Forums / Fun! / Creative

Serious talk, in the last month I've worked hard to start building the engine of a game that I've thought about for a long time. It's a turn based RPG with its main mechanic surrounding changing the environment's colour to change stats. This is called your team's "aura" and once you mess around with it a bit I think it will make some sense (although later I will definitely have a tutorial in the game).

Here's a preview:

And you can download the demo here. (note: as I post this the link is still updating the file)

I eventually wanna focus on crowdfunding but this thing isn't really where I want it to be yet for that. The main reason though outside of funding is also so I can receive feedback from backers during testing since I want this game to be as balanced as possible. But right now I'm just showing what I got, looking for opinions, ect.

Currently in this demo, there is a basic overworld and battles. Everything in the demo is stuff I created, music and sprites ect.
Notes:
- Overworld has no menus yet, only one NPC. Also sprites/backgrounds obviously are temporary.
- Item menu doesn't have any function in battles yet.
- I haven't done anything with the stat upgrades so that is probably buggy.
- Party colour is currently random to show off the music change mechanic.
- 1 in 4 battles will be harder and will have different music.
- Fleeing always works
- Some sprites are missing/gibberish
- Possible crashes (please report to me all crashes with copy/paste of what it spits out)
- No animations in battle. I might not even get this in by the time I get a crowdfunding demo out. The way the battle's animations are programmed make setting up certain things complicated (pseudo-3D graphics). I have an idea for an engine but it's so time consuming to make sure it works properly that I want to develop it after the rest of the engine is complete.
- Camera spin sometimes does this overlay glitch, it's because I'm not done with it yet ;)
- Loss isn't programmed.
- You can restart the game by pressing shift, and spawn a battle in the overworld with backspace.

I don't want to go into detail about what kind of direction I'm going to take the art/story but I assure you that I've spent a lot of time thinking it through, and that I think that if you like my other stuff that it won't disappoint. I really want to aim to make something awesome, so any feedback is appreciated. Currently I'm focusing way more on getting this engine working so feedback on that is more important.

If you have crashes just PM them to me, I'd rather have this thread more for opinions, ideas, questions, suggestions ect.

Old demo video:

Gonna bump this. Is good and in 3D too.

The battle system looks great.

Sorry for the lack of updates. I'm still working on menus, they're taking a lot more time than I expected (but they work like a charm).

Anyways, have some of the soundtrack I've worked on since then:

I love it. Keep this stuff going it's incredible. Still buggy of course but I love the aura system.

If you could report bugs to me via private message that would be awesome. Thanks!

https://www.dropbox.com/s/txsc2drr8569sey/colors_demo.zip?dl=0

Demo Update:

-You now have an inventory. Main bag + individual character inventories.
-Menus!!!!!
-Party menu – you can equip items, move your party around, check your moves and check your stats. Talk menu currently WIP.
- Inventory – You can give items to characters and toss. Use doesn't work yet but none of the items provided have uses outside of equipping yet anyways…
- Option – Just two at the moment.
- Saving!!! You can load a game by pressing shift while in the overworld, and it will load from a previous save file.
- A few minor balance changes, most notably dipping costs more MP
- Characters have abilities, although they're invisible to the player. Richard doubles experience gained from battles and Mike autotargets and has a chance of dealing triple damage.
- bug fixes, bug fixes everywhere

To Do:
- Currently working on a way to have leveling be more balanced. Right now if you battle the same characters over and over you get the same amount of experience.
- Display friendship stats on the menus, lol forgot to do that
- Sprites, visual bug fixes, ect.
- Victory screen has some visual bugs if you equip stat-boosting items.
- Battle item effects (Orgonite, Scrolls, Arrows and Potions) as well as bag equip (use a turn to equip an item)

By the way, Black/Richard does have a full design, but I haven't done any of his major sprites yet. Here's the work I'm doing on for the overworld:

The design on his shirt isn't anything special, it just represents the 3 colors of light coming together. In color the diagram looks like this:

In it you can see there's red, green, blue, but also cyan (anti-red), magenta (anti-green) and yellow (anti-blue).

