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A simple blog about a simple game!

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A little Update

Just a small upgrade today. This is what I got done the past days:   1. Death Penalty When your whole party gets wiped out, you will be teleported back to town and revived with 1 HP. There is no Game Over in this game. But you lose 50% of your gold as Death Penalty. Now there are two tricks: A. You can purchase a "Money Pouch" that will reduce that Penalty to 40% and there is a Magic Pouch as well that you can find in one of the dungeons, this will reduce the cost down to 30%   Second, there are various Jewels in the game. Those are worth a lot of money and can both be found and bought. When your party dies, you lose gold but not those Jewels. So the Jewels can be used in order to preserve your money. Not a big deal, but it might become handy at some point.   2. Technical / Graphical Updates   2.1 Textures I reduced the texture size down to 256x256 at 128 colors. Below is a picture attached. Do you see a difference? I do not. Its much faster now and takes less disk space and RAM.   2.2 Player Sprites Instead of Faces each Actor is represented by a typical Actor sprite. Im using the Time Fantasy sprites here, as they perfectly fit that retro fantasy setting. I want to use Actors instead of Faces because in this first person game you will never see your actual party. Having sprites adds at least a bit of personality to them instead of having faces all the time (and they can be animated). It also looks better during combat, as combat takes places on the same screen/perspective.   2.3 HUD Im redesigning the HUD a little bit. increased the transparency of the windows so that you can see the floor shining through. I might also change the black background color to something else to make it lighter and more lively.   Im still thinking about switching to good old brownish parchment style for the HUD, don't know...   2.4 NPCs I'll be using a old face-set from the RPGMaker Advance as NPC faces (screens follow later), as they look really nice and retro. Now the NPCs use faces and the Actors sprites - that makes them look different altogether and thats exactly what I would like to achieve.   2.5 Monsters & Icons Got both the Monsters and Icons for the game as well. TBA in a future blog post. By adding several new scripts (like Battle Line EX from Soulpour777) the combat now looks really nice!   Still looking for a nice and freely available set of fantasy music though!  
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System 2: Light, Darkness & Encounters

I sweat waterfalls! Nonetheless the second system was completed today: Light, Darkness & Encounters.   As said before, I want to add a bit more pressure (stress) to dungeon exploring without going too much into detail. There has to be something between battles in order to keep the players on their toes. Yesterday the Food & Starvation system was finished and today its the Light System and its impact on the Encounters.   (The fully lit dungeon)   1. Light Basically all dungeons are dark. When entering you are not able to see further than one tile. Various light sources can be bought at the Town and found inside the dungeons. There are candles, torches, lamps and magical light sources as well. They all increase your light level by a certain amount of lux. There are 6 light levels (20 lux each) that enable you to see between one and six tiles in front of your party.   2. Darkness When your light level drops, you reach a point where navigating the dungeon becomes very difficult. Better have some reserve light sources ready or a very good map of the dungeon level. Because otherwise it might get really difficult to find your way out. A rather rare emergency solution is a Pocket Portal that allows you to teleport back into town.   3. Encounters The more your light level goes down, the higher the encounter rate raises. You should think about this fact each and every minute! The darker it is, the more dangerous the dungeons get. Better keep your surroundings well lit, or otherwise difficulty will ramp up a lot.   Thats it for today, simple and effective if you ask me.   I have not decided what system to tackle next, but it might be the Gamover/Party Wipeout penalty. You cannot really lose this game, your party just gets teleported back to town. But this comes at a cost!   Im also always interested in your ideas - so if my blogging inspires you, feel free to comment!   cheers -"sweating" Malagar   (The same area without any light and a crazy high encounter rate!)
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System 1: Food & Starvation

Ugh, it's actually way to hot for RPG Makerings, but well...I managed to work a bit on the project today:   After some experiments with my project Monster's Den, it was decided that the typical dungeon roaming requires some more pressure to it. Therefore I deciced to add a few "Systems" to the game that are not directly battle related and add a bit more stress to the dungeon running. Today I would like to shed some light on the first (finished) system:   Food & Starvation To be honest - i hate when you have to feed your characters in RPGs. But starvation surely adds some pressure to dungeon exploration, so i decided to add it. To keep things simple, there is a food counter that is the same for all characters and each food type also increases that food counter by the same amount. So it makes no difference if you eat a banana or a steak, they both heal 100 food points.   (please note that Im going with 16x16 icons for this project)   1. Food Items There are many different food items in the game, but only one is of real importance: Iron Rations. While your characters can find and eat any kind of food - only the Iron Rations can be bought in town. And when auto-eating, your characters always try to consume iron rations first. That is what makes them so "special".   2. Food Usage Food basically "heals" 100 food points (a new stat), each Actor starts with 100 food points and once they drop below 0 it suffers from the "Starvation" state. You can feed your Actors manually as well and it is not possible to overfeed (is that the right word?) your party.   3. Food Extras Of course all food items are defined as regular items and can have nice side-effects as well. The most important one is that food heals either HP or MP - this fact turns it into a real alternative to potions. But I can imagine adding "magic food" later as well that will add some nice Buffs (states) to your Actors.   4. Starvation & Time Time requires your Actors to eat. Eating is only required inside of dungeons. But there is no realtime clock in this game. Instead what Im doing is measuring the number of steps. Each step reduces the food points of each character in your party by one. Once an Actors food points drop below 0, it is affected by the "Starvation" state.   5. Starvation Effects Once a Actor begins to starve it loses 1 HP per step taken. Thats not really dangerous (maybe at the beginning of the game), the true penalty is a different one: Actors affected by Starvation have all of their base stats reduced (except DEF because that would be totally unfair). In addition, any potential HP and MP regeneration is stopped. So Starvation kills you really slooooowly, but comes with a major penalty regarding combat capability!   Well, thats all for today - I hope to keep the pace and with for Monster's Den to shape up into playable state early next year.   Next time I will be reporting about the second "system" that I have started working on: The Light System.   until then   cheers -Malagar   PS: One more screenshot showing a Dark Knight and a Paladin in the party. Note that the 8-Bit Window Skin was replaced with my 16-Bit one (done about half a year ago). Also removed the border from the Actors faces and adjusted the bars and their position a bit. Please note that there are no real "faces" in this game - all characters are represented with Sprites instead of Faces. And they are all animated (simple with just 2 frames). The sprites are from RPGMaker 95!  
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Welcome to Monster's Den!

