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[sufimaster]

Election Day - The mayor of your town has found himself embroiled in a corruption scandal for stealing from the town eggplant fund, and you've decided to throw your hat into the race for a new mayor!  It's not really a thriller, I actually expect it to be pretty mellow like carmelo this year, except hopefully not as terrible.

The game is still extremely raw and undone and can't properly be called a "Game". The art is awful - all placeholder free art right now. A few of my attempts (inside a house) are also awful. The movement is janky. There is zero animation. Yeah. Here's a crappy screenshot:





I have been working on for these past few months, and by this I mean 1-2 hours a week if that- I have a demanding job, 3 kids (and a lot of family!).  

The main "systems" I've been stressing over were fairly simple things like camera movement, screen/sprite "units", the dialog system and the quest system.  I have some sort of dialog tree thing working - the boxes themselves look absurd. I haven't had time to play around with the libgdx stage system to see if I can come up something more decent than this:



This si totally not representative of how the game will ultimately look, I've been basically focusing all my energy in functionality.  I can define entire dialog trees, associated with particular quests, or not, I can define which dialog triggers a quest, and the quest gets activated.

I can define where the NPCs are, which house they own, or are homeless, etc, and they will spawn near that house.

What's in the pipeline?

-Get (or make) some better art. Any one have any ideas on good tutorials for making my own tileset?
-Learn more about libgdx stage configuration/skins to make the dialog not look like garbage.
-Animate!
-Add more dialog. Right now I have very barebones dialog, maybe one dialog tree that gives you the first quest, but nothing beyond that. I am not sure how to make "Acts" in the game, i.e. story progression, beyond having dependent quests.
-Fix the janky movement and the weird white lines that occurs as a result of camera movement. I suspect this has to do with tile borders as I've read somewhere before.
-full screen totally messes up all of my "stage" based components - dialog text and quest text entirely disappears moving to full screen.

I am thinking the interior of houses will not be sized the same as the town map. Though this may set me up for some weird proportion issues in the long run. And that's all I got for now. I will update now, as I think this actually helps me in some ways to organize my thoughts.

[sufimaster]

Ok, so I have been thinking more about art, and I am really trying to go for a quaint Indian town aesthetic, where the protagonist is a young and upcoming member of the town.  Here's a sketch I whipped up on what he might look like, and the direction I want to take the art in:



Gotta work on the houses and ground - not sure how to make that look like an indian village, but I am thinking less grass and change the style of trees.  Essentially, I am trying to move away from the idea that every RPG is set in some European style town that even Japanese game devs did back in the day.

[vitorlanna]

Cool idea! The game "Unrest" is set on a fantasy India IIRC, maybe it could be used as a reference. Also, some photos of indian villages as reference.

[sufimaster]

Thanks!  Wow, I didn't know about Unrest - I will definitely check that out. I've been thinking of modelling after my father's hometown of Agra, but there is so little photo evidence for what the city looked like back then, it's almost impossible not to make the place look like a typical european town. I am guessing the first step is to get id of all the grass, replace with more dustiness, more busy shops, markets, etc.  The housing style needs to be completely revamped.

As for technical stuff, I've been working on implementing the way my maps are populated. Now I have a JSON file that associates a map id, with name/description/resource files, NPCs that are in that map, etc. These are loaded at runtime and when a new map is loaded, the code switches over.

I am trying to come up with smooth transitions between maps - my current code fades to black, but for some reason I can't get the fade from black to the new map working properly.

I will update this space with some new graphics later today or tonight.

[sufimaster]

I took a look at "Unrest" and I think they the graphics really do convey the notion that this takes place in India.  The clay pots, the dirt walkways and concrete houses are very reminiscent of that!

But one thing looking at "Unrest" that I don't want to do is to invoke stereotypes of third world peoples as backwards, so I will try to avoid that type of characterization.

[nu_muso]

Very nice concept. I agree with you as far as not using backward stereotypes of third world countries. I think that you can do something fresh here. Following