Kaelan

@shadowblack Thanks for the bug report, I'll look into those later today. Diseases should be cured when you cast Remove Disease, if that's not happening, then that's a bug too. I'll look into that as well. @RaidoFrost Thanks for playing!

Demo Link: RHD Demo v0.6 (~2 hours) Changelog Game Overview Red Hand of Doom is a turn-based strategy game based on the Dungeons & Dragons pen-and-paper campaign of the same name. In it, you must try to stop the legions of the Red Hand from conquering the Human, Elf and Dwarven cites and settlements of the Elsir Vale. The legions of the Red Hand are too powerful to be fought directly, however - you'll have to find other ways to thwart their plans. Story History and Geography Controls You play the game mostly with your mouse: Left Click: Confirm Right Click: Cancel However, there are several useful keyboard shortcuts: F3: Quicksave F5: Fullscreen F6: Toggle screen scaling F7: Quickload F12: Restart Game C: Character Sheet (Status Menu) I: Inventory / Equipment Screen R: Rest F: File Menu (Save / Load) O: Options Menu ESC: Quit Game Number Keys (0 ~ 9): Configurable Hotkeys Space: End Turn (during combat) This is a point-and-click game, so gamepads are not supported. Gameplay Features Turn-Based Tactical Combat The game uses a set of rules derived from Dungeons & Dragons 3.5e. If you're not familiar with those, in practice this means that it plays as a tactics game, similar to Fire Emblem or Final Fantasy Tactics. It mostly follows the D&D standard rules, though I've modified a few things here and there to make the game easier to understand and more fun to play as a PC game. Character Customization You can create your own party of up to 4 characters using the game's character creator and strengthen them in whatever way you desire as you progress through the game. No characters have set abilities or classes - it is up to you to decide how your party behaves. The game provides a flexible and powerful customization system which allows for a myriad of character builds - from a traditional spell-casting Wizard to a horn-blowing, battle-singing orcish Barbarian/Bard, who defeats enemies through the power of his voice. If you're having trouble getting past an encounter, consider using different character builds or party setups. Passage of Time Time plays a major role in the game. As you play, the time of day changes, and all external areas will visually reflect this. Whenever your characters rest, several hours pass. When travelling to other locations on the world map, time will pass relative to the distance traveled. Time passes even when in combat - the longer you fight, the more time goes by. As the days and weeks pass, various events will happen in-game. Several events can only occur during fixed time frames, as the armies of the Red Hand march along the Elsir Vale.Your primary task is to stop them before it is too late; there are a number of secondary tasks which will divert you from this path. If you arrive at certain locations early enough, you may be able to save characters that would otherwise die. Whatever the case, the story will continue. Should you move on ahead of the horde and warn unsuspecting cities of their approach, or stay behind to save the wounded and get stragglers to safety? Spend your time wisely - losing in battle is not the only way to get a Game Over! Widescreen Resolution By default, the game runs at 1366x768 resolution. The Game.ini file can be edited to change the game's resolution from 1024x768 (better performance, smaller screen) to 1440x900 (more screen space, a bit more demanding on your PC). The game's UI repositions and adjusts to your resolution. All screenshots and videos below were taken at the default resolution. House Rules At the start of the game, several options regarding game difficulty can be changed. Instead of having fixed "Easy / Normal / Hard" difficulty modes, you can toggle individual options on an off, creating your own difficulty modes. Screenshots Videos Credits

Looks like it was just part of the same bug with Reduce Person. It was permanently altering your stats in a way it wasn't supposed to, so it would crash any time the game tried to check your character's size. Fixed and updated the download. If you want to keep playing on the same save, recast Reduce Person on any character you had cast it on before and the problem should go away.

Haha, good to see you're having fun with it. Looks like I at least did something right I fixed the Reduce Person and Inspire Competence bugs, but I'm not sure what's causing the other one. Can you send me the error log? There should be a text file called Errors.txt in your game folder.

@Saif Ü Thanks for the review! Updated the download to v0.6. Mostly minor adjustments and bugfixes.

