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[Pasty]

Watch the Trailer | Download the Demo (57 MB) | Kickstarter Page



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What's Alcarys Complex?

Alcarys Complex is an action-RPG developed in Game Maker 8/8.1 Pro. Myself and a few other people have been working since August 2006 to create a responsibly written, entertaining JRPG without condescending to the player or using common JRPG cliches as a crutch. I handled the programming and writing, mostly in my spare time. I took it to Iraq with me twice and worked on it on top of my twelve-hour workdays, and now it's almost done. And I could not be more relieved.

I have paid careful attention to the main script for this game: I began writing the game's first draft in February 2009 and ended in May. Since then, this 165-page script has consistently seen countless draft revisions. The story is informed greatly by characterization and character development - each of the six main characters have defined growth arcs based on their circumstances and experience.

Now, I'm not a professional writer, and I'm not published, but I've taken to heart the notion that writing is a skill and a process meant to be honed and improved over time, not something you just do, and I hope that will suffice.

Note: this game is a story-based role-playing game; its style is most like Squaresoft's SNES games. Naturally, a lot of focus is given to the main plot sequence. There's character development and lots of dialogue. Just giving people who don't like playing RPGs like this a heads-up.

Screenshots (click thumbnail to enlarge)

more...

The Gameplay

Banter: Banter is a system of real-time text-based dialogue that doesn't interrupt the flow of gameplay. It's mostly used to provide additional characterization to the main characters, as well as to communicate "radio" broadcasts in real time that inform the player about the world (this is more subtle than it sounds).

Combat: Battle, while containing many options, isn't the primary point of this game. The vast majority of combat encounters are voluntary, and the only rewards it nets are material: you get tags that you can turn in to shops for items. You get no experience from combat. That's the job of...

Sociability: Statistical growth is handled mostly by the plot. There is a maximum of nine levels in the game, dictated by how far you are in the story. Once you pass these thresholds, you automatically level up. Statistical customization, however, is possible with the Sociability system.

Cutscenes, banter, and NPC dialogue all grant Sociability Points (SP). Each level has an SP benchmark, and once the character is past that benchmark, they can spend any points after that directly on stats and grow their character the way they want.

NPCs: I write NPCs with two fundamental rules in mind: one, that the NPC will react to the plot, and two, that the main characters will subsequently react to the NPC and learn more about themselves in the process. I use a couple of tools to achieve my ends.

One: I've built a system of plot periods to provide an easy way to allow NPCs to react to the plot. NPCs will say different things if you approach them later in the game as opposed to earlier. Two: When an NPC gives the player a choice in this game, the choice isn't between snippets of dialogue the character might say. The choice is between the characters themselves. Conversation NPCs allow the flow of dialogue to diverge into wildly different directions, depending on the character chosen. Three: Certain "buddy" NPCs exist that befriend (or in some cases, antagonize) certain main characters. You can progress these conversations over the course of the game.

The Characters

(from left: Corvallis Unruh, Angela Leyline, Attlas Douglass,
Leyt Duckworth, Alex Kirovabad, Lomah Byron)

These people have their own motivations, rivalries, and social circles. Some of them hate each other and some of them have never met. But they all have something in common: they're the silent that thirst for a voice in this chaotic world. Maybe they'll make headway at some point. Full info on the main and supporting cast can be found here.

The World

In the game's world, a class of beings called cursors arose from a rogue state scientist's clandestine experiments. Full lore info can be found here.

Default Controls
Note: in order to customize your control set or use a joypad, go to the Configuration menu.

[Arrow] - Move/Navigate Menus
[C] - Attack/Confirm
[X] - Show Dialogue/Secondary Function
[Z] - Cancel
[Q] - Main Menu
[Enter] - Pause
[A,S,D] - Party Member Command Menu
[1-6] - Node Hotkeys (top row number keys)
[F1] - Help

Feedback Opportunities!

This game isn't released yet but it's really close to completion! The game is feature-complete and it's about 90% content-complete. When it comes out, you can find it at www.modestarcade.com.

Specifically, I'm looking for people who would be willing to help us find and destroy bugs prior to the final release of this game. If you can help us out, shoot me a PM with your e-mail and I'll add you to our QA mailing list. We'll let you know when it all goes down.

Anyway, thanks for your time! If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask.

