RMMV NEON RAIN - a cyberpunk decision driven RPG

[MAH1RO]

STORY
"Lin" a woman with no memories, not even knowing her real name, awakes in the slums of a dystopian cyberpunk city. She cant remember how she got there, the only thing she realizes is that she is a cyborg and it seems she's a really advanced one. But she has malfunctions that happen from time to time and become worse and more often. On her way to recover her memories and to find a solution for her malfunctions she meets several people in the city. Some of them may help her and become friends, others not...

GAMEPLAY
The game will be a full decision-based RPG-experience with no combat, leveling, HP, teams or whatever. You just play as Lin, the protagonist and try to find out who you are in the chaotic and messy city. The story can develop in different directions, depending on what your decisions are.

The experience will be completely different from typical RPG-Maker games. Fully handdrawn characters and HD textures, free movement, smoother animations, a (fake) iso-view (it still uses the normal RPG-Maker grid but it looks and feels like isometric). It will have several short cutscenes (not RPG-Maker-Cutscenes, but animated video) and the whole game will be in a 90s anime style.

TEAM
There is no real team behind the game. The game and the visuals are completely done by me as a (nearly) one-man project, so the development is quite slow, especially with the massive amount of textures to draw. The music is made by a freelancer artist who already produced a few tracks for the project. The characters are voiced by some friends of mine who are hobby voiceactors. And other friends check the dialogues and texts, because of my bad english grammar xD

DEVELOPMENT STATUS

2023 - May 18
finished:
- new ingame menu (but will probably rework it later, it looks nice but doesnt match the style of the other parts of the game)
- new design for the main menu
- cover and some cutscene artworks
still working on:
- first outdoor area map (changed to Blender 3D for the map design, the style will still be similar with a handdrawn look)
- drawing the transition image (you see before entering a new map a painting of the scene to get more immersion)
- finishing the city overview map, so I can implement it finished into the ingame menu

Spoiler: 2023 - Apr 11

finished:
- animated main menu added
- first test level (apartment) added with working collision and lighting
- removed the default ingame menu and replaced it with a custom one that shows the current position on a city map (currently a placeholder image)
Currently working on:
- changing the animations from GALVs Plugins to QMovement and finish the missing animations for Lin
- finishing the last details on the new ingame menu
- drawing the first outdoor area map
- drawing the transition image (you see before entering a new map a painting of the scene to get more immersion)
- finishing the city overview map, so I can implement it finished into the ingame menu

Spoiler: 2023 - Feb 25

Althought I already work for some time on this project, its still in an early development status. Most of it are currently sketches, maps, dialogue trees and storyboards on paper. But its already more than just a concept. In the last few weeks I've set up my RMMV with most of the plugins I need and made some proof-of-concept test runs. But I still have to learn many things. Currently I'm working on the basic animations and different portraits for Lin so I can show at least a short demo video in the next weeks. I expect to finish the project in 2024.

SOME IMPRESSIONS

 

[wilpuri]

The story can develop in different directions, depending on what your decisions are.

This always piques my interest. It is also a lot of work!

Good luck with the project! Never enough good games with rewarding branching narratives.

 

[MAH1RO]

Added animated Main Menu
Its not 100% finished yet (especially the Background), but it shows the direction of the project.
It will be a mix of city exploration in a fake-iso-perspective and many many dialogues with animated cutscenes.
Sadly the audio quality of the recording is really bad. Have to check my OBS settings. In the original the music and the sound effects blend in smoothly without distortion.

 

[MAH1RO]

First Test Level finished - Apartment.
This is just a small area for me to test stuff. I have to redo the character animations completely, because until now I used GALVs Movement plugins, but for my game in iso-perspective I absolutely needed QM-Collisionmaps, that are sadly not 100% compatible with the animations I created for GALVs movement.

But at least the collision, overlays and lights/shadows are already working fine.
You can see this like a teaser, since the whole game will be 50% in areas in this iso-perspective and 50% in drawn dialogue scenes.

 

[nbgamemaker]

looks awesome dude

 

[MAH1RO]

thanks^^
fully handdrawn parallax maps take time, but its worth it

 

[Ninjakillzu]

I'm always happy to see other people doing cyberpunk games on here. They are few and far between!

 

[MAH1RO]

Just small updates, had a lot of work to do in the last weeks^^.

In general I switched to Blender (3D design program) for the maps. Because the giant (nearly) free accessible city map became a nightmare for the performance. And it has another great bonus: If I create the whole city as a 3D-Model and just split the render results in different maps afterwards, I have already a nice overwiew map. The style will be similar with drawn textures and stuff.

And I've drawn some new Artworks, for example a cover for the game
(I finally realized how to achieve an authentic 90s anime aesthetic)