Ahh, I think I see what the problem is. I think the biggest issue I might have is the tutorial not explaining things well enough. Each caster class has a main stat that it uses, and that stat will determine both how hard your spells are to resist and how much SP you gain per level. Clerics and Wizards actually gain SP at the same rate, but Wizards cast spells with Intelligence while Clerics cast with Wisdom. If you had very low Wisdom, that would explain why your Cleric couldn't cast anything very well. If you have trouble healing, you could have a Cleric learn the Healing Domain at level 1, it grants access to healing spells 1 tier higher than they otherwise would be for your level. The gems are to be sold for money, they don't have any other function on their own. Accuracy is determined by your attack stat, which usually comes from Strength (for melee weapons) or Dexterity (ranged weapons and melee weapons with Weapon Finesse). You can increase it by having higher stats, using spells or abilities that increase those stats (like casting Bull's Strength on your Fighter, or using a Barbarian's Rage ability) or casting spells that increase attack directly, like a Cleric's Bless or a Bard's Inspire Courage. Some enemies also have abilities or properties that increase their evasion (concealment). You can either kill those with spells or find a way to reduce their evasion so you can hit them (Ghosts and Shadows lose their evasion when you hit them with Glitterdust or Faerie Fire, for example). Spell ranges are different per spell. Most support and offensive spells have 3 ~ 8 tiles of range. Healing spells are intentionally all very short range and generally harder to cast in battle than other spells because Clerics are not meant to stay back and cure like White Mages. They're meant to fight on the front lines (they can wear heavy armor and their spells can't fail because of armor) and provide support. Healing is mostly a backup strategy for when things go wrong - you should try to prevent damage as much as you can before it happens. The point about Weapon Finesse I agree with, it doesn't make sense that Rogues get it after Fighters. I'll change the requirements on that to 13 DEX instead.

Thanks for the review! Most of the testing was in normal mode, so it seems I missed some bugs in Easy. I'll fix them right away! For the story, you didn't miss much, the demo intentionally has very little story and no cutscenes. It's essentially the tutorial area before the story begins. In the final version, you'll discover everything mentioned in the game topic once you can reach the first town, which is right after the demo ends. For the difficulty you said you had trouble with, who do you mean by the first boss in the demo? The undead in the crypt? Or the Ogre in the cave? I'd love more thoughts on anything you found too difficult, I'm trying to make it hard but not unreasonable.

Updated the game to v0.5. Some fairly large changes this time around:

Actually, it could work pretty well. Grand Knights History did something like that:

You could just check if a screenshot file exists before trying to load it to make this compatible with old saves. Also, you're not deleting the screenshot when a save file gets deleted.

Short combat demo, since screenshots aren't really very good at showing what's actually going on. There's still a few display bugs I need to fix, but all that (hopefully) shouldn't get in the way of seeing what's going on overall. Still a WIP, warranty void if seal broken, standard disclaimers apply, etc: Don't mind Ralph, he's there to trigger the combat sequence; It's supposed to start when enemies see you, but I haven't implemented the enemy line of sight stuff yet :<

- Text properly aligned in text boxes. Seriously, so many games get this wrong, it's kind of mind-boggling. If there's padding on the side, there should be padding on the top! - This goes into visual consistency and it's something I see a lot: really pretty games with ugly menus. Don't do that! It's a real big sticking point for me if I see gorgeous mapping or character busts, then awful menus. Makes me think what other parts of the game were left by the wayside.

Oh, right, I almost forgot. If you want to practice formatting regular expressions or forget what all the symbols mean, you can use this website: http://www.rubular.com/. It lets you quickly test whether a regex matches a string and has a quick reference of all the accepted characters in one page. I use it a lot when messing with regex stuff, it's faster than trying to test it in RPG maker and having to run your game every time just to check if your regex is correct. You can also use http://codepad.org/ to run small bits of Ruby code and check quickly whether it's doing the right thing or not.

