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[Player 3]

Did anybody like Final Fantasy VI and up? Yeah, me neither. The demake contest is over and I was never around for it, but today, I'd like to introduce a little RPG experiment of mine...

So what exactly is this?

Did you just read the above sentence?

Synopsis

A historian manages to invent a vehicle that can traverse through the temporal plains. To get history possibly a little more accurate, Rico heads back a few centuries where magic was rather obvious. Unfortunately, there also was a cliff right in the vehicle's path and caused a crash, leaving the protagonist in that year.

Specs

Language: C#?

Visuals, Program Code: Player 3 (me)
Music: Rayven?

Logs

• The Start
  
• Day 1
  
• Day 2
  
• Day 3
  
• Day 4
  
• Day 5

[Destral]

It took me a moment to realise what you did with the title...  

But I like RPGs, so I'm interested in seeing what you do. Just hoping the Final Fantasy Flamefest gets its own thread in General, rather than happening here. 

[Player 3]

Day 1

After going through a little design notebook of mine of a previous attempt at this, I have realized that Last Delusion's system would work more like Phantasy Star's rather than Final Fantasy's. How? First-person combat and dungeons, not-that-interesting battle music, and even cutscene *.PNGs! Screw *.FMVs!

A battle formula is also in the works, which will be derived from the classic Dungeons & Dragons d20 equations, but not quite. Oh, and sketching the main protagonist in Photoshop.

[Inanimate]

That plot sounds fun, and if you keep up that awareness and snark in the game, I'd be quite happy. Best of luck with this project, man!

[Player 3]

Day 2

So I've come to an epiphany. I have officially named the main protagonist Rico for no apparent reason. Still working on his sketch. Travelled back in time in a craft known as The Time Reaction, also a synonym.

As for the parties, three members make a full party, excluding the leader, Rico. Comrades can be acquired at pubs, bars, whatever you call it if you're politically correct. Why? Everybody else has. Peer pressure, y'see. You can find these gathering places in locations where both the adjective and the noun (animal, specifically) start with the same letter, eg. Prancing Pony from The Lord of the Rings series. In those places, you can find people of all sorts of classes, statistics, money, and whatnot. Heck, if you're looking for specific statistics, you can even post classified ads there.

Oh, and to balance this out, in order to gain another party member, one must hit the trail and/or bite the dust. In the main pause menu, select STATS and then LAYOFF. They'll be gone immediately. If someone dies, they're gone immediately at the turn of death. Looks like a Phoenix Down can't help you this time. To add on to the difficulty some RPGs are known for, Rico must not die, or else it would have been as if everyone did. aka Game over, man!

[Player 3]

Still in the design part. Also got a little sidetracked by a school project I had to pull two all-nighters for.

Day 3 (For 31.04.2011)

I am contemplating Scala for the programming language used. It supposedly runs off of Java, which would be nice for cross-platform compatibility. Heck, my worstation is a fresh Xubuntu installation. By the way, I'd recommend Xubuntu as a distro, as it uses XFCE and is very fast on my horribly outdated machine that I somehow won't stop complaining about. Anyway, that settles the main parent language: Java. AIR would be better for other, smaller, miscellaneous things, like configuration applications, level editors, and "arcade" games such as Pocket Protector. I had a pound of cheese in my pocket, and no one bothered to protect it!

Onward to today's design phase. Many RPGs claim that a good night's sleep can cure lethal poisoning, amuptations, cause exorcisms, and even revive people from death. If that happened, I'd be a millionaire from selling the bed that does that. Because I don't have such a bed, that ain't going to happen. When resting at an inn, going to sleep with a poisoning will lead to the character's death the next morning, characters will still be possessed, feel numb, et cetera, or be gone because they were dead and smelling up the place. No one wants to drink their mead in a place filled with the dansk staunch of rotting corpse. Don't worry, all of their items will be dumped on the floor for you to collect. Just pick them up and head downstairs to hire more hands. Remember: The cheaper the character hired, the more useless they will be, in starting stats and/or class types.

