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[Chis]

Made some character portraits and descriptions. In the future I'll have full side-view versions with various expressions, but this should be fine for now.


Perplexi is the unofficial captain of NOMAD, an eccentric gang of explorers. (NOMAD has 5 members when you start, but gradually you amass many more.) She literally knows no fear. Excitable, hotheaded, always looking for a good fight. She holds a strong sense of justice and enjoys playing the part of Robin Hood. Sometimes lacking common sense; loves getting the crew into trouble.
She wields a lightweight hammer and specializes in wind damage. She's extremely fast and hits hard, but doesn't have the best aim.

Passeus is the unofficial secretary of NOMAD. He has the ability to seduce nearly all female town NPCs, which is great for getting free items and lodging. He's quite narcissistic, but good-humored; he's the level-headed one of the crew. He and Perplexi often exchange banters.
He uses bows and specializes in earth. Slow and sturdy, high attack and accuracy. He's cursed to break his weapons after a few uses.

I might redo him, he looks really weird ...
Ven was found dying in the desert and taken aboard NOMAD. (You meet him after the first dungeon) A quiet, melancholy daydreamer who can walk while sleeping and doesn't respond until you've called his name a couple of times.
Although frail, Ven has an incredible mana capacity and high magic attack. His element is water, but he's adept in pretty much every element. Begins with very little soul.

Alec S.: Thank you!  

[beetleking22]

  Beautiful.

[Chis]

placeholderartplaceholderartplaceholderart. Everything will look better in the future.
Yes, I was so lazy I drew in the door. Please admire me.

beetleking22: Thank you! :,D

[SolarLune]

It's looking pretty cool so far. The characters look really unique, and I like that you're not just going for 'stereotypical' characters, but rather are trying to expand on the concept, really fleshing them out.

[happymonster]

Looking great!! 

[Chis]

Implemented some platforms that move up/down every turn, so you can use them to elevate things. Along with that I set a limit on how high characters can jump/throw.
Also ended up modelling the door after all, haha. Doors usually open once the room has been cleared.
iTween is now in the system! Works beautifully even with my js code, and will make my life x1000 easier.
I changed the projector shader to an additive one, so now I can highlight tiles without slowing down the game.

Starting to regret using a hex grid after trying to fit geometry to it. Straight edges lead to extra padding like so:



Not sure if that's an issue. What do you guys think? I'll find a way to mask the untraversible partial tiles in the future. Or maybe just not show the grid at all.

I started learning about writing shaders. I'd really like a nonrealistic shader that emulates the art style for the characters, with the flowing lines and whatnot. Since amazing shaders like this and this and of course

exist, I know it's possible. Just hard  
Anyone have any tips on how I can achieve this effect?

[SolarLune]

About the grid, you could cut off partial cells (i.e. the ones at the top that are cut off can be 'deleted' altogether).

About the filter, you could probably start off with a toon shader and go from there (I don't know much about it, unfortunately).

[Chis]

Oops, forgot to reply to messages.

SolarLune: About the characters, thanks! I think writing strong characters makes the game more fulfilling and memorable   and makes the player care about them more.
Yes, that was my plan for the grid. I was wondering if it would just look bad if the traversible tiles didn't match up exactly with the geometry.
Yep, the toon shader looks like a great place to start (using them now in fact). I have no idea where to go from there but I'll figure it out. Thanks!

happymonster: Thank you!  

[Chis]

In case you were wondering, I've been sleeping for two weeks straight revamping the whole game.

- converting the entire game to unityscript to c#! Not sure why I started with unityscript, took me like a day alone just to redo the basics, and I still haven't started on the soul strands. But I'm so so glad I did this because now I get to use interfaces, the most beautiful things gosh ;__;

- Oh man, dialogue is here! Each character has a series of lines that display letter-by-letter with pauses in between, and you can also fast-load with 'A'. Portraits look fuzzy but I'll rescale them in the future once I finalize the GUI style.



- Implemented sprite-facing and animations! DISCLAIMER those sprites are not mine I just nabbed them from this really cool RPGMaker generator as placeholders to test.

