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[Friez]

Tears of Avia is an anime style Turn Based Tactical RPG for PC/Mac in the making.

Over 200 years ago a war was waged against the floating city of Avalon lead by the demonic overlord Vylenkine. A powerful mage stood up against his evil forces and cast a spell that would seal the portals to the demonic realms forever. Except... there was a problem.

The city froze and crashed and along with it all the citizens of Avalon including the love of his life, Avia. For hundreds of years he has been seeking a way to free Avia from the spell that he himself cast with little success. That is until you came...

Key Features:

• Turn based gameplay with an intense build crafting focus.
• Dynamic tachi-e system. The characters you bring in your party have different disposition to one another, affecting the sort of conversations you experience.
• Side missions triggered by characters and their discussions, not ! above heads.
• Obligatory controller support
• Difficulty system encourages players to make the game harder in return for better reward

Work-in-progress Screenshots:










Classes

The game currently touts 5 classes, each with 33 skills! (That's 165 skills! phew!) but a lot of the hard work has been done in terms of the backend systems. It's rather easy for us to change what a skill does and how it balances in just a few moments.

Ranger
The ranger is a mid-line damage dealer with a focus on archery, beast mastery and natural affinity. They bring to the table much direct damage and condition damage but can be played very tactically as a trapper or even as a tank if you take the right skills.

Warrior
The warrior is a mixture of damage dealer and tank with an assortment of skills that could even put him in a supportive role. The traits the warrior focuses on are Arms Mastery, Tactics and Might.

Priest
The priest is your typical backline healer class, with an assortment of skills that either heal damage that has been dealt or preventing it from happening in the first place. However, her smiting line of skills are more offensively driven and potentially makes your priest more deadly against undead foes than any other class. Her traits comprise of Healing, Protection and Rituals.

Mage
The mage is a classic mid-line damage dealer, dishing out massive amounts of magical damage. However, the mage has a good deal of tactical spells that can be used to great effect such as portals to move characters across maps (or out of danger) and skills that can corrupt enemies skills when used. Her traits focus on Destruction, Conjuration and Manipulation.

Brawler
The brawler is your general all-out savage in-your-face damage dealer. The only class that gains an damage bonus by fighting with his bare fists, the brawler's skills generally focus on dealing swift punishment to those that stand in the way. The berserker line of skills are highly damaging but sacrifice health in order to be used, whereas the strength line focuses on a balance between damage and defense with the agility line having more of a focus on mobility and swift attacking.

Weapons
As is typical with many RPG games, weapons modify the stats of the wielder, increasing their overall effectiveness. However, the last three slots on a character's skill bar are actually skills that derive from the weapon. You could put a healing chalice on your warrior if you really wanted to, and now he has the capability of being (a not very good) healer. We wanted to give the player the chance to really mix up their builds however they wanted.

General Gameplay
Gameplay is split between two areas - a town and battle. In town, the player can buy/sell gear, upgrade skills, change their party skill and inventory load out, or even visit the tavern and change the party composition altogether. Conversations can also be had in town, which can trigger off side quests depending who is talking and what the current events are.

The town is primarily a preparation area, a place where the player can figure out what is the best party setup they can run for a given encounter before they commit to battle. Once they've left the town, there's no going back.

Battles are turn based, each turn the player can move their characters once and use a skill once per character. They can then end turn and the enemy does the same in return. The winner is the last man standing.

Current Status
We consider this as "just started" because while we have been working a lot on the back-end trying to make sense of all the intertwining story mechanics, skill systems and general combat; we actually still have a lot of work to do in order to deliver a fully finished game. Many skills still need visual implementation and we have a lot of environment work to do too.

Anyway, enough blabla from me for now!

[EDarkness]

This looks pretty cool.  Looking forward to seeing more of it in the future.

[AndrewKennedy3D]

Excited for you guys! I know there's a lot of hard work that's gone into this. Looking forward to the future updates!

[COOLIO5676]

i can honestly say that i'm planning on buying this. it looks great phenomenal so far.