[Please note that I copied this entry over from the design theory forum section] Wow - I cannot believe it has been almost a year since my last (serious) attempt to use VXA. A few of you might remember me, I was working on ASOE - a online script for VXA as well as expanding the Triple Triad script. Well, now the time has come to work on a real project again. I would like to hear some of your thoughts: Monster's Den A more or less endless 3d dungeon crawler made with VXA (single player). I am currently in the pre-production state as well as very early production state. The game is inspired by old classics like Arcana (SNES) or the Wizardry series. Instead of detailled text, I would like to show you several "feature lists" to give you the idea: Boundaries & Restrictions Some restrictions that I set myself in order to make the project more manageable: No use of ripped assets of any kind (!)
All assets are either freely available, commercial or from older maker versions
Strong rogue-like flair, but dungeon levels are not randomly generated
The game features no real story, but might feature a series of quests
Monster's Den takes place in dungeons only (no overworld, no towns)
A single town at the beginning of the maze is accessible via Menu's only
Assets Used Some infos on the assets. As you can see on the screenshots below, the style of the textures and the rest of the game clashes. This is due to the limited resources available and a simple test I did a while ago: Using low-res textures just looks ugly and really hurt your eyes after staring at them for a while. Because players will look a lot at those textures, I decied to go with high-res ones instead. Textures by David Gurreah and freely available (downsized to 512x512 - still quite large)
All player characters are from RPGMaker 95 (!)
Uses a commercial Icon Set
Uses a commercial Monster Set that I plan to buy
Uses a very simple window set to underline the retro flair
Uses freely available music from a defunct GBA game
Animation and Sound Effect either VXA RTP or RPGMaker 2k3 RTP
Non-aliased retro font
Technology Used All scripts by the maker community: Most of Mr. Trivels old scripts he did for me a good while ago
Almost all Yanfly Scripts
Many scripts by Hime
All player character faces and NPC faces are animated (enemies are not)
Many other community scripts
Main Script: First Person Labyrinth Explorer (http://www.rgss-fact...rinth-explorer/)
Gameplay Imagine a JRPG hardcore dungeon crawler with frequent random battles and tons of treasure. The game is actually a huge grind (but I like that to some extend), supported by a shipload of items, weapons, armor and spells. Start in the Menu-based city to form and equip your party
Choose a party of 4 from ca. 15 different classes
Get a quest in the castle to have a reason entering Monster Den
Fight your way through Monster Den, complete the quest and teleport back to the surface
Rinse and repeat! (if you like)
Pseudo perma-death system that gives you a limited number of "Revive's"
216 spells, 6 elements, 3 power levels of spells
Hundreds of weapons, armor and equipment
Traps, Chests, Locked Doors, simple switch puzzles and the like
poisoned areas, lava areas, and other kinds of traps
wandering merchants and hireable heroes roam the dungeons
random encounters galore!
Choose any party you like and try interesting new combinations
Exchange fallen members with new ones you pick up in dungeons or at town (pre-levelled)
Random shop inventories that increase with your level
NO light system. NO food system. This is a JRPG that has a focus on battles. No need to eat/drink/sleep - because thats boring. We want to slay dragons with our left hand instead!
Release Date None so far, as I have just begun working on Monster's Den! Screenshots Just two very early WIP screenshots for you to get the idea. Please ignore the lazy layout and the many little errors on the screenshots. I really just started working on this. I explained the use of high-res textures above. The reason why Im putting all enemies on this kind of "playing card" is: Due to the 3d nature of the dungeon, the enemies look really weird as some of them get placed on walls etc. The "card style" makes things look a bit more abstract and removes the importance of enemy placements on the screen. Thats it for now! cheers -Malagar
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