next »

[Arvind]

Hi everyone,
I've been programming a 2D plot driven RPG called Unrest for the past 8-9 months, involving four people in an ancient Indian city, and how they play a role in the....unrest in the region.

Now, you're probably thinking - who the hell is this guy? Is he a spammer? His name sounds Indian, did he steal my job? But wait, don't call the police!

I'm Arvind, and I make games under the moniker of Pyrodactyl Games. About 5 of you might remember me from my devlogs for A.Typical RPG and Will Fight for Food, which failed to take off - but this time is going to be different! I hope

Here's a couple of sprites from the game:

                   

In my next post, I plan to write a bit about the engine I wrote from scratch, and how it works. Hopefully you'll find it interesting!

[Craig Stern]

Hey! I know you. Any chance of a gameplay video for this? More details on the mechanics, perhaps?

[Arvind]

Hey! I know you. Any chance of a gameplay video for this? More details on the mechanics, perhaps?

Hi Craig, nice to see you!

Most of the game involves navigating a region with one of the four protagonists. Conversation systems have always been a great area of interest for me, and here's what a typical reply dialogue looks like in Unrest (WIP):

The game keeps track of the PC's reputation via 3 values: friendship, respect, and fear (those 3 bars you see on the top right). Some places also allow the player to change the tone of the reply for different outcomes, along with the usual dialogue choices.

All this is done via an XML scripting language I made up. The combat is one-on-one knife fights sort of thing, similar to Swords and Sorcery but with stuff like strafing around each other, counterattacks, that sort of thing.

P.S. Gameplay video is coming up next week, I'll update this post with it for sure

[Craig Stern]

Cool beans. Is it just knife-fighting, or will there be other weapons available?

[Arvind]

So far I'm restricting myself to just think about knives, and once that's done hopefully I'll be able to move to spears and swords. I will have to consider how to balance the range of the weapons, the obvious way to do it is to make the longer ranged weapons slower - but then making all 3 styles fun to play will be a key issue.

[dbest]

Awesome idea to set something in ancient India.
Keep it up!

[Arvind]

Awesome idea to set something in ancient India.
Keep it up!

Thanks! There's a bunch of lore stuff on my blog called "Tales of Unrest", written by Rutskarn of Chocolate Hammer. You may like those if you are a lore type of person

[dbest]

Awesome idea to set something in ancient India.
Keep it up!

Thanks! There's a bunch of lore stuff on my blog called "Tales of Unrest", written by Rutskarn of Chocolate Hammer. You may like those if you are a lore type of person

Not particularly a lore person, but I will read the blog.

[Arvind]

Hey everyone,

Firstly, sorry about the delay, I had planned to post a smaller post but so much stuff happened in the last 48 hours.

Here's the story: I had planned a small Kickstarter campaign, so that I could budget better looking art (tilesets and sprites, mainly). However, the campaign blew up beyond my wildest dreams: Rock Paper Shotgun and Kotaku covered it, and we are 175% in less than 2 days.

Also, I've almost finalized the combat - it's sort of like the original Sid Meier's Pirates, but with some extra things like parries and counters. The art looks horrible though, it's not ready to be shared among you guys. Sorry about that.

However, I do have a a new sprite to share - it's Bhagwan, the priest who is one of the playable characters.

With the Kickstarter going as it is, we may opt to completely overhaul the graphics, take them up a notch though. So all this is WIP and under consideration. Geez, I really suck at this devblog thing, don't I?

But anyway, I'm just happy at this moment, and I hope you are looking forward to more of the game! Cheers, and I'll be back with some more stuff soon!

[harry)))]

do i get to play as a rajput?

[Arvind]

Maybe.

[harry)))]

excellent. let's murder some british then

[Arvind]

No, I mean it is more ancient that that - the British dudes didn't arrive until the end of the Medieval era.

[harry)))]

pre mughal or post mughal?

[Panurge]

I really like your ideas about story generation. I'll be watching this with interest.