Watch the Trailer | Download the Demo (57 MB) | Kickstarter Page

[Theon]

Oooh, shiny

[Pasty]

Update: I've made updates to the site. There's now a fairly detailed characters page with brief bios of the six main characters as well as most of the supporting cast up to the end of the second act. I've also posted both a trailer and the IGF RC2 demonstration. For the demo, you should just be able to unpack it and go.

If you notice any speed issues or other bugs, post here with your OS/CPU/GPU and a description of what was going down when the error occurred (ex. fighting a Saidder in the Grafton Desert, game freezes in the Ancients' Courtyard in Midvale, etc). I try to get all the bugs before I drop a public demo, but it never happens, ever, so I'll be happy to help as best I can.

As always, feedback appreciated. I'm always interested in potential improvements. 

[drderekk]

The title looks like the PS2 font :D

[GZ]

I'm definitely going to check this out within the next few days. It's great to hear you're nearly done with this!

[GZ]

I got around to playing this, I played both scenarios to completion. I think in total it took some where around 1 1/2 hours to beat both. It's worth noting I did have quite a lot of issues with the game when starting out. So I've broken this down into multiple categories, written in the order I played. Here's what I thought:

Scenario #2:

When starting out, you are presented with the two save files to load. Not knowing what to pick, I choose the second one because it appeared to be at an earlier point in the game. Everything went fine until I hit the first trip wire. I got stuck here for a good 5 minutes because it didn't make any sense to me that I'd need to walk through the wall to proceed. In the second scenario, you are told to go through a wall to get to the non-space portal, so if I knew this beforehand this would make a lot more sense, but playing this scenario first without knowing that makes it hard to figure out. After I got past that, the game froze when I chose to listen to the pipe on that same screen. I had to restart the game and continue, but I was fed up with that scenario so I picked the first one now. This time, the game froze when I tried to open my first door. I had to quit again. I played scenario one again and the game froze AGAIN when I clicked on another door (!!!). These happened to be the three spots in the game where it would freeze, because after that I had no game ending bugs. I went back to scenario #2, avoided the first pipe, and beat it. Beyond the game freezing and getting stuck on the walking through wall part, I thought scenario #2 was well done, having a bit of dialog, a bit of puzzles, and a bit of battling.

Scenario #1:

In general I liked the scenario all around, with the exception of the two boss battles because I had no idea what the hell I was doing (more later in general impressions). I really liked the trek from the city to the house. Good job on making the environments feel more open than they are. Ultimately it's a linear path you go down but it feels much more open than that. The non-space was great and I like how you integrated the glitched look of it with the story along with it being a portal system.

General Impressions:

- A problem specific to this demo is that I have no idea what's going on because it appears that both scenarios take place at some mid-point in the game. All of the characters, story details, and so on, go compeltely over my head because I have no context to draw upon. I would have preferred playing the intro to the game so that I can get a better understanding of what's going on. Because of this, I think a lot of what you might have hoped to covey through the writing largely goes to waste because I don't know or care about any of the characters or plots yet.

- The portraits for the characters look great. Why aren't they visible when those characters talk through dialog? On top of the color coding you use on dialog, having the portraits there seems to make sense.

- Great work on the battle effects. There's a lot of them and they all look really solid.

- When moving, it doesn't move to the next walking frame until a 1/3rd second or so. It looks a little odd, because you can move across the ground without ever changing sprite if you tap a key in any given direction.

- Map sizes seemed odd. For instance, why is it that something like the desert area was broken into something like 9 very small maps? It makes more sense to me that it'd be 1 large map. The only reason I can see breaking these up is because of the enemies, but you could always limit the enemy movement range to within X amount of pixels from their starting position. Other areas seemed to be broken up oddly as well, I would have liked to see larger maps instead of a bunch of small connected ones.

- I sometimes had issues when making choices in the game. The choice kicks in right when a dialog ends, and this is usually exactly when I hit the key to continue to the next dialog. What happens is the choice pops up for 1/10th a second, I click action not knowing I'd be presented a choice, and don't ever see what I choose. Having a half second delay before accepting input when a choice pops up would fix this, I think.

- Good work on the graphics. They have an otherworldly feel to them and there's a lot of attention to detail.

