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[DCoward]

First Real Post! Quick, Say Something Smart!

Hello! My name is Daniel, aka DCoward.

I had this idea for a long time, and recently found people kind enough to work with me to help realize the vision.

The simple premise is fairly elementary:

It is, in essence, a revisiting of retro RPGs, but with a special focus thrown into the mix -- Tarot Cards. We're not talking Persona-type Tarots either. Nearly everyone of interest, antagonistically, protagonistically, or neutrally will be the personification of one of the Tarot cards. As for who is who, we'll leave that to you, the player, to figure out.

More in depth:

This game gains its inspiration in music, style, and look, from Final Fantasy. Specifically 6. Nobuo Uematsu and Yoshitaka Amano have been impressive influence for me, and have really wanted to emulate them in a creative sense; where they are innovating their own medium with fantastically designed creations that push it to the limit, I too want to make a game where people say "Damn, you really put effort into this." Make no mistake though, I plan on really making it as unique as I can. But I look at it as using a springboard. When there is a thing I really like from FF6, I think about how I can change it to make it my own.

Currently, we (my team of 6), have done a lot of legwork and gotten some excellent ideas planned, mechanics drawn up, and even some neat artwork.

I am also very new. I want to be a great member of this forum, because it definitely seems like the place to get good advice, and to a smaller (but important) degree, a bit of eyes on it so I'm not screaming into the void.

I do have a page on Patreon, but I don't know if that's kosher here, so I'll hold back for now. Ultimately it is only up as a way to say "Hey, like what you see? Use this fancy little tip jar so I can pay my art people earlier rather than later."

(Don't worry, they literally volunteered to help -- though I still feel a bit scummy about it :/ )

I myself am learning Unity and ORK Framework in order to put the game together, as I am not artistically inclined myself, and through a lot of help from my roommate, I also have some maps drawn up of the world and some towns that I could post once I take some pics. Additionally, we have working languages that will be in the game. As a linguist, I've been helping my friend/roommate who likes making scripts and seems increasingly interested in conlangs.

Phew, I said a lot.

Maybe too much.

Don't beat me.

Thanks for reading, and please give me your feedback!

[Noyemi K]

This would probably have been more appropriate as a Devlog thread, but nevertheless I welcome you to TIGSource!

If you're using RPG Maker VX Ace or older (up to and including Mamirin for PC-88) I know quite a bit about usage, scripting, and some database organization tricks.

[DCoward]

This would probably have been more appropriate as a Devlog thread, but nevertheless I welcome you to TIGSource!

If you're using RPG Maker VX Ace or older (up to and including Mamirin for PC-88) I know quite a bit about usage, scripting, and some database organization tricks.

Hey, thanks for the reply and welcoming o/

I actually began with that (though was going to look into MV) but decided I might as well learn Unity since I needed more utility and didn't want to deal with scripts that work, scripts that do not, and then making them work, and likely frustratingly resigning myself to do it all on my own.

I figured I might as well do it all myself from the get go, and then as I stated I found out about ORK Framework which has been a godsend.

Luckily things have been going smoothly, but the biggest thing in the way for me right now is our artist needs to get the tilesets and character sprites started. Right now we're getting concept art together so she'll just have a constant stream of sprites to work on, and in the mean time I'm putting together stand-in stuff to demo our battle stuff, which is why I waited before making a Devlog, since right now I have veeeeeery little to show.

[Noyemi K]

I really should get some kind of experience with Unity as I'm familiar with UE3, XNA, Monogame, and SDL and SFML. It'd be useful for my work but it just seemed clunky enough in 2D for me to run to the hills and make do with just using a framework to make any 2D games where I need a lot of control under the hood. Hats off to you if you're making it work, though!

[DCoward]

I really should get some kind of experience with Unity as I'm familiar with UE3, XNA, Monogame, and SDL and SFML. It'd be useful for my work but it just seemed clunky enough in 2D for me to run to the hills and make do with just using a framework to make any 2D games where I need a lot of control under the hood. Hats off to you if you're making it work, though!

Huge part of the issue has been that despite having lots of stuff pretty much just ready to go, there's not lots of great resources I've found that gear their knowledge towards my genre, so it takes a ton of lifting knowledge from one thing and hoping it works for what we want. The framework cuts out most of the coding, but I know I'll need to for a few things already.

And I really want to learn more coding that is applicable, because I used to be in CompSci and was pretty decent at it, but I don't really have a whole lot of time to devote to this since I'm trying to make a lot of headway on the project :/

My main goal is to get the math we've done into a game to test drive, and meanwhile I'm just saying screw the art until we got it ready. OpenGameArt is a life saver for that much.