- I've decided to use binary files for storage! No hassle and microscopic file size wins a yes from me. I wrote up a custom serializer/deserializer for characters and maps. Also made a really crude map generator for the hex grid. You can click on a tile to mark it as traversible, and it'll write itself to a bin file.

- Lotsa little tweaks, like camera focusing on acting characters, fixing a thing where sprites further to the side would appear off-center, giving everyone their own health bar, etc.

But yeah, mostly just redoing everything. I'm much more happy with my code and I feel like I can actually progress now!

Also, I started playing Chrono Trigger. And Seiken Densetsu 3. Because I think it's important to let everyone know about my daily life.

[Chis]

I have a plot!! Granted, the synopsis is pretty much your typical evil guy tries to bring end of world thing, but I'm really relying on building strong characters to carry the plot through.

So the game begins after the third nuclear war/meteor strike/other apocalypse, which makes earth completely inhabitable and also wipes a lot of technology. During this time, a couple of land masses either separated from earth or fell into earth's orbit, and they now float above earth.

The few humans that survived took residence on these islands, and many generations later, the human race is flourishing once again. The evolution of civilization pretty much restarts - the current world is in a peaceful golden age and more diverse than ever before, with influences from ancient and modern cultures alike. This includes the rediscovery of magic, which was lost after the ancient civilizations.
Moreover, the apocalypse caused a drastic shift in the ecosystem, so you'll find all sorts of strange creatures inhabiting the islands. Bit of a far stretch, I know   but worth the fun.

The game starts with Perplexi and her merry crew as seemingly simple adventurers that dungeon-dive for rarities. And then everything changes when they meet Ven. And that's as far as I'll say!

Some areas I have in mind:

The mainland - the most frequented area in the game, and basically the hub for commerce and travel. Extremely advanced compared to the other areas, has a spacey scifi theme.

The neoSahara - huge, covers half of the continent, contains several tribal kingdoms.

Ara Lude - wind-themed island. It floats lower than most of the other islands, so it's completely enveloped in clouds.

[antoniodamala]

Great stuff here, lovely gameplay and art. I only ask you to not put a generic story and/or boring dialogues. Besides that, just keep it up with the good work 

[Chis]

I am breaking up with the hex grid due to a violent and unstable relationship. I don't think I'll lose too much without it.

I've planned out the layout of the first dungeon, including all the mechanics I want to have. It's fairly linear, but for a tutorial dungeon it'll do just fine. It's supposed to be fairy/Alice in Wonderland themed.
Wrote the scripts for the first few rooms. The characters hint at, but don't really tell you everything to do. Maybe this is bad for a tutorial dungeon, but I still want the player to explore their options for themselves.

antoniodamala: Thanks! The story is Chrono Trigger-esque, and I'm making multidimensional characters my top priority 

[TobiasW]

So beautiful!

And since it doesn't stop there and you're also doing interesting stuff with magic (soul strands, skill ghosting) I'll keep an eye on this thread!

[happymonster]

As I said in the art thread, I think this would work better for you if you did all the graphics in your more hand drawn style, with all the graphics 2D. The 3D graphics look in a different style at the moment.

[Peregrinus]

I have to agree with happymonster.

[SolarLune]

I agree that the style is different, but I'm not so sure about jumping to 2D. It might be possible to do in 3D while keeping the same style.

[happymonster]

Any news?

[Boud]

Damn I thought there was news on the game 

Hope you're still working on it buddy, it's really promising.

[happymonster]

Sadly, it looks like this has been abandoned. I hope not though! Any news?

[Chis]

I suuuuucckk
I just couldn't keep up the motivation to work on the game any longer. But rereading this thread now I realized that people were kinda looking forward to it 
I'm going to revisit this project after summer break and try again. The most daunting thing for me right now is detangling the shitty code I'd written before, lol. and after watching some super informative extra credits episodes I've resolved to get prototypes out as early as possible.
sorry for disappointing you guys, but I hope to get back on track! see ya soon