Hello folks, how do you all do?
The thing in the Geek Culture section called 'NaGaCreMo' has caused me to start making a game again. So I thought, 'why not dig up this old game design plan?' - a little big for NaGaCreMo, but setting up a battle mode with placeholder media? That's a bit more doable. So that's what I am working on first. Also, I am not trying any of this fancy LUA stuff for this yet.
Basically what I've got for this part of the project is:
Level Building with FPSC Free (Nice little tutorial on the Dark Game Studio section of the site to show you how to do get FPSC Levels into DBP)
DBP of course
3 character models I got from the TGC store and maybe some of psionic's
Cash's 3D viewer
MikeS's Normal Map Generator
Newton Physics DLL
Sound Matter Sound Effects
Music from wherever I find it
I will be using my own media eventually, so bear with me.
But what is Abeyance? The design is being redone, my original was produced in 2005, so it needs updating.
This a logo Animeblood/Cian Rice produced for me all that time ago, and I said I was going to use it, so I am.
It's an RPG based around Jack Keats [maybe a name change] is a factory worker in a world much like our own, but in the year 2010. For society, things have gone down the pit really - people no longer like each other, they're scared that somebody might be working for a terrorist organisation and the fear mongering of the media, government and even religion really isn't helping people. Fear brought people to do some mad things, I mean there's a saying: "what you repress always surfaces", repressing fear brought out a lot of irrational things. Instead of solving the problem at the source, the government turned to medicine and found that they could push these emotions back in with a single pill with a bonus side effect, compliance. A miracle cure for the issues the government had to deal with. Only for the aforementioned statement to remain true, Jack being one of the first to notice signs of a neurosis, much like schizophrenia causes him to change personas, to start seeing things that weren't there and he goes on battle images that aren't there. In his lucid state of mind it was like being free of the drugs, where he could see the problems in reality. Thus he tries to do something about it.
Story can always mean one thing, the other is delivering the game, but my plan for this has never really been to do anything complex, inventory, battle, talking and item using seems to be what the features demand.
So from now one, I'll shut up about the story (this isn't Game Design Theory) and get some progress onto you.
What have I done?
I have been getting my head around Newton to get physics to the game - I always hated trying to use DBP's commands to work out a decent collision system, I thought Newton would be more useful and it has. A lot of my time has been spent on getting a character moving and manipulating a character as a physics body again a level object. I can also see Newton being more useful later on.
Also, the character is able to talk to an NPC and start a battle with the NPC. And it's the battle system that I'm working on now. The battle system, so far is basic. Just 'attack' and 'escape' (you can't always escape) and an 'atb' meter. I've done battle systems before, so I'm just going to find some old code and see if I can use that to make it better. I will also be playing with some controller support.
Once that's done - I'll give the character some stock spells and items, and then get some design done for finishing up at the end of January.
Then work on the rest of the game.
Screenshots:
What I'm going to try and do is recreate some of the stuff from my Previous RPG Engine, unfortunately, all of my files are on my old computer, so I'm going to have to fire it up first and have a good look.
There, that's a highly descriptive and lengthy post of what I'm doing, so I best get on with it.
[EDIT]
Before anybody notices a big flaw, yes I realise my main character is male and the screenshots are female - once I've figured out the frame numbers and have got normal maps for any male models they will be switched.
