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[[bk]door.maus]

Hey, all,

I've been making a game. (Who hasn't?)

In ItsyRealm, you're on a awesome quest to discover the secrets of a necromancer god! On the way, you'll employ dozens of unique combat strategies using sword, staff, and bow to slay mythical monsters and eldritch abominations. Utilize gathering skills while raiding dungeons, forests, ruins, and seas to craft a bunch of powerful--and sometime legendary, should you be lucky!--equipment. On your way, you'll help like-minded adventurers achieve their own victories. Should you fail, the four Old Ones will succeed to tear the very fabric of reality apart...

I guess you could say it's graphically similar to Paper Mario and has gameplay similar to RuneScape and has a story straight out of the Lovecraft mythos.






Dining Hall, High Chambers Yendor Floor 1 West


Mn'thrw Attacks, Ocean Some Miles Off of Port Isabelle


Defeating the Ghostly Miner Foreman, Abandoned Mines^{this is not a clone of the gold mine from NeoQuest II I swear}


Talking to the Mimic, High Chambers Yendor etc


Port Isabelle


North-Western Cemetery, Foggy Forest


Isabelle Tower^{I think Isabelle might have an ego problem}

I made a launcher that downloads the game and stuff. I'm hoping to have the demo done by the end of February which encompasses the first quest/area (Calm Before the Storm / Isabelle Island). There's going to be six areas total, each with 10 levels worth of content. So it'll top out around level 50...

Also I made a stupid meme video if you've played RuneScape it has quite a few jokes and jabs:



(It's a link to a YouTube video).

Later!

[Ohmnivore]

I can't wait to stand in a financial establishment and repeatedly yell "selling rune simmy 35k"

Jokes aside you really nailed the RS feel, graphics (but with a different art style) and gameplay

[[bk]door.maus]

Haha, I don't think there's going to be multiplayer for a whiles, if ever.

I've been sick the last week so I haven't been able to do much. I added crates today though:



(A crate maze and a kitchen? Kill two birds with one stone! It's another nod to the notorious mazes of NeoQuest II that used things like crates and barrels to create grindy encounterfests. Ape Atoll dungeon with the skeleton guerillas was by far the worst... by far...).

The cool thing about crates is there rotation is determined by their tile placement using a noise function. This means that crates are deterministically rotated, but still (visually) randomly rotated. Helps improve the look with only a couple lines of code

You can eat from the tables in the dining hall and the kitchen staff replenish the table. If you kill one of the staff before they can replenish the table, another is sent out, too. So basically the game keeps trying to replenish tables, no matter the odds. Funnily enough, the chefs are more dangerous than the warriors in the dining hall. I guess working customer service jobs will do that to you.

[MattEbbs]

I haven’t played Runescape unfortunately, but I love your art style. Always been a fan of 2d/3D blending. Please keep posting!

[[bk]door.maus]

I haven’t played Runescape unfortunately, but I love your art style. Always been a fan of 2d/3D blending. Please keep posting!

Thank you! Having played RuneScape isn't required to enjoy ItsyRealm thankfully . I love 2D/3D stuff, Paper Mario is one of my favorite games aesthetically.

So this morning I finished the Cthulhuian parasite miniboss from the first floor of the High Chambers of Yendoor. Once slain, you get a key to open one of three waterfall gates.

The fight has two mechanics:



The parasites summon the power of Cthulhu...



...to cause massive damage.

Luckily it can be avoided if you break their concentration.

They also resurrect slain comrades:



There's no way to out-DPS their healing, so I wonder how you kill them all. It's a common gimmick I suppose.

[[bk]door.maus]

I had an interesting bug that's been bothering me for a while but by sheer happenstance I discovered the cause.

Over time my game would slow down. Sometimes it was quicker than other times, but I could never make a connection as to why. I thought it may be a resource leak but since I couldn't replicate it quickly (normally it took 10-20 minutes to surface) so I held off looking into it.

So enter this morning. I randomly open and close the rewards interface after the Cthulhuian miniboss fight:



And what do I notice? A significant tick time increase everyone 1-2 closings. Hmm.

