Thanks for taking the time to comment! I appreciate your honest feedback. I'll be incorporating your suggestions into the artwork as soon as I'm back on that job! Don't hesitate to rip on my pixel art... I'm terrible at it and want to learn.

Added the foundation of the second (third?) level. It's the town level, outside. That's the whole level. There's going to be some horses/merchants in the lower middle area and lots of people and things all over the place. There's currently cabbages growing around the statue which is why the town is called Cabbagetown.

I made the cabbages grow back and eventually spoil, but I'm going to do a little better job on that tomorrow. I want the cabbages and other plants to fully grow in over time. You'll be able to pick them when they're babies but they'll be worthless except to give you a small amount of nutrition.

I'm also going to add cooking to the game. With the right ingredients and a recipe, you'll be able to make better stuff from stuff that's not as good, like kimchi from rotten cabbage.

Some of the other new stuff: you can eat and drink stuff now. Your hunger and thirst grow over time and eating and drinking lowers them. If you drink alcohol, your sobriety goes down. You still can't rest but I'll make sleeping and sitting give you rest. Eating rotten food makes you sick which will set you back in some way but right now it just says "Sick" for a few minutes by your picture.

Right now there's not much indication to let you know that you've gotten sick or that you're tired other than the pause screen stats. I want to add some kind of notifications very soon now.

On top of these things, there are now 4 people on the development team including myself. We have quality assurance, sound design, music and programming covered. I'm looking for someone to do graphics, but until I find someone I'll keep doing them myself.

I've found that it's possible to learn how to draw pixel art. I previously thought it was all talent, but I see now if you put in a lot of time you can get better. I've put in more time on it than I ever have, but obviously it's still much less than a skilled artist. I'll keep plugging away at it and I think I'll get better. I think one of the best images I've done is this horse:



But it's pretty plain looking. I'm looking at learning how to add more details and effectively use colours.

My immediate task list looks like this:

Sleep in beds:
-rest stat changes
-sitting should also make rest stat change (slower)

Time related:
-regrow/rot cabbages (partially done)
-bartender inventory regenerates
-drops disappear

Drink booze:
-karma stat changes if you drink too much (get drunk)
-people respond differently

NPC interactions:
-attack NPCs

Notifications:
-When you lose karma, get sick etc. there should be a notification

Weight:
-Show total weight of items/weight you can carry
-Walk really slow when over your limit

Looks great... great style and excellent animation! I almost felt as if the high res profile images clashed a bit when using the low res models would almost work better, but don't take my opinion as authoritative.

This is looking good! I love the animation of the characters, very.. animated. Following this one.

I've sent you a PM Carlos.

The game will be an open world type of JRPG. The engine is open source, the data costs money. The game is in alpha (very early) stages with early access available right now. The position should be considered only if you are looking for a fun project to work on, as you probably will not make much money at the moment (but when it's finished, who knows.) This should be considered a very long term project.

Project website: http://nooskewl.ca/monster-rpg-3

So far I've done all of the work myself, except there is also now a QA person on the team. The graphics are low res pixel art (16x16 tiles, ~16x32 characters...) The audio is using my own MML player similar to NES. I've found a program that converts MIDI to MML so I used that on a couple of the songs. The MML player could be tweaked and expanded to support more effects and different sounds.

It's still early so I'm not sure there will be much interest in joining the team at this point, but I thought I'd put it out there.

About me: I've been making games for 20 years now. In my resume, I'm the top contributor to Allegro 5 (SDL-like library with more functionality), and a few commercial games which you can find on my company website: http://nooskewl.ca plus many more.

EDIT: audio is now covered, but we're still looking for at least one pixel artist.

I've made a bunch of updates to this, as I'll be doing for the foreseeable future 6 days a week. You can sit in any chair you have access to with 'space' or by clicking (or by gamepad...) You can pick up just about anything you can find, besides large furniture. There's a weapon you can get an equip, though you can't use it yet.

Another thing I added was buy/sell. You can initiate it with one of the NPCs in the two levels currently in the game. Using the same system, you can now drop items on the ground, too. An icon appears which you can interact with later to pick things back up or drop more things.

