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[crazyheckman]

Current News

Public Demo Early Next Week!

I'm wrapping up some fixes for issues brought up during the private testing and will be releasing a public demo here in the first half of next week.  Check back if you'd like to play!

Original Post Below

About 5 months ago I started working on an online party game.  Once I got the server up, I realized I could turn it into a kind of game that I've always wanted to make.  So I changed some things around and after 2 or 3 months I had a cool little RPG going, named it Ritus.

I've been a little bit concerned that it wasn't good enough to start showing off, but really want to get some feedback as it's being developed.  The aesthetics of the game in particular are worrying me, I'm not really an artist so I don't really know how long I can keep making assets for it.  But I persevere, everyone who has played has said the graphics were good but I keep expecting more critical feedback.


A recent screenshot of the first stage

Anyway, the game is an online 5 player action RPG.  The gameplay works similar to mmos in that you right click players and enemies to target them and then use an array of abilities to combat them, protect yourself, or aid your party.  I'm really trying to draw in ideas from Diablo, Monster Hunter, and Castlevania.  Some enemies will have attacks that you need to move or do a specific action to avoid, so navigating around the platforms and towards party members is going to be vital.


Old screenshot showing some of the different classes

The original idea was based on Terraria, not the sandbox part of it.  The fact that Terraria is in essence just Minecraft, only 2D which made it easier to produce content for it (until they stopped working on it).  So I wanted to create the essence of dungeons in WoW, and then mold that into a 2D game that I could quickly keep releasing new levels and gameplay for.


An early screenshot of the second stage

The plan is to make a few levels, showing off the low, mid, and high level content for a demo.  Then I want to gauge interest for it and gain some feedback so I can go full steam ahead on content and release a full version.

It's in a pretty good state at the moment, the gameplay is just about 100%.  I need to mess with the boss fights a little more to make it so every character isn't just standing and plugging away at abilities without thinking about it.  The equipment system is in, you can equip different gear and it will show on the character, but I need to fill it with items and make it so players get items when completing quests.  I'd like to also add a leveling system with different ability tiers to mix and match what utilities you'll need, but that feature may be too complicated and on its way to the chopping block.  

The aesthetics are getting a pretty big overhaul, in particular the UI, which I've never really been happy with.  Also the game is completely void of sound.  I'm not a great artists but I'm a REALLY TERRIBLE musician, so I'm looking into just purchasing some cheap freelance music and sound effects.  But I want to lock everything else down before I go spending money I need for food/shelter on it.


The equipment menu, which could use a little flair

I'm currently trying to fill out a list of committed testers.  I have a few friends that are able to help out here and there, but they aren't available most of the time and are never all available at the same time.  So I'd like a larger list of people considering the game is difficult to balance for 5 people when I don't have 5 people to test.  So if you're interested send me a message with the best way to contact you.  Or if you have an idea on how to alert people easily, I would love to hear it.  Right now I scramble around on facebook, aim, skype, and steam looking for people to help out.

Oh here's the only video I was able to take from around 2 months ago.  It has some major enemy teleporting issues and the Magician crashes the server at the end (which I fixed, one of his spells didn't sync with the clients), but it shows off the gameplay pretty well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoqmtW-oOao

[johnki]

I sent you a message about testing. This looks awesome. I'm always up for a good co-op game. :D

[crazyheckman]

I sent you a message about testing. This looks awesome. I'm always up for a good co-op game. :D

I did get your message, I'm adding all the emails to a list for later on.  I'll start another testing session after I finish the second boss, should be in 2-3 weeks at most.

[crazyheckman]

Finally got some time this weekend to work on Ritus some more.  I've decided to completely redo that backgrounds for each level.  It's a huge undertaking and it's taking me like 2 days to redo each one.  But I think the new style is more consistent and a lot cleaner looking.



Alls I'm doing is using the old paint brush background as a guide to make a more defined pixel art version.  Which is not so easy, my hand is so cramped right now.

I've also been thinking a lot about more systems I wanted to implement.  I'm being very wary of bogging my game down with dozens of complicated grids and points and such, but I'd like one way besides equipment to customize your character.  So a skill or talent system seems like the way I'm going to go so people can bring a little flavor to their playstyle.  The skill grid is kind of in the back of my head as a decent way to go, people would be able to pick and choose 1 out of 3-4 skills to fill each of the 5 skill slots they have (much like Diablo 3) to better suit whatever battle they'd be going into.

Things are picking back up, I'm hoping to finish this level and get a little code done by the end of tonight because this week is going to be full of Halloween preparations and work.

Starting tomorrow, I think I'm going to be doing a couple posts on the different classes.

[crazyheckman]

Not a very large update today, but I wanted to write a little bit about the classes in the game as well.

I redid some more assets tonight, most notably the gears are finally looking not stupid.



I also made a better font for the combat text.  Spent about 3 hours today listening to potential music, but I decided the aesthetics in the game aren't complete enough for me to know what styles fit with it.  Would LOVE some feedback on that if it's possible for anyone to judge the style based on the screenshots.

Anyway, there are 5 classes currently. I wanted to finish with about 10 so there are multiple options for each archetype, but that's going to come way later.  For the initial beta I just want to get the 5 I have down.

Each class will have a job to do based on their type.

Knights take a lot of damage and are able to keep enemies focused on them. They also have the ability to mitigate damage for other people and restore the party's mana.

Mystics are healers that can keep the party alive and buff their abilities.  They can do a little bit of damage, but most of it relies on other players.  They have a spell for instance that will convert overhealing into an aoe burst on their target.

