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[Venks]

I would like to introduce you to Berathen: Spirit Detective. This game is a top-down, adventure RPG. Usually detective games are presented as point and click adventure games. I personally have never been a fan of point and clicks, I usually get frustrated by the system.

In point and clicks I always mistake objects I can interact with for objects that are just art in the background. I find this incredibly aggravating and usually find myself clicking all over the screen. So of course when I decided to make a detective game I chose to do away with the point and click controls you usually see in this type of game. It makes much more sense in my eyes to present this kind of game from a top-down RPG perspective. It is quite usual for adventurers to explore every tunnel in a cave and examine all the pots in a town.

In case my explanation is confusing here is a screenshot of my game in development.



Again don’t let me confuse you when I call this game a RPG. I mean it in the same vein that Harvest Moon is a RPG. There won’t be any random battles with monsters or anything. The focus of this game is to solve a crime. Not grind experience and gold for hours. Though that sounds like a great idea for a sequel.

The story for this game, thankfully, has been completely written up. I’ve outlined everything and have estimates for how long I think all the events will take me to program. According to my estimates the game should take about twenty-one hours to complete. I’m a rather lazy guy so I’ll only be programming so much in a day. Though I will try to do a lot tomorrow. Despite the fact I have rather comfortable cushions in my estimated times, I wouldn’t want to stumble across an obstacle and not be able to get this game out on time.

The release date for this game is May 19th. The reason I am so adamant about releasing this game by this date is that it will help me focus and finish this project. I have been playing around with the idea for a long time and programmed all the ground work. But I have been very slow when it comes to actually getting much done. If I can manage to get this game out on time it will be the first of many games I plan on getting out in short bursts of time. No worries though. I have plenty of testers and will be making sure it’s as polished as I can make it within a reasonable amount of time.

When the game comes out I hope you all enjoy it!

Check out the site for the game at: www.berathen.com

[Savick]

Explain the story more please.
Murder mystery? Kidnappings? Robbery of the King's Pajamas? I want to know moooore.

[Sir Raptor]

The name reminded me greatly of Ghost Trick. Try not to disappoint.

[jeffrobot]

I'm skeptical of all story-based games.

[Franklin's Ghost]

This sounds like a nice change and looking forward to seeing how you develop the gameplay detective adventure rpg elements.

[Venks]

Pushing out some more progress.




All of the items in this room can be examined. Including the books on the floor which will give you small excerpts of the stories inside. It took a bit to make the dialogue text pop into the middle like that. I kept making a bunch of silly mistakes. The biggest one being that this format is accessed when ever I call the 'write' function with the last argument equaling two. I continually made the argument equal zero at first as that is the default. So basically I was never calling the other format I had made. Oh silly programming woes.

Perhaps you noticed that Terrich's cloak has turned yellow?





It's all part of a feature I implemented. Terrich can lock into ethereal signals and his mystical robes provide a visual cue for whether or not you are getting closer to the source. Basically by playing hot or cold you can find objects or places that have recently been haunted. If you keep on top of these trails it shouldn't be long before you've solved the case.





The two exorcists of LionHeart Kingdom were seeing to their daily chores when there was a knock at their door. The exorcists were given a letter, by the King himself, requesting them to go to a far away village within his dominion. It had been quite some time since the royal exorcists had performed any paranormal duties. No spirits dared bother the inhabitants of the LionHeart Kingdom. The case was also intriguing as usually a report of spirits coming from a small, underpopulated village would be assumed to be the imaginations of superstitious commoners.

Upon arriving at the village the exorcists found the village to be quite quaint and friendly. The feeling of camaraderie was confounding as the reason the exorcists have been brought here was due to a report of murder. According to the letter a specter had appeared before one of the villagers and killed him in cold blood. It has been six days since the murder and all of the villagers seem very keen to see the spirit exorcised. Despite how helpful the villagers are something still seems amiss.

It is up to you to find out the truth.

[Venks]

I've been giving a lot of thought to the game's flow. Like where the player goes at what point of time. As someone who has run Dungeon and Dragon campaigns I already know how players like to do everything, but what you want them to do. While there are multiple options in my game, certain events have to take place before other events do. So in order to facilitate this I'm trying a gentle way to point the player in the right direction.





For example the npc in the house just before the next one suggests that you go into the neighboring house. At first there were very few trees south of these houses, but I decided nature should flourish. By having trees blocking the way to the southern house it should hopefully make less players head there first. There is also a dirt path that connects all of the houses in the village together. Though I haven't had my play testers try this out yet. I won't be completely surprised if my testers decide that they should go to every other house, but the very next one. I'll just have to wait and see.

It's not that I have anything against exploration, but I am against player frustration. Players usually get pretty grumpy when they are confused about what they are supposed to be doing. But they also get irked if you have lengthy tutorials or too much hand holding. Hopefully I can find the right balance.

[Venks]

So originally there was about fifteen villagers to interact with, but after a bit of time I decided to add a few more npcs to make the place a bit more lively. There is currently nineteen villagers at this point of time.

One of these new villagers is Ami Judge, daughter of Ericson Judge.





She cares about her father a great deal. She is a energetic, optimistic, bizarre girl. She doesn't quite get along with the other girls as much due to her weird habits such as attempting telekinesis.

An eager fan of Berathen: Spirit Detective asked to draw one of the characters for me so I requested that they draw Ami.





I'm flattered someone would want to draw a character for my game which hasn't even been released yet! I really like how Ami looks in non-sprite form. What do you guys think?

[ink.inc]

If you want an honest opinion, the rendition could use a lot of work.

[Venks]

If you want an honest opinion, the rendition could use a lot of work.

