I don't know why I decided to do this. I felt like it was a cool idea. Or something.

Anyways, you may have heard rumors circulating around that I was creating another RPG Maker project. This is indeed true. The new project is called...wait for it, I actually have a cool image I can use for this one.

YEAH! HYPE MAN!

But yeah, it's called Broken Destiny. If you want a brief plot summary of what I have so far, the main character, Eris, decided a long while ago that she wanted to become a writer. She wanted to tell everyone about her adventures in the form of writing. However, her home town of Arfoile was raided by the Red Knight Empire, which left the town to burn and die. While escaping, Eris is unaware of an ambush set up by the Red Knight Militia, and is hit with an arrow which debilitates her and her fighting ability. She is then executed on the spot.

However, before her death, Eris hears the voices of the gods and goddesses in her head having a distant conversation. Time then stops, rewinds itself moments before Eris became aware of the ambush, and everything resets itself. Eris is dumbfounded by this change of events, but she now knows where the spot of the ambush is and evades it. This puts the soldiers who were chasing her in a stump, and she dispatches them easily. She then runs away from Arfoile and proceeds to join the neighboring Rarindal Empire.

In some of my earlier RPG Maker projects, you'll have noticed that maps are rather small, linear, and have pretty much no interactivity to them. I plan to rectify this by making maps as large as they can be, but also as detailed as can be. Pretty much akin to something like Final Fantasy's large-scale maps but have lots of enemies in them. Of course, this might sound different from the usual RPG Maker norm, but it's always interesting to try new things. Since the style I'm going for is more of a single-player MMO experience, similar to Xenoblade Chronicles (you're going to hear me preach about this game A LOT), maps are going to be very large, enemies are going to be a lot stronger and tankier, there will be world and field mini-bosses, and more importantly, the maps are going to be parallaxed.

Yes, you heard it, parallaxed. Something that I've actually never down before. But there's a first time for everything, isn't there? Note, that I don't plan on parallaxing EVERYTHING, only spots where there would be lots of trees. For example, I'm not gonna bother parallaxing a plainsy type of area when there are only going to be 2 or 3 trees. No, there are some areas like jungles and snow places that are going to have thousands upon thousands of trees parallaxed in with the actual tileset. As for how I'm going to do that, I don't know, since a 300x300 map in the editor is about 360,000 pixels altogether (guestimating here, but that sounds about right). I've only done a cheap method so far of mapping out everything in the editor, treeless, then taking a picture of that, opening it up in Photoshop, and adding trees that way. But that's going to be a problem with bigger maps.

The combat is also one of the things I'd like to talk about. Combat strays away from the traditional turn-based mechanic and incorporates ATB in a rather streamlined and easily accessible manner. From doing multiple playtests of the game's combat system, I can safely say that combat is one of the things I am very proud of to have working. Combat is very fast-paced and enjoyable; it has the perfect balance of choosing the action of one of your party members, them being able to execute it, then selecting the next one and executing it, and so on so that you'll never really have any down-time waiting for the ATB gauge to fill up. And that's one thing I've always disliked about how some developers handle their ATB in RPG Maker: they make it wait too long for some reason, so the fights drag on and on and on. In this sense, even though enemies are tougher and take more hits to take down, you're not wasting time waiting for the gauge to fill and you can focus on how exactly you want to plan out your attacks and strategies.

Here's a few videos explaining what I really mean when I say AT is streamlined and more focused.

Anyways, I think that's about all for now. I'll be using this blog as a means to keep everyone updated on the whereabouts of where my game stands in terms of completion, and when I'll be releasing alpha demos and whatnot. If you're interested, feel free to comment below. It means a lot~