DotI’s first review!

http://rpgmaker.net/games/4179/reviews/1739/

Metatron has been the man to post the first public and proper review for DotI and gives a brutally honest opinion of it.  Much of the complaints about it are things that I’d have to agree with myself, although some of them (such as thinking the stealth mission was frustrating) I’m sad about, personally thinking Jezelles stealth sequence was quite succinct and to the point, I never saw a problem with it.  Then again, tunnelvision can create these problems.

Mainly, I’m pleased about the story thoughts, as that is my main goal.  As I’ve been promising over and over, Chapter Two is to be an improvement, and I’m taking on feedback such as this review towards that, I’m hoping that when someone decides to post another review based on Chapter Two, it will be a much better result, as it’s already exciting with the new plans!

Anyhow, the whole tunnel-vision problem I’m hoping to solve with Colonist, especially since there’s been a surprising amount of attention towards it, both feedback and people wanting to join the team or even just help out.  A whole new build towards the game and people involved has got me putting a lot of attention on that more than DotI, however I don’t want to think DotI has fallen into a hiatus, just that the past and coming weeks I’ve been fairly busy and haven’t been working on either so much; my sisters wedding and my neuro appointment have unfortunately taken precedence over getting more evented.

However, the latest thing I’ve had done on DotI is a swamp dungeon; it’s in two and a half sections, and the first section is a maze (of sorts) and took a few tries to get it right.  Unfortunately I made it impossible a couple of times, but now it seems do-able, since there’s at least one direct route to the end, but will need some testing to see how easy it is overall.   As well as that, the side missions have been built up and plans for the main mission have been more or less finalised.  There’s also the introduction of the Storytrader; the most well informed group on Averell, second only to the Storytellers themselves.  This shifty gentleman will  give you all the information you could possibly need to advance through the quests, but will only reveal these hints and secrets at a cost!

Short Break – (Pixel Brady Games)

I’m going to be taking a short break from DotI (not too long, a week or two, then I have a wedding to go to at the end of that) so when I come back to working on it, my head is clear and I’ve mentally rejuvenated.  I’ve been working on DotI ceaselessly and it’s caught up with me; that writers block equivalent, when all you can do to improve a new map is stare at it a while longer.

I’ve also got other wee ideas that I’d like to play about with, but ones that don’t necessarily fit with my main project.  Due to DotI being a long-term project, I don’t want to rush it or feel like I’m pushing aside that for lesser ideas just to get them done quicker, so I feel it’s in the best interests of DotI to get the exciting wee smaller ideas built up in the short term, so that I can focus fully on DotI when I’m back to it, and have a couple of mini-projects under my belt, too!

So far I’ve made a wee dungeon crawler, while playing about with variables and random generation, and am now working on an exploration/sim game that’ll be my first non-combat based project.  For these, and other projects, I’ve made a new blog just to cover that, so that the DotI blog can remain purely about the main project and so I can still talk about my other games.

http://www.pixelbrady.wordpress.com

Have fun! 🙂

DotI evolves with ABS (SAS)

http://arcthunder.site40.net/en-sapphire-action-system-iv/

I’ve taken up Khas’ Sapphire ABS script and have gone back and am now retroactively converting DotI into an ABS game instead of encounters.

I’ve thrown up some quick shots on the Screeny page as well, and will be remaking the video once I’m finished converting chapter one into ABS.

“Why?” you ask, with such interest and enthusiasm like I’d hope you do.

Well, I’d be toiling with the idea from the beginning, but pushed it away because I had virtually no understanding of scripts or even VXA as a whole, and why I tried to do this on 2k3 years ago, it made me want to die.  I’ve come back to the idea because I’m increasingly understanding the software, but also heavily because the quality of the finished product is paramount over my schedule.  I don’t know when I’ll get it finished anyways, so if it takes a bit longer for me to redo some stuff, I’m okay with that if it improves the game.

So, why ABS for the game?  Well, because being based off of a story that had all the characters separate and meeting up here and there, it was hard to create a party system for the game, I was having to create other characters that would be relevant and interesting enough to play, but be able to write them off as soon as the main character moves on.  That’s fine for one or two situations, but for every single section of the game I feel it would become blatantly obvious that the story was not designed with the intention of big groups travelling around the world together.  This way it allows the character to run around and do exactly as intended within the constraints of the story, without having to imagine up various other people to follow you around and act important for an hour.
The ABS also opens up some doors in terms of puzzles and dynamic/interesting dungeons that aren’t as readily available with encounters combat, and being a story-driven game I want sections of non-combat involved as well to allow the player to explore and treasure hunt.  This is also a bonus by removing the tiresome transition between encounters and field and lets the player move more seamlessly between events and cutscenes, getting a better feel of the progression.  Or at least I find it so.
As for the bosses, it allows me to make bosses that are hard without making them “the biggest badass in town” because teh story already has a set hierarchy of who is hardcore and who is flimsy, which falls to pieces when you have to make a boss hard just to keep up with the combat.  ABS allows difficulty in the boss battle without ever specifically stating that the boss character themselves are actually stronger than you are.