[Arvind]

pre mughal or post mughal?

Pre-Mughal era, although we do take a lot of liberties with history, and you might be pleasantly surprised.

I really like your ideas about story generation. I'll be watching this with interest.

Thanks a bunch!

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

is that house really the kind of house they had in ancient india? i'm not all that knowledgeable about that era (although i've read parts of the ramayana and mahabharata) but that house seems relatively modern to my eyes, particularly the shape of the window and the fact that it has a western-style door with a doorknob

[Arvind]

is that house really the kind of house they had in ancient india? i'm not all that knowledgeable about that era (although i've read parts of the ramayana and mahabharata) but that house seems relatively modern to my eyes, particularly the shape of the window and the fact that it has a western-style door with a doorknob

Hi Paul,
That art is a bit of a placeholder at the moment, the trouble is ancient Indian architecture is crazy intricate and we weren't expecting to have the budget to draw that (until now).

However doors in poor houses are usually just a bunch of planks bolted together, regardless of culture. Needless to say, all this art is getting revamped now and we'll be MUCH more faithful to history this time around.

[Arvind]

Hi everyone,

This is a repost of the tech update I posted over at Kickstarter, but I figured some of you might find this interesting, considering it's an engine I built from scratch. Update below:

ArvTech 3.0 update v1

First of all, a few backers asked me if I could implement an Iron Man mode (for those of you not aware of the meaning, it means the game keeps one single save file of your progress - you can never reload if you messed up, nor can you save to a different file). Well, since they asked so nicely, I can confirm that Iron Man mode will be in the game - here's a screenshot of the menu you get on clicking "start" from the main menu:



NOTE: These portraits are older images, which we will be changing as the art overhaul happens.

Secondly, a few other backers asked me how I could offer mod support straight out of the gate - I mean, these things are tough to implement and support, right? Well, thanks to the wonders of ArvTech 3.0, it's very easy. Let me show you how easy it actually is:

1. Let's take a look at a normal install of the game. Our focus is on two folders today - "res", which contains the official game resources, and "mods", which will contain any mods you make.



2. First, we move inside the "res" folder, and find this directory structure:



3. You'll notice a file called "default.xml" - this is the master file for the game, and it contains a link to every single parameter to the game. Let's open it, see what we find:



4. Let's say I don't like the default inventory layout, and I want to just change that while keeping everything else the same. This seems like a promising place to start:
<inventory layout="res/layout/inventory.xml" db="res/items/db.xml" />

5. Now, all I have to do to make a mod that changes just the inventory is to copy the default.xml file, go to the mods folder, and paste it. To make sure the game scans the file, I change the filename to "example.unrmod", which tells the game that this is an Unrest Mod file.

After that, I can copy the inventory.xml file, paste it inside the mods folder, rename it to "inventory_v2.xml" and change whatever I want in it. Once that is over, I open example.unrmod in Notepad, and change this:
layout="res/layout/inventory.xml"
TO
layout="mods/inventory_v2.xml"

To recap, this is what the "mods" folder should look like now:



6. And voila! Now I have a mod called example that modifies just the inventory layout of the game. Let's open the game, select the "mods" from main menu, and see what we find:



That's pretty much how you start modding the game. If you played Will Fight for Food, you'll notice the similarities between the folder structures. That's because WFFF was ArvTech 2.0!

[Arvind]

Just wanted to make a quick post about the final 32 hours of our Kickstarter campaign. I'd be really chuffed if you pledged: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/698883673/unrest-an-unconventional-rpg-set-in-ancient-india

I'm also going to appear on the Krautfunding show in about 4 hours from now.

And I'll be livestreaming and answering questions about development and stuff for the final 24 hours, over at ChocolateHammer: http://www.livestream.com/chocolatehammer

Normal dev blog service should resume once the madness ends and I can get some proper sleep. Here's an image from the game, to show how far we've come from the initial screenshots:



Also, there's a video of the new art style in action (Work in Progress):