Breaking it down line by line: groups = [$data_skills, $data_items, $data_states] for group in groups for obj in group next if obj.nil? obj.load_notetags end end 1. Store the skills, items and states from the database in an Array 2. Iterate through that array, calling the current collection a "group" (first all skills, then all items then all states) 3. Iterate through each object in the current group. So when iterating through $data_items, obj is the current item. When iterating through skills, obj is the current skill, etc. 4. Most things in the database are 1-indexed, while Ruby collections are always 0-indexed. This means that the first item in each database collection (i.e. $data_items[0]) is usually nil. This line skips processing those to avoid errors. 5. Call the load_notetag function of the current object (current item, skill or state). I imagine the engine that's in has defined a load_notetag function for RPG::BaseItem, RPG::Skill and RPG::State. It's not calling the same function (DataManager::load_notetags), it's calling a function that has the same name in a different object (i.e. RPG::BaseItem.load_notetags). All that said, this code isn't actually doing any parsing, it's whatever gets called by the obj.load_notetags method that's parsing things. You can parse notetags in anyway you want. How you parse it is part due to preference and part due to how you decide to format the information inside your notetags. For items, for example, item.note returns a string containing whatever is in the note. So you use Ruby's regex functions to find the regex inside that string and store it somewhere. Here's a simple example I use for parsing enemy data in my combat engine: RX_ENEMY_TYPE = /<monster_type:\s*(.+)>/i def note_get_monster_type m_data = RX_ENEMY_TYPE.match(@enemy.note) if m_data.nil? || m_data[1].nil? @monster_type = "(NOT SET)" else @monster_type = m_data[1] end end It's set to match a notetag that looks like this: <monster_type: Hobgoblin Regular> inside my enemy notes. The Regexp.match method returns nil when nothing is found, or a MatchData structure when it is. MatchData[0] returns the entire matched string ("<monster_type: Hobgoblin Regular>"). MatchData[1] returns the equivalent of $1, which is the string matched by the bit in parenthesis inside the regex ("Hobgoblin Regular", in this case). A more complicated example: RX_ENEMY_STATS = /<stat_data>[\r\n]*/i def note_get_base_stats @enemy.note.split(RX_ENEMY_STATS).each do |block| next if block.empty? # Skip the start of the note block (the <stat_data> line) block.split('*').each do |line| # Split each part of the block starting with '*' into a line symbol = line.match(/:[\S]+/) # Find the first symbol in the line (i.e. ":str") next unless symbol # Skip this line if there aren't any symbols on it symbol = symbol[0] # Grab the symbol from MatchData[0] line.sub!(/:[\S]+[\s]+/, "") # Remove the matched symbol from the line line.chop! # Chop the newline character out from the end of the line cmd = "@stats.set(#{symbol}, #{line})" # Call a function that sets the stats using eval(cmd) # the loaded symbols. i.e: # @stats.set(:str, :base, 13) # Repeat for each stat end end end Which runs on a tag with (for example): <stat_data> * :str :base, 13 * :dex :base, 10 * :con :base, 16 * :int :base, 10 * :wis :base, 15 * :cha :base, 12 * :ac :base, 1 * :hp :base, 29 * :mhp :base, 29 * :fort :base, 3 * :reflex :base, 1 * :will :base, 3 * :bab :base, 2 <stat_data> Hope that clarifies things a bit.

It's a throwaway test map, I didn't even set passability on anything. It was mostly just to show the combat system. I literally put the map together in about 5 minutes so I'd have something to walk on, lol. It's not possible to see through a screenshot, but the terrain is like that so I can test footstep sound effects (creatures have different sounding footsteps depending on the type of tile they're walking on). And the resolution isn't a hacked DLL, it's a script, which is legal, though I don't plan on making the game commercial in any case.

Menus and combat stuff I've been working on:

RM/work chillout music:

Don't forget that when using escape character sequences in Ruby, you need a double slash if you escape the string with double quotes ("\\C[2]Text"), but a single slash if you escape it with single quotes ('\C[2]Text'). The \C is essentially just doing a change_color while processing the text in draw_text_ex, so you can't forget to reset the color at the end of the string when you're done. If you don't, it'll affect all text drawn in that window until another \C[x] call.

@Artorias That looks better, but I don't think you need the speech bubble "hook". It looks odd with square message boxes, and you don't need it if you're already darkening the bust of whoever isn't currently speaking. You might also want to try making the window with the speaker's name transparent, like this: Recently I've been putting some more work on menus right now, currently remaking my inventory screen: Before: After: I like the new version more, it feels less cluttered. Thoughts?

@Tenebrun Is that supposed to be like the BoF3 desert scene? I'd definitely add more miscellaneous bits like rocks, hills and dunes to make it easier to look at. The sand is also really bright, that might get hard to look at after a while if your game doesn't have a time of day thing going on like the BoF sequence does.

You can customize most of what's shown, I just usually leave all of the information windows open 'cause it's helpful for testing.

@Artorias : Aren't the stairs supposed to be longer than that? They should go down all the way to the same level the bottom of the wall goes to. Adding potions and scrolls to my combat system. It will eventually be finished, I swear.

It's 100% explicitly prohibited, the RMW staff has already confirmed this before. There's a clause in the EULA somewhere about not "altering base program functionality", or something to that effect. Any game posted with that on the official website would most likely get immediately taken down, regardless of whether it's commercial or not. It would make your game better, but whether that's worth the trouble later in distributing it, I'm not too sure.