The final big thing I added was to make the world persistent. Everything about the levels you visit is saved now. If you drop something, you can come back and pick it up, etc. Soon I'll be adding a time factor so that things change over time; like items you drop eventually going away, people you buy stuff from eventually selling off stuff you sold them and replenishing their stock.

I've also updated the public builds. They're currently the same as the backer builds. I'll be updating them sometimes (but not as frequently as backer builds) and they'll remain like a demo for the full game.

The next steps are making things affect your stats. You'll be able to get drunk, eat, sleep and so on. Right now that's the last thing on my list before moving on to new levels. I'm having a lot of fun making this game... it has really gotten me out of the slump I was in after finishing the last one!

NOTE: this project was resurrected. See the end of the thread for the new stuff for now.

Hello,

I've got an existing, finished game but many of the sound effects use "sound effects libraries", however the game is open source and I want the SFX to be zlib licensed as well. I cannot relicense some of the SFX however I choose.

I'm short on time so I'm looking to hire someone to create about 50 SFX for me using tools like Bfxr, or recording them yourself for the few that have voices.

You must keep the length of the effects matching approximately the existing ones which I'll send you. If you can replicate the structure of the existing sounds, even better. The important thing here is that you don't use any sounds from the 'net but create them yourself.

I have budgeted $250 USD for this job, one because it's all I have and two because it can mostly be done by clicking 'next' in Bfxr then pasting a few sounds together in Audacity, but I have too many projects going to do it!!! Not to say it's easy but it shouldn't take that long.

Please let me know if you think this is fair and if you're interested in the job. I'd like to see perhaps an example or two of a SFX or game you've made, to see you know how to do the job. Thanks!

I didn't have anyone to play with but...

The graphics and animations are nice. I had a ton of fun playing Mario Bros. (on the Lost Levels cartridge maybe?) so this would be great for multiplayer on OUYA. Do you have any plans on submitting it officially?

Yesterday we officially released version 1.0. It was a crazy 2-3 weeks or so getting that all ready. Everyone pitched in and I'm thankful for that.

So the first goal has been reached, the game is complete, but that's not the end. I'm still going to release it on the Mac App Store etc, do ports for iOS and Android and right now actually it's on Greenlight so I'm hoping that goes well (Greenlight link).

This has been the hardest thing I've ever done. That sounds pretty lame but I've actually been through a lot and this was harder than all of it. Glad the hardest part is finished! Thanks for viewing.

So I've decided that we're going to cut off the last part of the story, so we're almost done now. The spot we're at is perfect for an ending, and after > 4 years working on this, it's time to finish it off. There's still a large amount of content and it's all very good, so we're better off cutting it down now than trying to finish everything planned and taking another year+ and not doing very good work, because at least for me, right now I can't do it anymore. I love this game but I've bit off way more than I could chew.

Thankfully it wraps up tidily. We just finished a boss battle that feels like an end boss, timing is good. We're going to add a little bit of extra stuff to make an ending. Then we have some things to modify a bit, add a bit to finish off. I'm excited that the end is in sight, something I couldn't say for the past year.

Just got finished uploading ALPHA40, which adds the boss to Stone Crater Caverns and some other stuff. Updated progress to 60%.

Next up is Jungle Valley, the first part of which is the second minigame. That's already coded for the most part, just have to fix the bit rot and add the graphics and sounds.

Feeling hopeful we can finish the game this year!

Well, I spent two weeks in the hospital recently, and another couple weeks recovering/getting back up to speed. Now my laptop (where all my development stuff is) isn't working so I have to move everything to my desktop. I don't think that'll take too long. Once that's done (this week) I'll continue working where I left off to get ALPHA 39 out soon.

One thing you learn is that it's very very difficult to estimate how long something like this is going to take. Even if you've done it before and already learned that, doesn't make it any easier. We originally planned to be done in January (6 months ago), now I think it could be next January. *shrug*

One cool thing that happened was we got in an IndieGala bundle. That did pretty well.

