Journey to Westshire

[Traveling Bard]

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Words from the Designer:


05/09/2016 Wow...how time flies. Three years... I went back and forth on this game for years. Explored other ideas...refined this one over and over. At one point I even gave up on the whole idea of making games at all due to really diving into a career in software development at my current place of employment. Then one day while at a Starbucks cleaning out my old computer, I found the half finished demo of this game. I listened to the soundtrack and played my demo to it's conclusion... I'll spare you my emotional response but bottom line I'm picking this back up and finishing it. I owe it to the fantastic audio master, DesperateMeasurez, who provided me with an awesome soundtrack, to myself, and to the story I've written here to get this out. I'll actually be updating this thread this time lol and likely this description as several pieces have changed. 


 


 


08/22/2013 Hello there! This is my first title, so feel free to tear it to pieces just as long as you can give good constructive criticism in the process so that I can learn and get better. This isn't a hobby to me as much as a career choice and I have every intention of releasing this game commercially. I won't be asking for anything outrageous in the pricing, it's my first title. I assure you whatever the price I decide on, it'll be under $5. The screenshots you see are made with placeholders. I will be getting/making new sprites and possibly new tilesets over time. The demo for this game will obviously be free and is currently in development. The demo will also have art placeholders until such a time as the artwork becomes available and I am able to drop it all in. The planned length of a run through in this game is about 2-3 hours but holds replay value as you are able to get through it several different ways with different outcomes. Without further ado... 


 


 


Story Synopsis

Spoiler

Zeke, a former soldier, Raven, a fencer from Alcantor, and Erik, a fire wizard from Voir, are traveling together for adventure, coin, and their own private agendas. These three adventurers have toppled groups of bandits, faced all manner of beasts and monsters, and held their own in city-wide drinking contests. After finishing their latest adventure, taking down an ogre that was rampaging a mine, the group is offered a new job. The job seemed simple at first, "take a package across the forest to Westshire"; however, things are never that easy. Our adventurers will have to face off against bandits, monsters, an army lead by an elite group of knights, a powerful wizard that will stop at nothing to get the package back, assassins, and an angry ogre that seems to hold a bit of a grudge. Did I mention that the ogre possesses a golden amulet that reflects magic? What's in this package that's so valuable anyway?

Raven: "This will be easy, he says. A stroll through the woods, he says!"
Erik: "*Gasp* *Wheeze*, think they'll let us catch our breath?"
Zeke: "Nope." *CLASH!*


This is only the beginning of an even greater adventure. Join these hardened adventurers throughout all of their journeys, encounters, and goblets of ale! 

 


Gameplay

Spoiler

The Battle System
The battle system is standard menu based fighting. Aside from your normal skills and abilities, your characters each have a special move called a Life Force move that uses your life force to make it happen. On this journey, you are only going to be able to use these special abilities a specific number of times and that's it. So use them wisely. As far as the demo goes, it's currently set as 1 use. 

Game Flow
You start off the game with 500 Gold and you use that to ready yourself for the trip ahead. Upgrade your weapons, buy items, etc. Once you leave the first town you WILL NOT be able to come back. So prepare well. There are several ways to get through the forest to Westshire, some harder than others, the obvious path being of normal difficulty. You will find items, stashes of gold, and some shortcuts that'll help you skip certain challenging situations if you desire. Though, if you go the harder route/off the beaten path you will be rewarded for it.

The Initial Goal
The goal is to get to Westshire within three days or three rests via your tent, an in-game item that restores your party to full health and mana. If you go over three days, you are no longer eligible for the reward money you are fighting so hard for, not to mention it makes the conclusion a bit....complicated. 

The Ending
The ending is two fold. The first part is at the Westshire bar where I let the player spend all the money that he received during the adventure on different things like a round of beers for everyone, a drinking contest, tipping the dancers, etc which reveals bits of each character's pasts and may hint to "other things" as well. The second part of the ending is Erik's story. Erik, our favorite fire wizard, loves to tell stories at bars and the end is him telling the abridged version of YOUR story based on the choices you made going through the forest and the achievements you earned. The crowd that gathered to hear will comment during and after the story is over on how surprising, lame, or what have you, that it was.