There’s a number of reasons I feel this is the right path to go down, and after playtesting the first two areas (the Wildness and the Tunnels) I feel it’s drastically improved the game.  The Chasm escape scene is now much more fun and challenging without becoming an issue of being transition-locked between constant battles. I was going to avoid it at first and maybe worry about it on a remake or split the game up into parts and ABS one of them, and any number of other avoidance plans, but I just couldn’t let it go once I started thinkin’ about what a benefit it could be.  Luckily, the more I work on it, the more convinced I am that it’s an improvement on the game and that it definitely was the right choice; not to mention it’s oodles of fun to playtest!

I am so, completely, utterly looking forward to making up the Grimaldus battlefield scene again, as with ABS it’s going play/feel amazing, I do believe!

Help me shape Chapter Two (poll time!)

Polls!  I need some feedback and polls seem like a good idea to get that! 😀

So, this is just a quicky wee post.  Amn-Duth City is taking pretty long to build up; there’s 70+ villagers and over 120+ conversational lines between them, some of them including pointless chit-chat, others informating city events and some even essential to quests!  There’s also thieves that will pick your pockets should you get too close, several merchants each with their own pricing agendas, trying to get as much of your money as possible and even another party member just itching to join you!

Chapter Two will be focussed around this city and the areas nearby, based around the central quest of catching the main baddy with a backup of several other side-quests to accomplish to help you level and get better gear, as well as find more characters and back story, including learning more about the Druids, if anyone remembers the mention of them in the Freelands.

Anyways, it’s coming along well at least, if slowly.  I’m not rushing it because this will be the focus of almost the entire chapter and no one wants it to be half-assed.  The city is fun to run around in because you do get completely lost, but there’s a lot of people scampering about and there will be hidden stuff to make it more worthwhile.  But, to the point, I’m not getting a lot of feedback despite views on both the blog and forums going up constantly, so am hoping that a poll might get me some better responses.  It won’t require you to log in to vote or anything, just two seconds to read and click, and it’ll all help direct me where I’m going, which is eaxctly what I need right now; I’m sorta floatin’ around in that “so much to do; where to start?” area and need something to focus on and build around!

The craftsman is one of the many merchants in Amn-Duth who will sell you various parts and pieces for various prices.  There’s a group of other marketplace salesmen who will also buy and sell gear at mixed prices in an attempt to scam you out of more than the items worth, as well as some who will actually sell you it even cheaper than normal!  There’s also a chemist poking around with all the best healing and restorative items.

The regional map is still a bit empty to look at, but not too much time will be spent on it, as it’s mainly a travelling section between the city and the scary-ass swamps to the east where you’ll have a quest to go in and visit in the name of saving a Druid!

I Passed! (+Amn-Duth Map)

I passed!  My first year of college (3D Animation, tyvm!) has been a bounding success, despite my sleeping disability knocking me out for most of the second semester, my attendance was awful but I still passed, and got a decent grade as well, considering how quickly I had to throw together some of the work 😀

So because of this, not really done hee haw today, just had a wee party of sorts with my mate!  Despite all the shit stuff goin’ on, s’kept me in a good mood and had a fan-fuckin’-tastic burger for dinner! 😀

Just started back on it the now, seein’ what I can put together while I still have some energy left.  Am building the Amn-Duth topside where you’ll spend the majority of your time within Chapter Two, or at least where you’ll be collecting your quests.  There will be a number of quests to collect and do in your chosen order, with your important quest at the end, to investigate this Drug Baron that was paying off Sheriff Garios!

The City Centre

What I’ve been doing mostly here is getting the city built.  It’s quite huge and the map is somewhat “bare” in the sense of a tileset, which is a bit of a shame but I was lacking in tilesets.  I would have made it a bit smaller to appear to look better, but I was drawing the basis of the map from the sense of Venice (as you might have guessed by the Chapter Two page at the end of the Demo) and when I was in that city I got lost.  I mean completely lost, the place is a bloody maze at the best of times, so I wanted my city to be a maze of smaller and large pathways and rivers and bridges and a hell of a lot of buildings you shouldn’t be going in, but with a brilliant big area in the middle.

I wanted you to feel lost within the map and have to explore and find some of the secrets and quests I’ll be dotting around, but since it’s still early in the game I wanted to keep it simple enough still, so it’s still quite basic.

The peoples of the town will be talking shite mostly and have little to say, but most of them will have one or two possible lines (as discussed earlier, all civilians have multiple different conversational lines) that direct you towards some hints about what’s going on, what your missions are, and most of them warning you about the fiendish pickpockets that steal your money before you even know what’s happened!  But then again, you can always go and find the thieves den and put a stop to them!

The Wee Touches

After spending an hour now writing up a variable and dozens of conditional branches combined with self-switches so that each and every NPC, villager, and otherwise non-story-essential person will not only have different dialogue options when you talk to them, but never repeat the same line twice in a row, I start to wonder if anyone will ever, ever notice this.  Typically, a normal person (myself included) will just clicky a person once to see what they say.  Twice maybe, if they’re curious and happen to know there’s multiple chat options…but when you’re in an area with a half dozen people and have an exciting mission to go to kill a dragon or save the girl, you’re never really that inclined to keep testing the limits of the NPCs ability to talk shite to you, so all the other available chat options become wasted, lost, forgotten.

Yet I can’t convince myself to stop doing it and just leave it as a static chat box.  I just feel compelled to make sure that I’m trying to pay attention to the small touches.  They’re the ones that count after all, eh?