Retrogression

[Tarq]

Game Synopsis:

Spoiler

Abstract:A concept game, of sorts; Follow Will as he engages with four distinct realities across three acts. Each reality abides by its own rules, with new, relevant, mechanics overwriting the old.

Unabridged:

The first act is notable for establishing two distinct realities, a hyper-reality with a game reality inside it, and then showing the first few instances of blurring between them for Will. Its a very narrative orientated, shorter, act and could better be considered an introduction to the actual game.
When 'playing' Will's real life sequences players have no means of pausing or saving (there is actually an autosave, just to avoid annoying folks), or even controlling Will. Dialogue will be voice-acted and music will be diagetic.
The faux mmo has an action battle system and a few conventional 'skilling' systems, like smithing, cooking and fishing.

The second act takes the realistic setting of the first and imposes a game-like structure. As a sandbox the player is able to explore the real world as a game. Distinguishing characteristics of this act are:
-No levelling; stats are decided largely through choice of equipment, which in turn is regulated through money. Will's sprite also changes to reflect his current equipment.
-Weapon durability; things break if you don't look after them.
-A first person battle system without any health bars or such; you gauge your own health by the shade of the screen, and
your enemies health by its changing graphic. Health recovers over time, you can't just drink a potion.
-Hunger, thirst, and tiredness meters; real life can kill you in more ways than one.
-All the inconveniences of real life :3 ; areas can only be accessed at coherent times, pick an item off the shelf and carry it to the shopworker, learn skills by reading, etc.
 
The final act will be a traditional dungeon crawl and, while it will be the most recognisable of all the acts as an actual rpg, it could better be considered as reality reasserting itself; with the wildly high fantasy being offset by exploration of some of the darker tropes in games. While less developed than the other acts, here are some of its features;
-Eight classes that can each utilise two distinct playstyles.
-'Traditional' sideview combat. No ATB though; time is a thing of the past!
-Varied level design, including the rather risky 'assymetrical dungeon'.
-Weapon Augmentation.
-Everyone's favourite; Achievements!

Screenshots:

Spoiler

I'm not particularly proud of my mapping or anything but the mods want five varied screenies =P

This is an image of one of the mmo maps. You can (barely) see that the def buff is active and that the heal skill is on cooldown. I'll be adding a chatbox when I finish the script and I'll be fancifying the HUD soon under Takeo's insistence xD

This screen shows the beginnings of the Act II Battle system. The red border indicates damage taken.

Luther's Guns in Act II. Hopefully speech bubbles will be recognised as the intermediary between the voice acting of Act I and the text boxes of Act III.

The Achievement scene in Act III; one of the first scripts I ever did :3

Credits:

Graphics:

Spoiler

Modern Day Tiles Resource Pack - LunareaZombieSurvival Resource Pack - Lunarea

Futuristic Tiles Resource Pack - Celianna
Misc. art resources by David Morgan

Everything else by yours truly
Banner:

Spoiler

If you want to support the project (you darling, you!) then just copy/paste the above image. I've been assured that it'll work, but let me know if it doesn't

 

[Tarq]

(This was copied from my vxace.net thread so some of it wont be entirely coherent since, obviously,this is my first update here.)

No update this week? Past me is a liar. Future me is building a time machine to correct his shameful behaviour. Present me is updating you. Let's roll:

So, I actually ended up doing a bunch of cool stuff this week; all that time in the database led me to figure out how to give enemies attack animations, so now most have them. A few even have custom ones but its a totally new aspect of the engine to me so inefficiently giving them all super-awesome animations is low down on the priorities list.

I finally got back into ActIII in the last day or so. I say 'finally' like it was something I was looking forward to but it was actually the reverse. By being overtly faithful to the dungeon crawl genre I was worried it would turn out really bland but its actually been pretty cool to work on. Very action-orientated so far; flamethrowers, poison darts, those pendulum axe things, webs that slow you (BoI style), obscuring the screen traps, minefields, alarms. And that's from a couple of hours, how promising. It's gone a little astray from the original idea of the final act (the game's title was a hint) but its probly a better game because of it. Let me know if you think it would be better to go back to a more old-school rpg approach for this act though, like said, I'm in two minds about it since this is principally a narrative game.

As well as doing most of the stuff relating to Act II that I said I would last week, there's also been considerable fresh progress in that Act. Two 'guilds' have been made (I'd like four in total), a dojo and a beggar's guild. The benefits of each guild are a safe, free, place to rest and associated skills/gear, as well as simply the additonal content they provide.

I also made a script so that pressing 'x' goes straight to inventory, has a capacity limit, and money now works as a float variable (although, as you'll see from the screen, while its relatively easy to limit the no. of zeroes after the decimal, its much harder to force it to consistently display two). It turns out that you can't normally equip stuff straight from the inventory so I had to script that too =P

(I also scipted a scene for withdrawing/returning books from the library and improved how the reading system was handled generally, but I suppose that's neither here nor there).

Anyways, here's the aforementioned screeny, points for whoever gets the reference:

As always, if there's any changes you'd like to see or critique you'd like to give then I'm all ears. No, really. I'm a mutant.

 

[Atlas Rose]

I look forward to the book system. I'm a lore guy, so things like in Skyrim or Guild Wars where I can read the books and learn the history of the world is a really great feature

 

[Tarq]

I endeavour to keep these threads updated about once a week, although this one will be decidedly more brief than the last few.

ActI:

-Figured out how to allow random movement of npcs within a set region so the mooks can't wander too far from their spawn point any more.

-The same logic also allowed me to create a more sophisticated aggro system.

-Every enemy has their own attack animation. So does all the player's skills.

Most of the work this week has been on ActIII content. Its kind of hard to go into detail of the kind of risk/reward content I've been making so I'll use a screeny for an example:

This is the cloud room of the second floor where falling sends you back to the beginning. The player is given three choices:

-The right path has no unique traps (there are debuff on contact clouds that affect all routes) but is significantly longer causing the player to have more battles. The loot on this path also sucks.

-The middle path is the shortest but heavily fogs the screen. I would consider this the hardest and getting the loot to require incredible luck or effort, and so it is very rewarding.

-The left path is something of an intermediary; wind blows the player periodically and they have to make sure they're in the right spot at the right time when it happens. The loot is very useful, but its also fairly easy to acquire elsewhere.

All the rooms have gameplay like this; content that suit their theme. Although some are certainly better than others. At least there are lots of interesting traps littered about; I even remade the Whomps from Mario :3

In fact, outside of balancing and all that. I'd say I'll probly have the first draft of ActIII ready by the next update. Maybe. There's still plenty to distract in the other acts.