So I make the game print the interfaces it's updating and what do you know, there's dozens of inventories and rewards interfaces (among others) being updated. Whoops. Turns out I never removed the closed interface from the update list.

Well, at least it's fixed now.

[StoneTide]

Love the art style going on here, looks more fun than the current runescape atm lol and it would be cool if it could be multiplayer

[[bk]door.maus]

Hey,

I fleshed out the quests a bit more. I also added the Nominomicon that examines the GameDB for the quest progression, and shows you your current progress plus the next step to help you out. There's also an "Introduction" entry that provides the most important bits of info about controls, combat, and skilling so a player can skim it if they need help.

Prayers were added. Most of them scale based on your Faith level, which incentivizes leveling up faith for more than just extra prayer points. Prayer boosting items like the Sailor's hat or copper badge help /a lot/ when it comes to reducing prayer drain.

I finished the first floor of the High Chambers of Yendor. Here's a run-through of the dungeon in 1 minute:





There's also a lot of optimizations. No more FPS drops from UI over time; the scene graphic culling was optimized and a bug causing flickering models was rectified; and a scene graph scene node leak was fixed.

A major bug fix includes greatly improved path finding.



You can download the latest version from my GitHub: https://github.com/aaronbolyard/itsyscape/releases/tag/alpha-20190125

[[bk]door.maus]

Warning: This is a boring technical update.

I've been working on a website, I'm hoping to get it up and running this week. It looks pretty nice. There's the website which is literally just two pages; the admin page which allows me to manage screenshots & downloads; and the API which will enable developing a launcher.

I think it looks pretty good though:



And so now I'm working on adding a launcher. (Small lie: working on analytics then launcher). The launcher will download the latest version of the game (if necessary) and then launch it. It's going to be a simple C#/WinForms app so it shouldn't be too hard to port to Linux / macOS using Mono.

I've had a few hundred downloads and only a handful of comments. Since I'd like to try and approach publishers in the future, I need data on play time, retention, etc when I launch the demo. There will be an opt-out mechanism (just run ItsyRealm.exe with /f:anonymous at the command line; it's a one-time thing unless you reinstall it or something like that). Analytics are pseudo-anonymous (they can't be linked to a specific player or person) but I'd like to give players the freedom to opt-out anyway.

I'm also adding a title screen and save select. This means multiple save files . The title screen is gonna show areas of the game (only Isabelle Tower right now) in a Yoshi Island sort of way:





Unfortunately I'm going to need a code signing cert which runs upwards of $400 when I launch the demo so I don't have to deal with SmartScreen (that 'feature' is just a racket of Microsoft pushing the UWP/Windows Store platform, in my grumpy opinion) and have potential players freak out. But that's still about two months away...

It sucks, I want to be working on finishing the content but these little-big things need done at some point and I'd rather get them out of the way.

tl;dr: website, launcher, analytics incoming over the next couple weeks. As far as content, title screen & save select.

[[bk]door.maus]

The website is live!

https://itsyrealm.com

As a double-feature I added a launcher which downloads & runs the latest version of the game. No installation required, it's kind of like a click once application (if you've ever used them).

[[bk]door.maus]

Been working on adding powers (aka abilities in most other RPGs):



In the demo, there's going to be 5 for each combat style, plus 5 defensive ones. Post-demo, you'll unlock an ability roughly every 10 levels, capping around level 50.

Defensive abilities require shields, so I had to add shields:



That posed an interesting technical problem because of the way I render characters. The problem was backface culling / the shield having both a front and back. But I got it working nicely in the end .

[ChrisLSound]

Ooo, I like this art style! Nice work so far.

I haven't tried the demo since I'm on Mac, but I plan to download it on my Windows laptop soon
Any plans for a Mac version?

[[bk]door.maus]

I added rain.



Small polish: doesn't rain in buildings.



The rain is 100% necessary for a Cthulhu cinematic at the beginning of the game. Yep. 100% necessary.

[[bk]door.maus]

I made a trailer.





I'm coming close to finishing the High Chambers of Yendor, then there's some polish left and the demo is done. Estimate 1-2 months.