Fair enough. I'm more happy about the fact that someone wanted to draw one of my characters then the quality of the drawing. ^^;

[McMutton]

I think you would do well to have a read of this:
http://thegamedesignforum.com/features/reverse_design_ff6_5.html

Because, my god, it's awesome. It's about ways to have the NPC's direct the character or make the world feel lively.

[Venks]

I think you would do well to have a read of this:
http://thegamedesignforum.com/features/reverse_design_ff6_5.html

Because, my god, it's awesome. It's about ways to have the NPC's direct the character or make the world feel lively.

That was an amazing read. I definitely go to Final Fantasy VI when I'm looking for inspiration. Thanks for the link. This should really help me shape my dialogue better.

[Venks]

Sorry for the slow update!

First off I wanted to say that Kickstarter has finally given me the go to launch my Kickstarter page. If it's successful I plan on porting my game over to mobile devices. I'm not asking for too much. The idea is really to see if I can get any use out of Kickstarter and to gauge interest for my game.

Anyways today's update is about the notebook feature!





With the simple press of a button you can access Terrich's notebooks and review everything note worthy you've come across in your investigation. You can review clues and the profiles of all the suspicious villagers. This will be infinitely useful for keeping track of names and staying on top of your leads. Not to mention, in case you miss it, Terrich will be writing down very specific observations about any clues he comes across.

Remember kids, in 'Hot Fuzz' Nicholas Angel(Simon Pegg) tells us that it's not his gun that's the most important tool in his arsenal. It's his notebook!

[Venks]

I've already met my KickStarter goal of $50 thanks to a family member. Not exactly what I was going for, but the fact that they want to support me is a very encouraging fact.

Nothing big to report today. I was polishing npc interaction and the note book feature for about six hours straight today. Hopefully in the end it'll make for a very rewarding interactions.

[Venks]

Made another $50 on Kickstarter as another close friend decided to back me. Posting my Kickstarter link on my facebook has definitely proved to be a good idea.

[Venks]

I have to say I'm really happy with how Berathen: Spirit Detective is coming out. I'm getting a lot better at discovering the reasons for things not working in my code. I've just come across the same hindrances time and time again that it's a lot easier for me to see what's wrong. A lot of time's it's just me forgetting to make sure my 'interact' variable is true or that I sometimes use "==" instead of "=" when trying to assign a value to something.

if (coolDown==0) walking==true;
if (coolDown==0) walking=true;

The first line is wrong and the second line is correct. As usual I tend to do things wrong when I'm doing them very fast. The first line says 'If the cool down is equal to zero then is walking equal to zero?'
The second line is correct and says 'If the cool down is equal to zero then walking is equal to zero.'

Those sentences both use the exact same words, but I'm sure you can see the difference. One of them being a question and the other a statement. It's silly things like this that slow me down.

Anyways here's a new screenshot! What has Terrich gotten himself into this time?

[Venks]

Yes! Return of the notebook! After properly getting to know the villagers Terrich will write about them in his notebook. It's always a good idea to check out your notebook and read what the young detective has wrote! You never know when certain observations could pay off later!

[Venks]

So there I am just programming away without a trouble in my mind. Then I come across this:








How sad I was when I came across this sprite. As in case you can't tell this character's complexion is a little darker then the usual ones. The character generator I use doesn't make NPCs varied skin colors. If I want them a bit darker then I have to change it myself. Unfortunately, for what ever reason, I made this character's background black which means I can't just edit that out as it will also take out the character's outlines. So basically I have to create the character's sprite all over again.

This would be a simple task, but the problem is the character generator I use is online. Not something I have constant access to while I do the bulk of my programming in Tasmania.

Well time to redo this character! NPCs don't tan themselves!

[Venks]

So who wants to see a new screenshot?





Most of the houses in this game have been tiled and ready for use for quite some time. This one on the other hand was made just recently. I have to say I really like how it turned out. I probably could of filled it with more stuff, but I think for now this is fine. I've never really been much of an artist so when it comes to things I tend to go for a functional approach more then an artistic one.

This time around I can't tell you how much time I spent with misspelling a word and leaving out numbers. All of my npcs say different things based off of the state of the game as well as pop up in different places. This is realized in code by an array that keeps track of each npc's current state. For quite some time the npc in this house was not appearing because the game was looking for 'kF-stranger', but this npc's array slot was equal to 'kF-stanger'.
By missing just the letter 'r' I spent more time then I would of liked to figure out what was going on.

I also added the option of having up to four interactive npcs at any one given time. This encountered problems left and right because I would continually forget to ask for 'comp3' or 'comp4' and try to interact with 'comp'.
This happens a lot because the dialogue, animations, and interaction with the player all call for their own lines of code. I do not write everything word by word that would take too long. Instead I'll copy and paste what works for other npcs and make the appropriate changes here and there to make the code work for other npcs. Now and then though I miss little things like a number here and there. But a single number can be the difference between elegant dialogue or the crashing of my game!

No worries though. I'm keeping on top of everything and the game is making nice strides in progression. Also for those of you unaware and you can backup my project on Kickstarter here: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1537889393/berathen-spirit-detective

A special thanks to Gypsy Dunson and Ceri Davies who already have done so.

[Venks]

The average work day of a paranormal investigator calls for a lot of outlandish stuff. You never know when you'll be dealing with a friendly apparition or a murderous phantom. So our protagonist, Terrich Lembton, always keeps his wits about him making sure to be observant to everything around him. Such behavior can be what keeps you alive in certain situations. Perhaps this encounter isn't one of those situations.






All of the items in every house can be examined. Sometimes this will lead to finding clues or helping you learn about the inhabitants of the house. At other times you will just be examining a table.