Hey tigers! My college roommate is working on a multiplayer text-based RPG and is looking for an artist to do illustrations to paste around the website. Aside from being a better programmer than I could ever hope to be, he's an incredibly dedicated fellow and I would say the chances of him releasing the game are pretty high.
It’s a turn-based strategy game with some RPG elements. It’s different from most other browser-based games because most of those are just "command your empire/village/army to victory" and how you play is basically: 1. login, 2: spend daily resource that you get, 3: attack or whatever, 4: logout until the next day. There’s not really any depth to it, so I wanted to make a game with a bit more strategic depth. In this game, players play as a "tactician" and manage multiple characters (each levels and changes classes individually), put them into formations, and battle them. It’s coded in PHP/MySQL, but battle will use C++.
Formations/BattlePlayers can put up to 7 characters in a 3x4 grid. Classes give bonuses to classes around them, so positioning your characters for good stats is really important. The actual battle is completely automated by the AI and will probably be text-based, because I don’t do flash and that’s hard. The AI will probably just attack whichever character it can hurt the most.
Character ClassesThere are a total of 123 different classes, in a big tree. It sounds like a lot, but characters usually go through 5-7 class changes before hitting their final class. Character bonuses usually end up like this:
Buffer: Helps the surrounding characters.
Selfish: Hinders surrounding characters, but stronger than normal.
Mixer: Helps certain spots while hindering others.
Loner: Little to no effect on neighbors.
Some example classesThe Tyrant gives -10% stats to characters around it, because he’s selfish. But he has really good growth, so it might be possible to put him on his own off to one side and have a regular army outside his aoe.
There’s also the Marauder, which gives +2 strikes and +4 speed to the people near him for two turns, so he’s a rush character. You could put some heavy hitters on the front row with him and dps a lot in the first few turns.
And my favorite is the Virtuoso, which has insane stat growth but gives himself -70% damage for 25 turns. But if you can stall for that time using other classes, you can really unleash a ton of damage. If you’ve played Magic, it’s like a combo deck.
We’re trying to balance classes right now, but we really don’t know how it’s going to turn out until I write the battle code. We’ve only got the backend data stuff going for the designer to play with, like the growth chart down there. Who knows what parties are going to be overpowered when it comes out..
Classes ChartsCharacters start out as a novice, then choose one of 3 branches:
Swordsman:
http://tinypic.com/r/mwa5fm/3 Spellcaster:
http://tinypic.com/r/2v0eamh/3 Trainee:
http://tinypic.com/r/119mg79/3 Stat GrowthThere are four stats, STR, INT, VIT, and LUK. Characters have stat growth, which changes depending on which classes they become. Like promoting a Swordsman with stat growth of 6 STR / 1 INT / 3 VIT/ 2 LUK to a Knight would give him +2 STR, etc.
Here’s a graph of the growth of a Novice -> Spellcaster -> Empath -> Cleric -> Priest -> Zealot -> Templar -> Inquisitor. You can see that he starts off a pretty normal priest with high INT but once he goes Zealot at level 50 he gets a massive STR growth boost and starts beating people up instead of healing.
WeaponsThere are few different weapon types, and each classes uses one more different kinds. There are only weapons and body armor, no other kinds of equips. You can also imbue your items with random mods (like D2) and refine them to increase their damage.
Example imbue:
+23% Damage
+22% STR
+15% VIT
+11% INT
+14% LUK
+2% Regen for 15 rounds
+30% Physical Defense for 9 rounds
+10% Magical Reduction for 6 rounds
+3 Strikes/Round for 4 rounds
So yeah, we really need art for the game. Hope someone’s interested in doing some art, and thanks for reading.
: it's a carefully designed online RPG that a competent programmer wants an artist for
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