Tapscape - a rewarding Runescape inspired mobile RPG

Introduction

Tapscape is a simplified rewarding mobile RPG game that is heavily insipred by the old Runescape mechanics.
In Tapscape you can train a variety of skills like fishing, cooking, woodcutting, mining, smithing, agility and more.

Actually you could see Tapscape as some sort of mix between Runescape, Minecraft, Pokemon and a Swiper App like.. Tinder?

Gameplay

The movement in the game is simple by design. The player can swipe to the left or to the right to change their position and encounter new things like trees, rocks, obstacles and monsters. By moving through waypoints (like doors or ladders) the player can move to another area - a new swipe lane to find explore new things.

The player can interact with most of the encounters by tapping on it Hand Any Key

. But the gameplay is not just tapping. While there are some mechanics that borrow the "cookie clicker" mechanic of tapping lots of times (woodcutting, mining) there are also a lot of skills that work differently.
For fishing, as an example, the player has to tap once to start and tap again to reel in and potentially catch a fish depending on the timing.

The world has random/changing elements but also some static points for the player to remember areas and find what he is searching for.

Generally we want to focus on the combat mechanics first and use the skills as a supportive gameplay element.
The combat is turn-based-realtime like in Runescape. It uses the same speed per gametick. You can swap equipment during combat, consume food and switch attack styles. Some weapons even have unique special attacks you can make use of to K.o. your opponent. Also you can flee from fights - pokemon style.

At the end of the combat you will have a chance to pick up some random loot depending on the monster you killed. Evil

Will you get the rare balloon whip or just some monster meat?

Tapscape != Runescape
Obviously we are not using any assets or copyrighted material from Jagex or Runescape.
Tapscape offers a completely unique story, unique monsters, unique skill implementation, traps, bosses, loot and surprises.
As a (oldschool) Runescape player you will definitely find several easter eggs you will hopefully enjoy. Coffee

Screenshots

Info: The following examples contain placeholder art

Singleplayer over broken economy and ghost towns

Tapscape is a single player experience. We have plans for adding simulated players that act like real players (in pvp, scoreboards etc.) or even making a mulitplayer
version if it turns out there are actually players enjoying the concept. For now want to deliver the most enjoyable experience for the player and think that Singleplayer is the most rewarding playstyle for what we are making. Also mulitplayer would mean A LOT of work. WTF

The game will be free and without ads available on Google Play and probably later for IOS as well.

The progress

Mechanic wise a lot of the features are implemented. Navigation, combat, mining, woodcutting, smithing, cooking, fishing, inventory, bank/storage, dynamic world respawn/despawn of entities, tutorial hint/onboarding system...

The tutorial and the first gamezone is also available gamedesign wise. I'm curently working on traps and obstacles for the agility skill. Christiane just joined recently so we have a lot of art work left to do. Our plan was to release a public version mid november, but we will probably more likely have an open alpha by then.

Finding the art style

We are currently trying out some new art styles for the game. I'm interested for feedback what you think about that.

Who we are

We are Luc and Christiane from Cologne/Düsseldorf, Germany. I'm working as a web/app developer fulltime currently and Christiane is a freelance artist working for various projects. I was a passionate Runescape player and actually started and half finished to make games with these "skill grinding" mechanics for years while learning new technologies. There is just something very rewarding about unlocking a new mining level and being able to mine that new ore you need to make the big bucks from smithing the new shiny sword.
I would like to use this platform (tigforums) as diary for the progress of this game and i'm curious about getting to know new like-minded people on the way of finishing Tapscape.

How can i play it?

There will be a closed alpha soon for the few twitter people following us, which will still contain some placeholder art. We are working hard to make it as soon as possible with the limited ressources of time we have due to our jobs. But i must say i'm very impressed reading your gamedev logs here on tigsource. So many people creating awesome game in so little time. Who, Me?

Get in touch

https://twitter.com/BurntMeatGames