Working on this has really stressed me (and Tony) out. Mostly me. Having spent all kinds of money I don't have on assets and not knowing when it's going to be finished is hard. I've learned how to deal with the stress a bit better now, though. It has been a great learning experience all in all. Look forward to a real update with new content in the next couple weeks!

I don't think dogs can see screens very well lol.

Uploaded ALPHA37 tonight, bumped our progress to 50%.

We are slightly under 50% of the way through the story, but we've got so much foundation and some stuff is way ahead that I think we're even a bit past 50% (but I don't want to underestimate what we have left.)

A lot of polishing has been done in the past few weeks. Fixing bugs, improving small things, adding non-WOW features that have to be done eventually. Well that has been going on all along. I really underestimated how much of that there would be to do. I've done this before so I should have known better.

Not sure how much more polishing there will be before more content this time. I want to get as much of it done as possible. Seems like the lists are getting smaller though.

Tony's working and a bit ahead so there hasn't been much new art (not that it's needed ATM, I still have a level to build.) Zoe has done some new music (last minigame theme, really cool!) I've been busy.

Here's a summary of what I've done in the past week:

- Did a complete leak check/fix with C++ Memory Validator. This took a good 3 days, running, finding and fixing leaks and other problems that I found while doing this.
- Released ALPHA35. Had the fixed leaks, fixed fullscreen mode with multiple monitors on Windows, and a few other things.
- About two days ago I started making the player AI in battle able to use special abilities. That was a pretty big change and took 2-3 days, but it's working now. No doubt will need some tweaks but need more time to test it and figure out what could be better or what's wrong with it.

I really wish I had money to pay about 3 playtesters. Each one could do an hour of testing every 3 days or something. But I have to do that myself now so there are more bugs than there should be.

Alone at home with my dog and she insists I work on the couch (where she can sit with me) so it's hard to work on levels which requires a real keyboard and mouse and a big screen (ie my desk.) Hopefully can get back to that soon and finish the next section of levels.

I think there are now about 6 large main areas in the game now. Lots of minor ones. It's starting to freak me out a little. Sometimes it feels like I'm playing a cool game on SNES made by a big company in the 90s...

Funny you should say that... Tony who does the art for the game has started back to his full time job (second day today I think?) So it's going to be an extra challenge (especially for him) to get things done. We're not making enough money for him to work on the game full time. I hope one day we do so we can make more games.

And while on that subject, selling the alpha hasn't been very profitable so far. That's probably expected. We've got a few things coming up that will make a fair bit of the development costs back (for me, everyone else has made at least a little bit of money already.) Things are coming together though and I fully expect to make my money back and then for everyone involved to be making some money off this game.

That was one of the longer release cycles, but just released ALPHA34. Even though there's not much new gameplay, a lot of work went into it, mostly the cut scene and puzzle for the end of Stone Crater. We're now onto the 5th dungeon (or possibly 4.5 since Stone Crater isn't very big...) Hopefully won't be long before we're finished this one up to the boss. I like splitting at the boss so we can release more often because the bosses take a while to implement. This one in particular feels like it's going to be rather tricky... more on that when I have some screenshots. For now, I bumped the project to 40% because that's where we are in the script/storyline. Time to relax a bit, then back at it in the "morning" (it's 7am right now and I haven't slept.)

 

Storyline-wise we're just starting to get back to work, but I've spent the past 2 weeks fixing bugs and optimizing. One thing I re-learned is that spending time getting a game to run on a lower than target system is really beneficial. In my case I ported the game to Raspberry Pi -- it works and it's playable but it still doesn't keep 60FPS all the time. I made an absolute ton of optimizations for the port, and it resulted in all of the other ports feeling that little bit crisper too.

Been a while since I posted here...

We've since added that boss I was talking about, here's a short video:





We've also added a new dungeon, again up to the boss encounter but not including. A ton of little details were also finished. Here are a couple screenshots of the new dungeon, Stone Crater:

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The next area includes a boss encounter and a little logic puzzle. It's going to be one of the more difficult areas to script so far. After that we move on to Stone Caverns which is like an old mineshaft. REALLY cool boss at the end of that one.