Nice. Can't wait to see the full game.

showing off dialog trees

The dialog tree system is actually pretty simple. It basically works like Slides and Ladders, but there are also 7 additional emotions your characters can be, and depending on the emotional state of your character AND the percentage completion they have on their friendship meter determines which tree is chosen. Depending on how you answer that tree results in a changed emotional state and percent.

If a dialog tree doesn't exist or has already been used at that percent/emotion, it's unavailable, and the percent happiness meter can be filled by battling as well (but if you're outside of the party, there is no such option). Each character is expected to have at least 40-50 trees neutral emotion and around 30 for each other one. Possibly more or less.

Dialog trees are where most of the game's story is told, and is required to learn more advanced moves in the game.

Pardon the nearby updates, but I thought I'd show this mechanic which causes a character to stop talking to you, as well as how branching dialog trees affect future trees:

There's actually quite a few ways to enrage him to this point but this is one of the fastest.

Big update – name screen and a lot of clean up work. Look at how purdy this game is now. cough cough.

There are some bugs in the video but I'll be fixing them later in the week. Blah.

Since the battle system is pretty much stable now I've decided to start building out the rest of the demo.

ATTACK ANIMATIONS?!

Work with the beginning of the demo

Demo is coming along nicely…

I'm starting to put in accessibility features. Yee. You're probably wondering what that is.

That means making my game usable for the blind. Basically it entails spending a whole day to program footsteps (as well as other things not shown here). But hey, they can be used to detect collisions through sound! How neat is that?

Quite neat. Giving a possibility for anyone to play is quite a good idea.

I actually have a huge hobby in developing games for the blind; this is my first work that I own all the IP. There's a whole forum dedicated to people into it at audiogames.net but most of them are blind developers themselves.

I plan on implementing this feature in the sighted game as well so it's not just an accessibility feature but a full fledged mechanic.

Hey everyone!

Try the demo! It's out :o

https://www.dropbox.com/s/31p3m3yy2n7dsgg/Colors-Default-1.0.0.35.zip?dl=0

graphics update

Now the battles have flashy animations. Pardon the frame skipping my CPU is shit

Heyyo. I don't really have time for the demo, but from that last vid I can see some good potential from this concept. I especially like what I assume is the equivalent of "experience" is only shared among those that weren't defeated, which adds a want to keep your friends alive.

I assume you're going to add more sprites for moves, as opposed to "hop-on-the-spot"? You should only need one for a move, like say what you'd see in Darkest Dungeon.

In any case, I'd hope your priority for this is to work on the right things to have a tech demo primed that you'd be proud of. This means not worrying about major dialogue, but have the skeleton of a basic, but original story set up. And as long as the major game-breaking bugs are destroyed, few will complain as long as a nice and thorough art style wins their hearts.

Long story short, make a demo worthy of Mordor, get it kickstarted, and hire a team to ensure more tedious projects can be dealt with quickly.

I'm going to be adding an attacking animation along with finishing up the hit animations.

You're right about experience, experience is actually friendship and likewise you have to survive the battle to level up. It affects what monsters you can run into plus the obvious stat increases atm. You get a base boost for defeating the monster, but some moves, mainly ones that affect allies, can give an additional boost to the affected allies.

I'm pretty content with the game in terms of basic story setup. So I'm focusing on polishing the look of the battle as well as implementing more stuff in terms of monster abilities. There's also a lot of weird consistency bugs I've been weeding out. My last priority is overworld graphics since for the most part they're placeholders.

The main priority of building this thing out is making something that's super easy to flesh out different ideas. So to prove this, I've been working on creating a wide variety of status effects, which make the game a lot more strategic than a lot of JRPG like games. The aim is to be more like a card game but instead of a randomized deck you have essentially an enemy party you're pit against that has a certain set of strategies you have to navigate, instead of just a generic set of monsters.

But if you do ever play the demo sometime it would be nice to have some input.

You can now talk to monsters. Demo's not updated with this but basically how this function works is if there's only one monster left, you can attempt to inquire. It might fail so try a few times. If you listen to 7 turns of dialog, they'll leave automatically.

They drop really good drops if you do this so it might be a good idea to try just for the drops. They also might dispense information or lore as well.

I've been optimizing the hell out of the overworld so that I can work on having better sprites and artwork there. Eventually I'll be replacing my work with professional work if I can, but yeah.

AKA. The totally uncool but necessary part of game development.