The Gist


The idea is to have smaller adventures, each with a specific goal, and ultimately an ending with the clashing of goblets. Adventurers tell their stories over beer, usually not during the action of an adventure. I really wanted to have a place for players to spend their gold and for it to actually matter vs. games like final fantasy where by the end of an adventure you have a ridiculous amount of gold with nothing to spend it on. What would adventurers spend their money on? Weapons, armor, magic items...sure. But also ale and entertainment. Instead of focusing so much on buying the best weapon or armor, I'm giving you established adventurers who already have all that. You only really need supplies and maybe something to give you an edge here n there. So that leaves ale & entertainment, which I envision using to allow the players to learn more about these adventurers as they open up new journeys for the group to go on. It all plays out into a bigger story but the goal is for the whole experience to try & feel more organic like a dungeons & dragons session. I hope I am able to accomplish that!

 


Setting

Spoiler

The Clashing of Ideas

"Magic is the root of all evil! It took only six wizards to topple the world leadership and plunge us into thirty years of darkness! We cannot allow such horrific acts to be forgotten or repeated! The Light will shield you from their evil as well, if you just accept it!"

"We will not be defined nor discredited by the actions a hundred years ago of a few insane men! This so called 'Light' that this 'church' wields is perverse and against the laws of magic and nature. It can only bring misfortune!"

The Church of the Golden Goddess and The Grand Circle of Wizards. The reach of these two organizations spreads long and wide, even into the farthest of places. They influence kings, sway the masses, and empower militaries. Similar in action, vastly different in practice. They despise each other and are constantly looking to undermine, discredit, and overpower one another. Both feel that for the world to be the way that is needs to be, the other cannot exist. For now the two organizations are at a stand still. The Grand Circle of Wizards wield powerful magic and the Church of the Golden Goddess have their mysteriously empowering "Light". Rumors have been surfacing that both have been researching strange new forms of warfare, unearthing relics of the past, and preparing for a final push for supremacy.

 


Screenshots


Will add some screenshots after I am finished converting the game from vx ace to mv. The ones that were here before are a bit outdated. 


 


 


Thank you for taking the time to check out my first game. Feel free to leave comments, critiques, etc below. 

 

[Berylstone]

I like the approach you are taking.  I feel a lot of games make the mistake of drowning the player in a sea of plot at the beginning.  But you keep things both direct and easy to grasp, and center the story around the actual characters the player will be.

I also like how you plan to intertwine your ending with the player's experiences and allow them different choices on how to spend their reward money.  That's a charming little twist on the norm - and I think your game design allows for it without causing the project to become unmanageable. 

If you succeed at making the combat fun, I think this could be an enjoyable game.

 

[Traveling Bard]

Thank you for the kind words and I hope to live up to the expectations! The combat system is the standard menu based battle system however, I am trying to make the individual fights and boss fights fun by giving everyone some interesting skills and effects. This is a group of experienced adventurers, so they start off at level 20 with several skills already available and learn more over the course of the game. I make it so that the monsters you fight will be challenging enough for adventurers of that level and yet if you happen to discover their weaknesses you are rewarded with an easier fight and possibly more experience. Example, flinging a fireball at a man-eating plant sets it on fire, every end of turn there is a 50% chance that it will bump into the monster next to it and catch it on fire too. This counters the monsters' sleep pollen ability that could put most if not all of your team asleep, even if asleep you would still be able to kill the plants from the catching fire alone as each tic will deal 25% of health as damage on them. Sounds alot more interesting than them just being weak against fire and you being able to one shot them with a fireball, but I guess it remains to be seen if people will like that sort of thing. 

I'm hoping to be able to release the 0.1 version of my demo soon(2-3 weeks). It will feature only one path, the obvious critical path, and will take you to the half way point in the forest. Each version after that will have a new path open to take and will weave/intersect with the other available paths creating(hopefully) a fluid experience that when you make a decision or decide to back track the story will always move forward. Those decisions you made will be reflected in the story and the options you will have moving forward. Sounds complicated but as you said, it's manageable. In the end, the game is an adventure with twists and turns all over the place. I hope you all enjoy it as much as I enjoy writing and making it

 

[Berylstone]

