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The big task of creating a small RPG using VX Ace!

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Little-Big peek at the skill system

Hey all, Its been a while since my last blog entry. Real life keeps me busy (damn working class!) but there is progress at last. I have decided to rename this blog into a general RPG development, because my main project is currently undergoing drastic changes. What has not been changed is the core system, especially the skill system. I want to talk about that today.   The skill system in general 1. In the game, skills cannot be learned regularly. Instead they become available at a certain level. Then you can buy the skill at a special skill shop. Usually a new skill becomes available every 5 levels. 2. All skills in the game come in 5 levels (I through V) of increasing power. Once you have learned a skill at a specific level you can learn the next skill level. Usually a new skill level becomes available every time your character levels up. Each new skill level replaces the previous skill level. 3. The final game will feature about 20 skills (exlcuding levels) for each class. But you cannot take that many skills into combat, you have to "equip" skills instead. Each character can equip up to 8 skills at a time. This forces the player to make a decision.     A quick glance at the Combat System 1. Combat uses a script by Mr. Trivel (Battle Rows). That allows you to place your characters in the front or back row. The row has big impact on how the character performs during the battle. 2. Usually the front row is reserved for fighters, while mages and archers stay in the back row. 3. The row system modifies damage dealt and damage taken as well. Missile weapons and magic spells are not affected by the row.   Skill Specialities 1. There are active and passive skills. Active skills must be activated during combat, while passive skills generate a effect as long as the character has equipped the skill. 2. Some skills feature a cooldown, warmup or use limit - this is done via YANFLY's skill restriction script. 3. In addition to the general skill limitation there are Heroic and Legendary skills. Heroic skills are limited to 2 (no matter what skill) while Legendary skills are limited to one skill. This means a character can only equip two or one of them at a time. 4. Each class utilizes a different resource system in order to pay for skills. Some classes use MP, while others use TP or even sacrifice HP. Some classes make heavy use of skills with cooldown or warmup restrictions. 5. Finally there are switch-skills. Usually two skills are marked as a switch and only one of them can be equipped at the same time. Most often this allows the players to choose a more offensive or defensive style of play.     Example: The Knight Skills To finish this mega blog article, I like to explain you the first bunch of skills from the knight class. One of the core classes to be found in the game. The Knight is a slow moving powerhouse with lots of HP and DEF, but is also able to dish out some serious damage. The Knight is one of the first classes available in the game and is a superb addition to any party. Able to provoke the enemy, protect his party members and soak up tons of damage - the Knight is a true Tank class.   The disadvantages of the knight are his lack of AOE skills (only one and even that is not really a area effect), his reduces ATK compared to the more offensive classes and his vulnerability to magical attacks.   The main advantage of the knight are his cooldown skills. The knight does not require any kind of resource (like MP or TP) to use its skills. Instead, each skill features a cooldown of one or more turns. This limits the skill use but allows the knight to re-use its skills after each combat. This fact makes the knight more enduring than all other classes.   Knight Skill List   Shield of Faith I-V [Active Knight Skill, 2/3/3/3/4 turn cooldown, no other costs] The knight gains 4/8/12/16/20% DEF & Guard Rate for 2/3/3/3/4 turns.   Justice Strike I-V [Active Knight Skill, 2/3/3/3/4 turn cooldown, no other costs] Deals ATK + MAT damage (increase with level) to 2/2/3/3/4 random targets.   Royal Blade I-V [Passive Knight Skill, Switch Skill tied to Knight's Armor] Increases the Knight's ATK permanently by 2/4/6/8/10%   Knight's Armor I-V [Passive Knight Skill, Switch Skill tied to Royal Blade] Increases the Knight's DEF permanently by 2/4/6/8/10%   War Cry I-V [Active Knight Skill, 2/3/4/5/6 turn cooldown, no other costs] Knight gains 5/10/15/20/25% MHP & provokes enemies for 2/3/4/5/6 turns.   Shield Rush I-V [Active Knight Skill, 2/2/3/3/4 turn cooldown, no other costs] Low damage and 75/80/85/90/95% chance to stun one target for 1/1-2/2-3/3-4/4-5 turns.   Crippling Blow I-V [Active Knight Skill, 2/2/3/3/4 turns cooldown, no other costs, Switch Skill tied to Sunder Armor] Low damage + Reduce target opponents ATK by 5/10/15/20/25% for 1-2/2-3/3-4/4-5/5-6 turns.   Sunder Armor I-V [Active Knight Skill, 2/2/3/3/4 turns cooldown, no other costs, Switch Skill tied to Crippling Blow] Low damage + Weaken target opponents DEF by 5/10/15/20/25% for 1-2 turns.   Dash Attack I-V [Active Knight Skill, 2/2/3/3/4 turns cooldown, no other costs] Medium Damage (increasing with level) & push back (75/80/85/90/95%) one target (target is moved from the front row into the back row. If it was already there, the effect is ignored).   Thrust of Valor I-V [Active Knight Skill, Heroic, Warmup 1/2/2/3/3, Cooldown 2/2/3/3/4 ] Powerful ATK + MAT Damage (increasing with level), Stun (50/55/60/65/70%) & push back (50/55/60/65/70%) one target.   Phew - thats all for now, more to come in one of the next blog installments!   If you are still with me, thank you for reading this wall of text. Yep, this is a big project and it will keep me busy for month's if not years. But its moving forward, in the next installment I will introduce you to the next class: The priest!   cheers -Malagar
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A open-world, roguelike game