[Friez]

Thanks guys, really appreciate the kind words.

[PixelDensity]

wow the art style looks amazing, great job. I look forward to seeing this develop. Giving this a follow!

[jctwood]

Such lovely soft landscapes!

[jaharley94]

This. Looks. Awesome.

It is so good to see a fantastic-looking indie JRPG being developed!
Plus the website looks incredibly professional.  Very polished stuff.

I'm definitely following the progress on this one. 

If you need music, PM me.  I'd love to work with you on this.

[McMutton]

Very nice art ye got! Gameplay sounds pretty cool; especially the part about basing skills on equipment.

[Friez]

Thanks guys

Update 25th Jun 2015

So it's been quite a slow week of bug fixing and control system tweaking mainly. This is a PC game, but we support joypad controls as we feel it plays rather nice with this sort of input. You can of course use a mouse and keyboard.

When you flick to joypad controls, the camera follows the cursor in the middle of the screen. This makes sense for joypad as you'll want to focus on your cursor rather than have it wander off the edge of the screen. With a mouse, you generally don't want the camera to chase your cursor (your cursor won't lock screen centrally anyway), instead the player has free control of the camera with the arrow keys.

We also switch the UI over the moment input gets detected on a device, so if you start wobbling your mouse, all the joypad tooltips go away and mouse/keyboard relevant stuff appears. Probably have missed a few cases still, but think I've covered the most of it.

We've also been working on a website skill builder. We've only checked off the ranger thusfar, and you can check it out here: Ranger Skill Builder

We made this little toy to help players get an idea of how the class system works, and let them play with build crafting before the game is even out. This is only one fifth of the entire picture though as there's still 4 other classes to cover and they all have cross-class synergies.

It also gives us great opportunity for feedback, people can play around and find combos that are good and even throw what if... ideas at us even before we've actually made the skill in-game. We'll get around to the other classes in due time, but for now I hope people enjoy playing around with ranger builds.

That's all for now!

[Friez]

So we've been working a bit on the town area recently. The town is the area where you can -

• Hang out with your party members
• Buy/Sell Items
• Make offerings at the temple (for the heals)
• Change edicts at the town hall
• Check your progress/shinies in the loft
• Peruse random bits of lore in the library
• Upgrade/Change the skills your party uses
• Change equip items from your inventory
• Change your party composition in the tavern
• Chill out with a cat

Here's some screenshots






More soooooon!

[Jasmine]

Dude, this is breuuutifurl. GREAT presentation thus far. Is this game going to be heavily story-based? The bit about the mage accidentally trapping his love interest with an evil tyrant is rather interesting. Conflict of interests much?

[Friez]

Yeah, it's quite heavily story based although we haven't developed too much content in that vein yet (we've been writing the underlying systems to support them).

There's actually quite a few protagonists you can play with, each of them have different dispositions towards one another. You could have a party that get along quite well, or you could end up rolling a party that seethes with jealousy and distrust. The story system feeds off of party disposition and presents you story elements that echo the sentiments and feelings of the characters you play with.

Much of the side content will spiral off based upon the party members you roll with, a discussion could happen that is unique to the combination of characters that you play with and a chain of events unfold that involves those specific characters. I felt it would be far more natural to spiral off side quests this way than have you walk up to NPC's and accept a bunch of chores to do.

The main story does revolve around Dulantine (the mage), he's been using magic to keep himself rather healthy for about 200 years while he scours dusty old tomes for information pertaining to the particular spell that he cast. Or rather how to undo it, he never learned all he needed to know about that bit. That's where you step in.

During the game you work towards undoing the spell, and of course there are decisions with consequences. Do you save Avia? What about the invasion that's going to continue? How're you going to deal with that?

We have the massive arcs of the game already planned out, but I don't want to spoiler it too much

[Friez]

Not so much a devlog but more of an announcement -
We'll be taking our prototype (yes, prototype, not even alpha) to EGX this year



If you're in the area pop by and say hello, we'll be in the rezzed area.

