RMMV Eat the King! - An Undead Strategy RPG

[onipunk]

Well, I never thought the first game I'd release would be a jam game, but here we are!

Eat the King is a lighthearted, bitesized turn-based tactical RPG that dares to ask the question "What if Fire Emblem, but zombies?"

Control the recently-risen Steve as he seeks to consume the brains of the wisest (maybe) and most noble (also maybe) person in the realm, King Lyon himself! Use a combination of sharp claws, jagged teeth, eldritch magic and prayers to the gods of hell to get Steve's dinner sorted.

Created for the RPG Maker Jam #3 with the theme of "contagious", Eat the King was made in 4 days with the self-imposed goal of using as little RTP material as possible. Filled with cute sprites, retro tiles and sparkly pixel animations, Eat the King is hopefully charming to look at and enjoyable to play!

Features

• Shiny graphics! Go on, open up the screenshots and have a look, they're lovely.
• Tactical combat system! Do you like Fire Emblem and Final Fantasy Tactics? Well, this game isn't nearly as good as them. I had four days, man, cut me some slack. But if you like those, this is up your street!
• Bad jokes! A lighthearted tone combines with dry British sarcasm and Glaswegian-style self-deprecation to create a hitherto undiscovered level of comedic genius. Okay, that was all nonsense, I know I'm not funny, and the jokes in this aren't either, but you might chuckle? I'll settle for a grin, even.
• Short length! Free! It'll only take an hour at most to play through, so if you pick it up and hate it, at least you didn't spend that much time or money on it!

Spoiler: SCREENSHOTS

Spoiler: DOWNLOAD

As a game created for a jam under a strict time limit, it's rough around the edges, there may be bugs, the audio isn't great and it hasn't been thoroughly tested. Just a standard caveat for this type of thing! NOTE: there is a known bug in the final battle that causes the enemy to stop fighting. I'll be investigating and trying to fix this shortly but in the meantime I'm leaving the game in its original form up, warts and all.

Get it for free on itch.io here: https://onipunk.itch.io/eat-the-king

Make sure to vote in the jam if you like it! Or if you hated it. I promise I won't cry too much.

Future Plans:

• Updating the title graphics and the gane's itch.io page with a bit more polish.
• More appropriate music tracks.
• Hard mode or solo character run mode (or both!)
• Implement images in the positioning screen (I totally forgot about that, my bad!)
• Images for cutscenes
• Postmortem to follow when I recover from the sleepless nights

That's about it for me, I hope you guys enjoy and be sure to leave any feedback! This was a fun, if tiring and at times very stressful side project, and any thoughts you might have will definitely help me with my larger tactics projects! Have fun, folks!

 

[Fooljastic]

This was glorious. The ending though... you even -_- ... alright I wont spoil anything for others... still awesome animations for four days work.

Overall even though I have a dislike for tactical battles I quite liked this... but i sadly ran into the kill the last boss without a fight bug (they started doing nothing after I used the unholy aeo attack, deathbound i think was the name, so i hope that helps) so I was done in 25 minutes. The last boss fight could have been so hard but noooo.... :/

Its a little silly but overall for four days of work I am impressed.

 

[onipunk]

That actually does help, I'll try and narrow down what the problem might be starting with that and then looking at the enemies in that fight and seeing if they're somehow the cause of it all. I'm glad you enjoyed it, though! It is admittedly short due to the time I had to make it in, so I knew I had to have a small-scale game. I'd rather make 25 minutes of good cutscenes and battles than have the players spend their time doing meaningless busywork for hours, you know? I'm having a break for a few days to deal with real-life stuff but that bug is first on my priority list when I go back to it. Cheers for the feedback!

 

[cradth]

This looks like so much fun! Cute character sprites, love the style and the story sounds fascinating. I'll make sure to put this game on my play list. Well done!

 

[Dinamic Creates]

I'm commenting to make sure I will try this one.

 

[QuietPenguin]

Those sprites look great. Nice job!

 

[ADMtn]

Fun and silly. I enjoyed it.

For me, after I used the daemon-whatever spell to freeze the boss in place, all the enemy units stopped moving/acting for the rest of the fight and the zombies feasted at their leisure.

Thanks for showcasing a bit of the LeTBS. I just started up with RMMV (after having played with XP back in the day) and it's nice to see what's available out there.

 

[onipunk]

Cheers for checking it out! I never found out what was causing the bug, and this uses an older version of LeTBS so the problem has probably been addressed in newer versions. Still, it means a lot that new folk are still checking out the game even now, and I'm glad it acted as a showcase for the kinds of talented scripters that help us in the community make the games we picture in our heads, so if you end up using LeTBS then best of luck with it @ADMtn!

 

[shayoko]

i could not play this at all.
going into the options menu and backing out of it caused an unknown error. (i'd guess its something to do with being a single executable)

and after the 1st cutscene. before the battle started, "header is wrong" crash happened.

 

[Crashykk]

I have no idea why, but game froze for me like this.

 

[Crashykk]

I played it again and it worked this time. It looks nice, plays nice (battle system is gorgeous), but it lack any feel of progression. More like a mini game you could place in actual game. It really would benifit if you put in in it some kind of tutorial. Game has only 3 levels and I had to learn skills for like 20 minutes, so I could play without stopping to read every message box, every time i use a skill.

You could definitely make something awesome from that setup. For now it looks kinda like sample demo for Battle System. I really liked humor tho.

Full playthrough:

 

[onipunk]

@shayoko No idea what's happening there, you're the only person AFAIK who's encountered that error. The reason the game's a single executable is because I used paid animation effects and wanted to protect those from being ripped, as per the license agreement and if that caused errors, I'd rather have a glitchy game than end up in any potential legal troubles. I'm glad you want to play it, but the game's nearly two years old and it's not a good use of my time to bugfix an old game jam entry, especially since I'm not a coder and wouldn't know where to begin fixing that. Sorry for any disappointment caused!

@CrasheR Thanks for giving it a shot! As mentioned, this was a game jam entry made over the course of about 72 hours, so progression fell by the wayside - I just didn't have the time to implement anything like that. Tutorials are a good point though, I'm terrible for assuming that stuff that's evident to me will be known to players so I'll take that advice going forward! I haven't used this specific battle system in a long time, but I am still developing strategy games so maybe I'll have a more fully-featured game to interest you at some point!

 

[Trihan]

onipunk, I'm not accusing you of anything but looking at the concept of the game and the name of the protagonist did you by any chance see this when I made it? XD

Steve, an indie RPG game for RPG Maker VX Ace :: rpgmaker.net

Steve, an indie game made with RPG Maker VX Ace. Get downloads, images and news!

rpgmaker.net

 

[Sanrie]

Love the graphics , cute sprites, me likey.

 

[onipunk]

@Trihan Honestly no, I haven't ever used RPG Maker Net and only started being a part of the community here and making games a few years back. Steve's my go-to generic name cause it's so generic and the game jam theme was "contagious", hence the zombies. Just a coincidence, I guess!

 

[Trihan]

@Trihan Honestly no, I haven't ever used RPG Maker Net and only started being a part of the community here and making games a few years back. Steve's my go-to generic name cause it's so generic and the game jam theme was "contagious", hence the zombies. Just a coincidence, I guess!

Haha, I do love an amusing coincidence.

I can't even remember what the theme was for the contest I made Steve for.