Another text-only update today: If you followed my last entries you already know that im into "roguelike" game concepts. The title of todays blog entry goes even a step further: It describes the "real thing" Im going after: A open-world roguelike game. People keep telling me that it's not possible with VXA, and still I try!   A open-world, roguelike game - what a powerful term. Now, what does this mean for development strongpoints? Here is a quick breakdown what "Realm of Legends" will be - and what not: CON: Graphics. I'll keep this project RTP only with some tiny little additions.
CON: Media & Menus. Again: Not important to me, neither is music or fancy effects.
CON: Storyline. There won't be a story. Maybe some lore to the background world, thats all.
PRO: Open-world. You start in or near one of the smaller Villages and thats it. You are free to go anywhere and do anything. There are no barriers or borders except your level & skill.
PRO: Random. All dungeons, may they be overworld or underground - will be randomized and deep. This encourages exploration and replayability. I plan some dungeons to be like 50 floors deep, this is only possible thanks to the random generation algorithm Im using.
PRO: Items. There will be tons of items, literally tons of them. Not just weapons and armor but also ingredients, tools, materials, potions, food - everythings.
PRO: Crafting. Besides buying you will be able to craft almost every item in the game by yourself.
PRO: Survival. Your characters will need to eat, drink and rest. You will suffer from starvation if you don't. Combat will also exhaust your stamina.
PRO: Party Sculpting. You start with 1 character and can hire more. You can also dismiss them again. You meet more classes throughout the game and can exchange members until you find your ideal group.
PRO: Skills. Besides crafting there will be lots of skills, both for combat and peaceful skills as well. This includes haggling, fishing, gathering and many more.
PRO: Scalability. Finally, all dungeons will scale with your parties level. This means: no matter when you visit a dungeon, there will always be a challenge. No "newbie only" dungeon. Visit the old tower at lvl 1? No problem. Visit the ogre cave at lvl 32? OK. Vice-versa? Do as you wish!
Okay, thats all for today. Realm of Legends is a very ambitious project, but im doing without some very time-consuming features other games focus on. All in all this is a learning experience to me and: there is no deadline, I dont think this game will be finished anytime soon.   It might not be the game for everybody, but if you ask me - it's gonna be a damn cool concept!   yours -Malagar
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Realm of Legends - Devlog 2

The "Realm of Legends" project made another big step forward today. Most of the work was put into debugging the existing scripts and "harmonizing" the 3rd party scripts with each other. The rest of the day went into some more core concepts. Those concepts seem to be finished now and I can carry on to care about other things (like equipment, skills, classes and enemies). What core concepts am I talking about? Well, its all about "tension"!   "Realm of Legends" is a typical crawler, so the player will spend most of his time in dungeons. Besides enemies and traps, there is no real need for the player to keep moving or explore the lower parts of the dungeon. Well there will be quests and a storyline, but it felt like there should be some "tension" to force the player to move on.   In roguelike games this stress situation is often created by using a "food counter" that is ticking away with every turn. I wanted something similar in ROFL and went even a bit farther: Besides food, there is also thirst and stamina as well as item durability and a limited inventory. These core concepts could also be considered to be "enviroment mechanics" that keep the player on his toes. You just cannot endlessly collect treasure as you will sooner or later run out of space.
You cannot rely on your equipment forever as weapons and armor will sooner or later fall apart.
You have to care for your characters by giving them to eat and to drink, or they will starve.
And, your characters have to rest - this is simply done by pressing the space bar, but it also makes the enemies move closer to your party (possibly triggering combat), so better think twice!
The hunger/thirst/stamina system deserves an extra paragraph: When one of your character falls to 0 food/thirst/stamina he will gain a negative status effect. This effect works similar to poison, but is much weaker (5% hp loss over time), but the effects stack up to 15% (this can be in fact quite dangerous). Hunger/Thirst can be recovered by consuming food items. This wont happen often (1 per character per 500 steps) but its crucial to survial. Stamina is easy to recover by visiting a Inn or resting via pressing the space bar. But beware of wandering monsters!   In addition, your equipment loses durability and may break during dungeon adventures. Its wise to stock up food and water in towns as well as packing an extra weapon (or two) to be equipped for the dungeon. In Realm of Legends, preparing before departing into a dungeon is taken to a completely different (higher) level!   thats all for today, more updates next week   Yours -Malagar
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Realm of Legends - Devlog 1