[Friez]

This week we've been busy working up our UI. We wanted to have a very painterly, handcrafted feel to the UI in our game to compliment the art in the game world itself.

Here's some screenshots:

This is the skill upgrade screen, here you can spend skill points to improve character abilities.


In-game HUD. We've only got 5 skills equipped here, but you can have a total of 8. We limited the amount of skills we have in the prototype so that we don't overwhelm players when we take it to EGX next month. 


Some inventory management shenanigans. Players can equip different weapons to their characters, which can have different skills attached to them.


In Tears of Avia, conversation is presented in a Tachi-e style. Every character have different dispositions towards one another, the conversations you have reflect this. Some attitudes characters have towards one another include friendship, jealousy, frustration, fear, annoyance, admiration, pity, doubt, hatred, love, respect (and a whole load of shades in between).

The party you bring along can be really harmonious, or they might seethe with poisonous hatred and jealousy. The conversations you have lead you down sub-arcs and are unique to who you play with. Play the game with a different party composition, you'll probably have a different experience.

Also, in-battle conversations have a different twist in that they react depending on who is still alive. Complete a level with a full party, you'll probably have a conversation where the entire party reflect on the battle they just had. But if your party nearly wipes and you're left with one person alive, they'll instead have a monologue about how rough the experience was.

We're hoping that people are able to experience the game a few times over and get a different experience each time.

Anyhow, that's my update of the week!

[Friez]

Just a little update regarding audio in the game.

Audio is being developed by Andrew Kim, the musical direction of Tears of Avia was to create an emotional soundtrack that reflected the nature of the story (which for the most part is generally sad and underwritten with feelings of guilt and regret).

The music for Tears of Avia draws inspiration from the classic era of 16-bit RPGs, but with high-quality instruments that brings the music into the modern era. For the demo, we've had four tracks composed (title screen, town, dungeon, and boss), plus the music for the game trailer.

You can check out the tracks we've made thusfar over at soundcloud
https://soundcloud.com/level-up-audio-1/sets/tears-of-avia-ost

The soundtrack is primarily orchestral in nature, and will cover a wide range of moods, from delicate piano/violin tracks, to raucous full-orchestra epics. Throughout the development of Tears of Avia, Andrew has been live-streaming the music production on Twitch, at www.twitch.tv/levelupaudio so feel free to stop by and check out the progress.

(As a side note, if you're quick, production is being streamed right now!)

[Friez]

So it's been a while since I posted so thought I'd run an update.

Code work for me has been very slim the past few weeks (or rather, unexciting). Mostly we've been chasing down bugs in preparation for our EGX demo, there's not a lot of exciting things to talk about on that front. Added a basic settings screen so we can set up things for the demo while we're at the site without having to do any rebuilding of the game (we plan to avoid this at all costs).



This was a work in progress. Navigation buttons missing and we still have space for additional settings (for things that are not yet in the demo, like localisation). Super thrilling stuff, I know.

Aside from that, been working on videos. Cutscenes, kickstarter pitches, all that good jazz. All things that take me way outside of my comfort zone, but are absolutely necessary. It's been one hell of an experience and I think I'm better off for it but I'll do a proper post mortem after everything has gone live.

Less than a month to go, getting close now, hope to see some of you at EGX.

[Jordgubben]

This looks very ambitious.

Just curious: How large is your team and how long have you been working on this?

(Also, it's makes me very happy that you are planning a mac version )

[Friez]

There's a core of six people working on this, but we also get some hired help (such as the voice acting) for bits here and there. Been working on this for a year purely in evenings and weekends. Looking to raise some funding soon so we don't have to be distracted by taking on other work (and ultimately finish this!).

[Friez]

So it's been a busy few weeks preparing for EGX. We finally have ourselves a little teaser trailer which you can check out here:





This is due to the incredibly hard work of Pinax, Andrew and Jasmine. In the meantime I've been going through QA testing/bug fixing loops and have a build now that I think is fairly stable for the show. I just have to resist the temptation to add to it until after the show in case I mess something up.

We're also up on Steam Greenlight and would super appreciate your help and support! Many thanks!