, so it won’t be purely aesthetic.  The region map has been redone and animated and the characters improved upon, with new sprites specially made for them (and hopefully there’s some portraits in the works with them!) and a couple of cutscene-tutorials at the beginning instead of the to-the-point crap that was there before.

The overall flow of the first section feels a lot smoother now, really getting you in the idea that it’s a chilled out look-around game, but with stuff to do.  We’re constantly in the works to find out more extra stuff to add in to keep it full and exciting!

As well as this, DotI is still coming along, albeit slower than before.  The first section of the Swamp has been completed after at least three failures that have been wiped..  It’s quite fun to go through now and try to suss the maze, but it’s a matter of having to balance off the monsters in it so they don’t become impossible to manage.  There’s also been a new story-based+useful-NPC introduced near the new Refugee base-the Storytrader!  Finally, a couple of mini-tasks have been put in, with one of them having an effect on the main boss of the chapter, of bringing this Drug Lord Stirling to justice!

Mini-Project is too exciting!

So, after spending now a full day on my second mini-project I’ve come to realise that I’ve planned out more than I’d intended.  This was meant to be like PxDC in the sense that it was quick and dirty, but it’s grown so much more.  I do have a thing for mining games, ever since I played Motherload as a child, and many games like it, such as Cave Hero.

This game is a cave-explorer one, similar in style to that, totally not combat.  The object is to explore caves and bring back materials and goods to build up your town and help it grow and develop.  The wee village starts off with nothing to show for itself and relies on you to go out and collect the goodies, using your shovel to dig up dirt, and special Drill Guns to shoot apart rocks and more solid obstacles.  It’s similar to energy-based games on flash sites and FB in the sense that actions cost ammo (MP equivelant), but it’s easy to refill ammo by returning to town and doesnae require linking loads of friends to run properly.

I’m thinking, to balance this off nicer, that I’ll keep this as a mini-project and only build a few levels for it as intended, but keep the basis and deeper plans there for it, so should it grow in popularity and/or my wishes take over, I can either expand or simply rebuild the game from scratch, but as a better, improved “full” version.

For now, I’ll just work out how to finish it as it is without falling too much in love.