- A lot of things aren't explained well that are important, like lingual magic. Beyond the 20 or so help screens that most people aren't going to spend much time reading, it was not apparent to me that you needed to drink a potion just to use those certain spells. When I played, I did not know this until half way through the 2nd elemental boss simply because I was using every item I have at that point to try and beat him. Why can't a menu pop up before boss fights asking you if you want to use this item? That seems like the perfect time to tell the player and the right time to use it. Another thing which isn't explained is the stacking. At first, I would only cast one and they were fairly useless, but when I learned you can use two, it pretty much changed everything since those are the most powerful spells. Things like this really needed to be explained better. This is something that has to do with starting at the mid point in the game too, and I think really hurts this as a demo because the game has so many unexplained systems.

- Had a hell of a time getting into the battle system, but after a while it did feel better. Going on the point above, if you could try and simplify and speed up some of the interface stuff, it would be a lot more inviting.

Errors:

- In the first scenario, the game froze on me when I tried to enter the very top left house, or the 3rd house from the left.

- In the second scenario, listening to the first pipe caused the game to freeze.

- I had this appear in my game_errors.log several times:

Warning: objCameraFocus with ID 126818 in room rmGRACommercial exists without focus ID!

There was no effect on gameplay as far as I could tell.

- On the map Mastrov Easy, pressing A / S / D showed a bunch of dialog icons on the freeze screen.

- Speaking to the inn keeper or any shop keeper caused my character to get stuck in a wall close to them. You can move around in this state but it's kind of glitchy, and when you move to the right spot in front of them eventually proceeds with their dialog.

- The snow effect takes 2 second to fill up the screen and clears the particles when you press pause. You should try filling up the screen with particles on creation.

[Randomasta]

Looking nice, I recognized Ocean's artwork right away haha. Didn't realize that the game has been around for quite a while.

[Pasty]

thanks for the comments, guys! really appreciate them.

gz: glad you liked what you played, but i'm sorry to hear of your troubles. i'm going to see if i can address the issues you were having.

most of the game-breaking errors seem to come with the territory of changing code in a system that has, frankly, become quite massive. the mastrov easy map, in particular, moonlights as a cutscene map, so there are a lot of invisible NPCs that only get activated during one scene of the game. thanks for pointing this out.

the other errors and issues stem from not communicating enough with the player. unfortunately, this is one of my weaknesses as a developer, and i'll try to get better as time goes on.

re. the trip wire: since this game abstracts the character from the player quite a bit, i'm thinking of using the character to see places the player can't really see because of the top-down perspective. for instance, if the player takes too long to locate the wall entrance or trips the trip wire, i could have angela communicate using banter that there's an opening in the wall or give some kind of other hint.

i'm also thinking about adding an intro scenario to the demo as well, if that helps. if i do this i'll just post the save file.

thanks again for your awesome critique. i've been dealing with class but i'm going to have a pretty large amount of time to dedicate to this within the next two weeks, so i'll see if i can't climb ever closer to a finished game.

[Udderdude]

My (short) play experience: I loaded up scenario 2 (after fumbling around and discovering C selects things at the title screen, instead of something sane like Enter), and walked out of town until I found a rock monster thing in the ground.

I tried shooting at it, while one NPC ran back and forth doing nothing and the other one got pulled near it and sat there taking damage while doing nothing and not trying to move away. (It was the one with the wierd face mask thing, if I recall).

Also my gun seemed to be doing like .. 2 damage to it, while the rock monster was hitting the NPCs for 23 or so.

Maybe I'll fool around with it later.  But if you were going for a "Secret of Mana" style gameplay where the NPCs do helpful stuff, it's not exactly working too well so far.

[Alec S.]

This sounds really cool, but I keep getting an error when I try to run it.

"WAV load error: AL error in alBufferData (programmer error"

[Pasty]

udderdude: oh, that's too bad. :/

you may consider equipping some of the provided equipment before you set out and using Alex (the one in white) as your party leader instead of Angela because the hookshot and pistol AI modules are way more robust than the melee AI right now.

it also sounds like Lomah in particular is flitting between AI states for some reason. i'm looking at these things right now and will address them in the next version of the demo (which is coming very soon).

Alec: do you have any other games on your system that use OpenAL that run fine? i'm trying to nail what this would be but i don't honestly know. it may be a one-in-a-million freak out, but it's counterproductive to think that way. try downloading and installing the latest OpenAL library. after that, remove the copies of openal32.dll and wrap_oal.dll from the game's directory and try to run the game again.

thanks for the feedback!