Berserkers are a mobile damage dealer, I'm trying to get them to switch from balls to the wall damage as well as taking care of any special actions a boss may require.  For instance, there may be a lever that will disable to boss for a short period, the Berserker would be most fit to jump over, trigger it, then jump back into the fray.

Archers are the only class not shown in a screenshot, but they are in the video in the original post.  They deal mostly in debuffing the target and putting down residual damage.  They have to know when a fight is going to get tougher and compensate for it.

Elementalists are the magician type guy seen in a few of the screenshots.  He's pretty much raw damage, but at the moment he's rather difficult to play.  He switches between forms to deal damage, but I'm going to change that.  It's way too frustrating to manage switching forms, dealing damage, and avoiding enemies.

I don't want to nerd out on them too much because they're all subject to some big changes.  Especially the Archer and Elementalist, they're balanced very poorly at the moment.  Just wanted to write a little about the game design because I've been working on assets for the last 3 or 4 days.

[crazyheckman]

I got some work done today on the Town background.  It'll be used for the main menu and the lobby where your party selects their stage, quest, and equipment.



I still have to fill out the background with some smaller buildings and add some more details.  Those bricks are also probably going to get improved/replaced.  It's supposed to be a really cluttered main city so it's taking a very very long time to finish.  I can NOT wait to start programming again, and I'd really like to add some more equipment to the game.  These backgrounds are destroying my wrist.

Hopeful candidate for a musician, but I'm still searching tirelessly for some audio for the game.

[crazyheckman]

I've sealed the deal with a musician who has been very hard at work making two tracks for Ritus already.  I threw together a little video of the state the game is in right now, and I'm absolutely loving how well it's coming together.

Keep in mind a LOT of the visuals are being revamped.  The second screen you see with all the menus is going to be completely reworked and the city background is only about half finished.

Now I just need to find some sound effects and I can stop worrying and start working again.

[crazyheckman]

I've finally just about finished the town background.

I got rid of the big ugly chat box at the top and will be replacing it with a semi transparent one shown at the bottom while you're typing.

I'm toying with the UI at the moment, trying to get it not to suck.  Not sucking is difficult though and I'm trying to draw in ideas from other games.  It should be something simple in the end, my meager drawing ability isn't up to creating big ornate falcons on the sides of everything like WoW or something.

Probably going to end up as just colored rectangles with the target's name on them.

My musician has been giving me absolutely amazing stuff as of late and I'm rushing the game a little bit trying to put a trailer together to show off a lot more gameplay.  I may be short of people to help me make the trailer so if anyone is interested in a very early alpha release just to record some footage let me know.

[yuotta]

This game looks really fun! Let me know if you need help with anything!

[crazyheckman]

I took a little break this week.  The musician was busy with another game so I thought I should just sit and think about pitfalls in the development (and play League of Legends).  The resolution for Ritus was originally 1024x640 for some reason, I tried to create so new resolution or something.

So I went back and redrew the town and clock tower backgrounds really quick.  The plan now is to stick to a 16:9 aspect ratio and kind of aspect fill the screen.  So the game will get a bit distorted on really high resolutions, but it looks fine for most.


New resolution is 1366x768

This week I'm hopefully going to get back on board with the musician and revamp some UI.  Then I'm going to get back into creating content, I have a lot of good ideas for some boss fights that I want to get completed before I show off another trailer.

[happymonster]

Don't be so hard on yourself, the graphics are nice.

[crazyheckman]

Don't be so hard on yourself, the graphics are nice.

This game looks really fun! Let me know if you need help with anything!

Thanks for the support guys, I will absolutely let you know when the demo is ready for some testing.  I'm pretty certain my art is not awful, but I look at other artists and wish I had spent more time drawing and less time playing WoW when I was younger.  But all I can do is keep trucking and keep getting better, thanks for the words though.  It took a while to respond because I hate making posts without any new screenshots to look at.

I've been getting a lot of technical work out of the way recently.  Ritus will now scale to all resolutions without mucking everything up.  I still have to get different aspect ratios to work, but I'm just glad I got everything to scale properly right now.

I also took some time to work on the different menus and interface things that I didn't think were that great.


The new equipment menu is a little bit better, but still not as shiny as I'd like it to be

The new player, target, and party frames are looking much better in my opinion.  I used the Dungeon Dashers UI for some ideas, been seeing a lot of that game lately.  The new frame will show health and mana as well as the percentage of threat in the vertical bar on the side.

I really can't wait until all this menu and technical business is taken care of so I can start working on new abilities and enemies again.  Quests have been on my mind quite a bit as of late, I have a few good ideas to put in and make everything not so "kill 10 enemies and get stuff".  I'll go more into detail once I have them all thought through.

[yuotta]

I'm very excited to play this!

[crazyheckman]

All images clickable for full version

Slow but steady progress on the menu front.  I'm trying to get all the boring stuff out of the way very very quickly so I can get back to working on quests and bosses.  Those menus are subject to change, I just wanted to get them out and functional before I spruced them up later.

Last week I finished character creation and saving, which was quite a big deal because only half the RPG elements were in place so some of my server had to be reconstructed.

The game is almost to a stage where it could be handed out to people without me babysitting them and telling them what order they have to do things for it to not crash or break.  So I'd really like to get an alpha of the demo out this month with just the Clock Tower stage to iron out some bugs.

Be sure to send me a message or reply here if you'd like to be a part of these tests!

I've also put Ritus up on IndieDB, so be sure to support it there where I'll also be posting videos and builds.

[johnki]

Looking really good. The little fire attack effect thing on the last one looks pretty cool.

I'd probably be playing Mystic.

EDIT: And lol@the test character names.

Be sure to send me a message or reply here if you'd like to be a part of these tests!

Does my way-long-ago-now application still...apply?