[Player 3]

Another update for today. Rayven is offering to compose for LD. I am quite elated. No, really. Listen to his stuff!

[Inanimate]

Wow, you seem to be getting a lot of ideas down!

A note, however: perhaps you could justify the auto-Game Over, by Rico seeing or hearing of a future version of himself; if he dies, that future instance never occurs, and a paradox then happens.

[Rayven]

You should add me to the music bit in the OP. 

[phubans]

What? Final Fantasy VI was my favorite VII was great, too... Are you sure you didn't mean VIII and up?

[oahda]

This sounds interesting, but I guess I can't say much at this point. Scala I've never heard of before. I'll take a look at it. Anyway, I'll be checking in on this project! I like the plot.

What? Final Fantasy VI was my favorite VII was great, too... Are you sure you didn't mean VIII and up?

I'm enjoying XIII at the moment...

[Destral]

IV to VII are the highlights of the series for me. IX and X were good, but not as good. I didn't get very far into XII, and XIII I forced myself to finish, but I was wishing for it to be over by the end of Gran Pulse.

[Player 3]

I just didn't like FF6 because if it weren't for the characters, it'd mostly be FF2 all over again. FF7 and up just give me the bad vibes of generic JRPGs. Personally, FF1 and FF5 are my favorites. But this is about Last Delusion, not ITT: Final Fantasy.

Anyway...
Day 4

Managed to get a conceptual sprite of Rico.



Blond, spiky hair? Check. Scouter sans power level? Checks over nine thousand. Pretty cool outfit? Also check. Witty personality? What kind of "parody" RPG is it if the main protagonist doesn't have one? That's all for today.

[Destral]

Cool protagonist

With all of those features on him, I have to ask how often the characters are going to be breaking the fourth wall... 

[Player 3]

Less than that occurred in Conker's Bad Fur Day.

[Destral]

I never played it, but from the wikipedia entry, it sounds pretty crazy and very awesome 

[Player 3]

Hey, kids! It's time for some more news!

Day 5 in actual production...

I made a mockup starring one of the game's story-based recurring antagonists, Dr. Ungood, Ph.D! What is this "core" you're talking about? Erm, nothing. Nothing at all. Carl, they're on to us!



If you wanted to know what some of the overall graphics would look like, here it is. Pixels can go shut their face. You probably have also noticed that some characters have different letters below their HP numbers, such as SP, MP, and PP. These will be explained another day when I can fully understand on what they mean and why they exist, for design purposes. In fact, I think that I could go back to AS3/AIR, after hearing that something as complex as VVVVVV was done in ActionScript 3 and managed to get sold on Steamworks. Not that this would be for sale, or anything like that.

[Player 3]

Day 6

Some more design to help you other designers out. In this post, I discuss the uses of HP, PP, SP, and MP and why they exist.

HP (HitPoints) is the very essence of life. With out it, we'd be thirsty. Really thirsty! Actually, you'd be dead. Potions and miscellaneous items will replenish some of this HP. HP may also decrease when a character is inflicted with a status, attack, bad-tasting food, explosive diarrhea, et cetera.


PP stands for Power Points. More physical skills will consume PP. That includes skills such as HYPERSLICE3.

SP (Special Points) are more for skills that aren't quite magical, but totally aren't normal. How about FLEX to raise SPEED?

MP (Magic Points) Here's the fun part. Magic is what makes your world go 'round. Spells such as HASTE and FIRE2 work like this.

Note: Rico won't be able to use magic due to the fact that magic is pretty much extinct in his era.

[Destral]

Ah, cool, I like that you differentiate between the three. It's a little more work, but each character having a specific resource that they consume to power their special abilities helps differentiate the inherent nature of each character, rather than everyone using generic MP/TP/SP/PP

[Player 3]

Day 7 - Control Scheme Discussion

I need a little help with determining the official default controls for Last Delusion, along with preset ideas. The NES Emulator preset has the cursor keys, X to accept, Z to cancel. The Default preset consists of the cursor keys, ENTER to accept, BACKSPACE to cancel, seeing that can ll be done in one hand.

Iunno, guys. I need help on some ideas for controls.