Thank you for the kind words and I hope to live up to the expectations! The combat system is the standard menu based battle system however, I am trying to make the individual fights and boss fights fun by giving everyone some interesting skills and effects. This is a group of experienced adventurers, so they start off at level 20 with several skills already available and learn more over the course of the game. I make it so that the monsters you fight will be challenging enough for adventurers of that level and yet if you happen to discover their weaknesses you are rewarded with an easier fight and possibly more experience. Example, flinging a fireball at a man-eating plant sets it on fire, every end of turn there is a 50% chance that it will bump into the monster next to it and catch it on fire too. This counters the monsters' sleep pollen ability that could put most if not all of your team asleep, even if asleep you would still be able to kill the plants from the catching fire alone as each tic will deal 25% of health as damage on them. Sounds alot more interesting than them just being weak against fire and you being able to one shot them with a fireball, but I guess it remains to be seen if people will like that sort of thing. 

I'm hoping to be able to release the 0.1 version of my demo soon(2-3 weeks). It will feature only one path, the obvious critical path, and will take you to the half way point in the forest. Each version after that will have a new path open to take and will weave/intersect with the other available paths creating(hopefully) a fluid experience that when you make a decision or decide to back track the story will always move forward. Those decisions you made will be reflected in the story and the options you will have moving forward. Sounds complicated but as you said, it's manageable. In the end, the game is an adventure with twists and turns all over the place. I hope you all enjoy it as much as I enjoy writing and making it

I like menu based combat because it leaves the door open for a lot of strategy potential.

 

[Traveling Bard]

Update 1


What I'm working on:


-I started the process of converting the old demo to RPG Maker MV and am now attempting to massage the database & resources into a functioning game without annoying errors popping up due to lack of sound effect files, etc.


-Tweaking one of the boss' AI to not be so spammy & be able to adapt to losing his minions (commanding minions to attack loses it's luster when your minions are down...lol)


-Adding AI & real stats to the final boss battle of the demo (apparently the final bosses had 200HP each *cough* slightly anti-climactic)


 


Goals:


-Get the thread a demo.


 


Roadblocks:


-None at the moment. 

 

[Traveling Bard]

Update 2
-Conversion complete! Well, no more errors anyway. 
-In the spirit of editing resources (of which I had to do quite a bit...thank the gods for Waifu), I added a bunch of faces/emotions for the party & populated the game's dialogue with them. 
-I also touched up some of the dialogue, character sprites, and facesets as I went along.


What I am working on:
-The audio delay destroyed most of my scenes as it appears to take up the full attention of my memory buffering bgms which causes some made latency during cutscenes that include custom bgm (all of them *cough*). Found two plugins which can be used to pre-load them that I will be thoroughly testing but I have high hopes. Might have to tweak them because they appear to purge the bgm out of memory too quickly.
-Still working on the boss battle AIs as I haven't gotten that far yet. Conversion took a bit longer than I had originally thought.
-Removing random encounters and instead introducing several on-the-map encounters. I decided to go into the direction of "small # of encounters, higher difficulty, higher reward" similar to how some D&D sessions tend to go.
-Adding bar rewards/cutscenes at the end of the demo along with Erik's version of the what happened in your adventure. 


And with those complete, v0.10 will be complete and I'll cut a demo! So, instead of adding these updates like this because this is a thread for feedback on ideas...I'll add the updates to my site under a change log and the next update I do here will be the actual demo that I hope I can get some feedback on  Forward momentum!

 

[LandOfShadows]

Hi Traveling Bard,


Love the idea.  And if you make this in MV and it's on an Android device I would imagine this would make a great game for a long plane flight or coach journey.


3 days travel and rest is a novel idea.


Looking forward to seeing more will turn on notifications.


LoS

 

[Traveling Bard]

Hey LoS,


      Thanks! I am actually making the game in MV for that exact purpose  though for now, I'm focusing on a PC release. An Android release will follow shortly after and then I'll get crazy n' try for an iOS release *magic fingers*. Currently, I'm just looking to continue the forward momentum and provide an evolving demo. What I have in mind for my first "cut" is going to be rather rough and not so pretty. I plan to eventually have custom art throughout but that's the cherry on top for later dev. I'm mainly just looking to prove the gameplay & story is fun and interesting. I look forward to your feedback once I deliver!