[Pasty]

Posted a new demo today with the following fixes and additions (there are more than this, see bugfix.txt for the complete list of fixes):

- You can now select from four scenarios! Recently added are an introductory scenario and a scenario that shows off one of the game's prime features: the Interactive Dialogue system.
- Added face portraits to message boxes for playable characters.
- Delayed hint system: these are CutsceneEvents placed in certain areas that pop up a banter hint if the party remains in contact with the event for a certain period of time.
- In Scenario 4, Alex is equipped with the Chieftain's Bracelet by default. This allows her to charge Lingual Nodes without drinking potion.

- Fixed fatal errors involving interaction with objects, including but not limited to: NPCs, NPC Triggers, disabled Teleports, CutsceneEvents, and Placards: the game would either freeze or not interact with the object.
- Fixed game-killing sound bugs related to OpenAL
- Fixed error involving objNPCTrigger: collision checking was interfering with the EntityMove script's pathfinding and causing control of the party leader to glitch.
- Fixed error in sprite animation: when starting to move, there's a small period where the movement sprite looks like the idle sprite, so if you tap a movement key, the character is moving, but the animation isn't, leading to a 'gliding' effect.
- Fixed bugs in display of Sociability talk icons.
- Modified the halt mechanism on choices. It originally waited 50 steps until it popped up the choice dialog. Now it pops up the choice dialog immediately and waits 25 steps before the player can make any input.



The Interactive Dialogue system (above) is something in particular that I'd like to share with you guys. The main concept is that of a dialogue between your party members and/or their allies and some adversary where you are given the opportunity to choose who leads the conversation multiple times. At the end of the dialogue, you're awarded SP.

Given a few Mood Cards, some hints and your knowledge of the characters, your goal is to choose the right character at the right point in the conversation and maximize your SP award.

The one in this demo is fairly basic, with players choosing between two party members and having three Mood Cards at their disposal, which they can use to immediately see the mood of all party members at that point in time. I'm aware no one really knows these characters yet, so this is kind of touch and go.

My goal is to have one of these for all nine Sociability levels and to have them gradually increase in difficulty until the player's gleaning the most advanced moods from their characters based on context. For example, if Corvallis is proud, it may be seen as a welcome change from his meek demeanor, but if Angela's proud, it may come off as boastful.

Anyway, feedback is welcome, as always.

Edit: Also, I'm looking for someone who can do a good folk soundtrack. PM me if you're interested.

[GZ]

I'll be sure to check this new build out as well and post my thoughts. Looking forward to seeing the dialog system in action.

[Glic2000]

Just tried getting into this... first impressions so far:

- What's with the heavy thumping sound while the text is appearing?  It's super irritating.  And the sound of walking up the stairs sounds like someone tapping on a metal plate.

- Tried to go into the main configuration menu to set the controls, but couldn't figure out how to back out of the menu!  I assume I was supposed to press Z (cancel), but you should also make it respond to the ESC key. 
 
- Is there no way to quit from the main menu?  I couldn't find one; even clicking on the X wouldn't close the window.

- Have you considered scaling the text window to fit the text?  It just seems like most of the time, the text box is way too big for the amount of text, and having a large black box covering so much of the screen is a bit unattractive. 

- I thought the graphics were great; nice colour choices and an attractive style. 

- Is it possible to save the game?  Contrary to what the readme said, pressing Q did not bring up a menu.

Nice work so far! 

[Pasty]

thanks, i'm in major study mode right now but i thought i'd post a few things.

- SE is always something i'm looking at. i acknowledge that the footstep SE is not the best sound so i'll have to do something about that. i also honestly don't know why i still have message blip still activated. i'm not very partial to the notion of message blip SE in general and more than one person has said that it's pretty annoying in its current state.
- one of the major usability edits i have planned before the final release is a title screen overhaul to make it easier for players to do what they need to do without having to fiddle around with everything
- UI is locked until scene 9 (when corvallis and angela leave town). i may unlock the main menu, though; it never hurts to introduce people to the interface they're going to be using for the entire game as early as possible (on at least a preliminary basis, anyway). in the meantime you can save by pressing [confirm] when standing over a save point.

i'll see what i can do about these when i'm not buried in integrals. definitely appreciate the feedback, though!