Hello Everyone, So, I started developing my first real game for VXA after giving up on RPGMaker 2003 because of it's lack of scripting freedom and other features. "Realm of Legends" (ROFL) is still in very early development, but I already got support from several people here on the boards. I would like to introduce the project to you and ask you for some feedback and fresh ideas. "Realm of Legends" is a so called "random crawler" (note: this word creation is copyrighted by Mr. Trivel), with many features found in "Roguelike" games like Shiren or Torneco. The only major difference is, that ROFL is party based and uses the regular, turn based combat system instead of on-map-combat.   Over the course of the next blog entries, I would like to talk a bit about the features Im currently adding to the project. Progress is slow, thats due to my job and real life commitments, but its steady. Today I like to begin with a tiny little feature as this blog post is already quite long: The Haggling Feature!   So, there is a set of "common skills" in the game that every character can learn. This skill family compromises typical out-of-combat and every-day skills like "Haggling" and a few others (to be announced later). Every character can learn to haggle and the skill can be upgraded two times to a maximum level of 3.   Haggling is a passive skill that you cannot directly activate. Instead, whenever you access a shop or inn, there is the possibility that "Haggling" grants you a discount to the goods purchased or increases the money you make from selling items. Each level of "Haggling" (1-3) adds 1% discount/bonus to your sales/buys and its important to note that the total Haggling skill of all party members counts. Its therefore possible to gain a 12% discount/refund from 4 party members with Haggling 3 each. Finally, there are some vendors you cannot haggle with, your skill will be ignored. In addition, there is a random factor, so you cannot count on your skill level blindly. Haggling might be just a tiny little feature, but nonetheless its part of the overall style of the project.   Finally, here is a small demonstration movie to show the basic functionality of the engine (kudos goes to Saba Kan for his random dungeon generator). Please ignore the story part, thats just a placeholder for now and note that I accidentally set the enemies to "through". All in all, this video is just a humble beginning of the engine:     Thats all for today, more infos when there is more to show! -Malagar
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Namechange & Logo

Well well, my main project - the rogue like game called "GrindQuest" got its name changed today. Its still a rogue like and the game itself was not modified. But its now called "Realm of Legends" (short: ROFL).   This was done because the new name fits the theme - exploring a randomly generated fantasy world - much more. Note when I say randomly generated, I mean the dungeons themselves not necessarily the world map or towns (because this would be too hard to achieve in VX Ace).   And, we have got a professional logo now - done by a friend of mine. Enjoy!
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The path of the Roguelike

Ah, my first blog (and my very first entry as well!)   So, this is Malagar, hailing from Europe (germany to be more exact). PHP coder by day (gotta pay the rent you know) and VX Ace noob at night (but im improving!). And yes, I try to create a "Roguelike" using VX Ace. A daunting task for a newbie you might think. And indeed it is, but i do not give up!   First of all, what is a roguelike? Its a computer game that utilizes tons of randomly generated content. So the game is always different every time you play. I tried to make such a game using RPGMaker 2k3 a good while back. But the old Maker engine lacked scripting and therefore the project was abandoned quickly. Now I am back with my trusty full version of VX Ace. And BTW, HERE is a bit more information about what "roguelike" games are.   So, the name of my game is GrindQuest. Because thats what it is about: grinding and questing in a randomly generated world. At first I wanted to make overworld maps also, but this is too difficult ATM. Instead I decided to put the game into a giant dungeon and save worldmaps for a possible second installation of the game.   The foundation of my project is "Saba Kan's Random Dungeon Generator 0.14" by Saba Kan and translated by Kirinelf. But I modified the code a lot (will be explained in another blog entry), so you cannot really compare it to the old codebase again. I also sent an email to SabaKan, but he didnt answer (sadly I do not speak japanese). It seems like he did not update his code anymore. Anyways, I have already implement so much new stuff into his script that I doubt his update could add anything useful to it.   The real challenge of creating a roguelike game out of this, is not creating the dungeon itself. Its the game system, the interaction of objects and the turn based combat that takes place on the map itself. Im already working on Items, Obstacles and Traps. But the combat system really gives me a headache. Therefore I have decided to use the standard RPGMaker battlesystem for now. I know that this is not very "roguelike" but the "real thing" is way beyond my scripting knowledge right now.   Maybe, if I finish the other parts of this "engine" I cann switch to a true rogulike combat system later. I am doing my best!   Stay tuned for more entries, features and screens - there will be more stuff soon!   cheers -Malagar  
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