Series 2 Redux

[Perversion]

I began working on my game for the mag contest. It will be a sequel to Series 1 (like that wasn't going to be too obvious... ). I'm going to try to make it so there is the eqivalent of two games in one. Meaning, when you start, you will be able to choose if you want to play the continuation of the good ending of Series 1 or the evil ending. Each section of the game will be drastically different, and each will have its own unique game mechanics and play style.

I began working on the "evil" section of the game last night, after not having worked on RPGM in close to 3 months. As it stands right now, the evil storyline is going to be comprised of minigames, of which the goal is to conquer all the other lands, be it through force or diplomacy. There might even be a minigame involving crops/resource management. These minigames are all going to be contained within events, as they were in A Series Aside. Meaning, they are mostly going to be text-based. As of right now, there will be one "minigame" that will include normal RPGM3 mechanics, which means battling, but it will be a very small portion of the game.

As for the "good" storyline, I'm planning on having it revolve around spreading the goddess Alluria's word to the people living in the surrounding areas. This storyline was already alluded to in my Series 4 teaser. I believe the idea I had that I was initially going to incorporate into (originally, the only game of) Series 4, which was astral projection, will fit in nicely within this scenario. Basically, the good storyline is going to be completing quests for people in order for them to pledge their allegiance and belief in Alluria. I think how I'm going to have it is, you will have to collect ingredients for a potion in order to astral project initially. During this time, you will be encountering/completing some quests. Once you drink the potion, you will be able to go to any church and astrally project at will. In doing so, some parts of certain quests that seemed uncompletable before will now be opened up after "talking" to and "listening" to people in the spirit realm. That's all on that for now. Oh, and there will be no battles.

As for what I worked on last night, it's a minigame based on the 3x3 grid that I used in both of my text-based games in A Series Aside. In this case, though, you have an army of 100 men, with a strength of 100. In each of the nine areas, you can fight an army stationed there, or if you choose to, you can go to any of the other nine squares and fight the army stationed there. Basically, depending on the strength of the army you are fighting, you will lose a certain amount of men from your army. If you drop below a certain amount of men, your strength will go down as well, meaning each enemy at that point will deal more damage to your men. The goal is to defeat all the enemy armies. The trick is, though, that if you just randomly fight enemies, you might not be able to solve the minigame, as your army might be fully depleted by the time you get to the end. In other words, there is one or possibly two different ways (orders) in which you need to fight the enemy armies in order to survive to the end.

Long story short, this minigame is basically going to be a strategy game mixed with a puzzle game. That's all I have laid out so far. This mingame, between brainstorming, programming, and playtesting, took probably 12 hours to complete yesterday. And I used event transitions for the first time (I needed to in order to program everything). As of 5 in the morning yesterday, though, it is fully playable with no bugs (debugging this monstrosity was a bear). I'll update this thread after I make more minigames, or make something in the "good" portion of the story. Thanks for your support.

[Ωbright]

Re: Series 2 Redux

Sounds AWESOME, and will inspire more people to play/replay Series 1!

The 'army battle' minigame sounds really intrigueing, and if it's anything like the 3x3 one in A Series Aside, it'll be brilliant. Sounds like it will be even cooler, as it will have more strategy associated with it.

I always loved the 'astral projection' idea, and it sounds like you've carried it out in a cool way.

I can't wait to play it, and I hope you win!

[Perversion]

Re: Series 2 Redux

I'm on a week vacation from work, so I'm attempting to work on this game. The last few days, I've been dabbling in working on the "good" side of the game. Because there are no battles, I had to figure out another way to make the game and keep it interesting. Basically, it's going to be a bunch of quests. There's going to be quests inside of quests inside of quests at some points. For example, in order to complete the goal of the first town, you will need to have the ability to astrally project. In order to gain that ability, you need to gather certain "ingredients" for the potion that you will initially use to gain that ability. In order to get some of these ingredients, though, you will need to get certain items from certain people, who will pose a quest of you in order to get the item.

So basically, the first priority of the game, and what you really need to do in order to complete all the main quests, is to gather the ingredients for the potion. Once you are able to astrally project, there will be a quest within your projections (I've not worked out all the details yet) that will allow you to read people's minds. Once you gain this ability, more quests or portions of other ones you've not been able to solve yet will open up to you.

I just hope people can get past the fact that a lot of this game is gonna be, well, not fetch quests per se, but quests inside of quests. There are gonna be puzzles spread out throughout, however, which will break up the questing a bit (I hope). I hope to put a big dent in the work that needs to be done on the "good" portion of the game before my week vacation is over. If it turns out that I can't finish both the good and evil portions of the game in time for the contest, I might release it with just the good portion being playable for the contest, and release a "special edition" somewhere down the line that will include the evil half too.


That's the update for now....

[Perversion]

Re: Series 2 Redux

I got in some hours working on it today. I seem to have gotten some of my motivation back. I added buildings to the last town today (but I still need to recreate three towns for the "astral" realm...there are going to be four towns total, and recreating them is kind of tedious and time consuming. I need to write down which building models are in each town, note their coordinates on a piece of paer, then copy that town, and re-place all of the buildings in the exact same spot....I've not even tried cloning NPCs to place them in the astral realm yet...), finished off one small portion of a quest, and then came up with a brilliant idea.

Well, not brilliant per se, but it seems as if when I make my games, instead of going for something simple, I feel the need to make it as complex as possible. For instance, in order to get one of the ingredients for the astral projection potion, you need to obtain two rubies, and put them in the eyes of a stone statue, which will then give you the ingredient. Instead of just placing the rubies in a treasure chest and leaving it at that, I decided yesterday to make the first one have a puzzle associated with it that you need to solve in order to obtain it. Then today, I had to place the other ruby, and decided to make a minigame (I'm not sure if it's even possible for me to make a game without including at least one minigame...) that you need to solve in order to get the ruby. It's another one of the 3x3 grid text games, but this one is different than the other ones I've done. Basically, you start out on the southwest corner of the gameboard, and move one square at a time until you get to the northeast corner, where the ruby is. In each square is an enemy, and you have cards that do 1, 2, and 3 damage to the enemies' corresponding 1, 2, and 3 hit points. You can get to the opposite corner in five moves, so you have five cards. It's a bit of trial and error, because the game does not tell you how many hit points the enemy on each square has. So on the first square, for an example, the enemy has 1 hit point. You can play either the 1, 2, or 3 damage card to defeat him, but if you play the 2 or 3 card, you'll not have that card later when you need it, because the game is worked out where you have 2 enemies with 1 hit point, and you have two 1 damage cards; 2 enemies with 2 hit ponts, and two 2 damage cards, and one enemy with 3 hit points, and one 3 damage card.

So basically, it's like a trial and error puzzle minigame. I spent a few hours today making/playtesting it, and it works fine. Seeing as how nothing is going on online right now, I'm probably going to go back downstairs for a while and work on my game some more. Maybe very soon, I'll have all these subquests out of the way (I'm working backwards on this-meaning, if there is a quest inside of a quest inside of a quest, to make things easy for myself, I'm starting on the most deeply imbedded quests and working my way outward), and I'll begin to actually start working on the main quest of the first town. This quest requires astral projection, so I wanted to get all the prerequisites required to get the astral projection in the first place out of the way first, and then go from there.


In that respect, I should almost be done or actually be done with all the "gathering materials for projection" quests done by the time I go to sleep tonight.

So that's the update. If I get more work done on this later tonight, you might see another update right after this one...