After taking a month off for some travel I am finally ready to get back to work on my game, I expect updates to be regular at this point and will try to post every few days.

My plan is to get a working prototype done within the next week so that I can release that on Desura and Steam Greenlight and maybe by making a small amount of money doing this I can further fun my desire to make games for a living, as in the end that is what this is all about. Later desires include releasing cross platform but that is something I will hold off on until I have finished most of the game on this end.

My first JRPG

Hey, I'm Craig, I'm an avid gamer, I have been playing since I was born and have played card, board, PC, console, book, you name it really and I have probably played that genre at least, anyways. After sitting around for long enough playing everyone else's games I think it is about time that I made my own, so here goes, I am going to attempt to make a few games and sell them and see if that could be a life for me.

For now I am just developing on my own, and until I sell something I see no reason why others cannot try it for free and maybe tell me what kinds of things they would like to see in my game or help me discover the bugs that I cannot find myself. Bare in mind this game is under development, many tiles and sprites are placeholders until I finish other parts of the game. I developed the combat system on my own and made the menus and other assets from scratch as the program I am using doesn't innately have them, so most of those things will continue to change and look better as I get the opportunity to work on them.

Bearing all of that in mind if you still want to try my game I will be happy yo provide you with a copy. Until the first area is free of game ending bugs I will only give a copy to people who email me and ask for one, but I expect that I will get the first area working withing 2 days, hopefully less.

You probably want to know what the game is about or at least what genre it is. This game is called Devoxus Rising - A Legacy of Evil, it is a JRPG style game, and I am trying to make it look and feel as much like an SNES RPG as possible. My hope is that I can make something of a time machine, that will transport gamers like me to a day when games had a more simple complexity. I will not randomly generate any items, skills, or assets, there will only be a finite number of things in the game, and the path that you choose to walk as you complete the story will deeply change the things that you have access to. I want you to have a different experience every time you play, but I am only going to probably make about 5 routes and a variety of prologue endings that will hopefully lead into this games sequel.

This game is build using Game Engine 001, all of the artistic assets are open source and I will make sure to credit everyone properly as development continues. This game will hopefully be available on Iphone, Windows Phone, Android, PC as well as HTML embedding towards the end of development, for now it is just PC.

So this is what I have planned.

Non Speaking Hero - You never speak, but you get to decide what you do a lot of the time which is what influences how people view you.

Dating Sim - This will be more like Mass Effect or Dragon Age than a traditional dating sim. The Women in your party watch your actions and act towards you accordingly. There are opportunities to talk to them and get to know them better, and if you develop a relationship with one of them there are special bonuses and items that can be unlocked and found. This will likely all culminate in getting married and having a child with one of them and in the sequel you will play that child going out for his own adventures.

Town Building - I always liked the mechanic that Secret of the Stars and Breath of Fire 2 had where you got to build a town without having to deal with all of the technical side of it, and thats what I want to offer. At some point in the game you will be given a town to develop, there will be architects around the world that can change you town to look, as well as people who want to join your town and add to it. Of course you cannot take everyone in for various reasons, so your choices on who to take in and what to build will change what you have access to for the rest of the game.

Good or Evil? - I know that this is not a class part of RPGS but I wanted to give the player more choices about what kind of things that they do. Of course the story has some arbitrary and compulsory actions that the player must take despite their alignment, but I am trying to offer them the opportunity to decide how their character feels about those things and how he reacts and the world will subtly change accordingly. 

Secrets Secrets Secrets - I am a firm believer in checking every box and wall and chest, I suggest you do the same, cause in this game there are secrets everywhere. I try to put at least 1 in every area (Dungeon, Town, Overworld) and most of them have more. The secrets will generally not be necessary to win but they will enhance game play.

Hidden Choices - Remember playing Chrono Trigger and you opened the magic box in 600AD and it took away the treasure in the future, but if you opened the box in the future you could go back and open it again in the past? I want those kinds of choices to ring throughout this game. Every choice you make should not be done in a menu, some choices are done as simply as opening a chest or fighting a monster, or letting someone go, the consequences of which may not be seen until much later. I want you to accidentally have made some choice, so when you play again you can avoid those choices, but generally speaking most of the choices will balance each other out. Like if you do the wrong thing it wont destroy the item you were supposed to get, it will generally give you a different one which will offer you a different game experience.

Active-Wait Combat System - Just like Chrono Trigger with the Wait setting on, this game has an action bar the fills according to the characters speed and once you being acting with the character the whole combat pauses. In this way you can choose what order your characters act in without having to use a wait command or anything. The monsters act in the the same way so its a pretty fluid combat and will be developed more as time goes on.

No Random Battles - You get into combat when you run into a monster, many times you can run around them, you will never get into a random encounter, there will be hunting areas for those who want to farm.

So that's pretty much it, soon, I will release a demo of this game so you can try it at your own leisure, but for now if you want to try it please just send me an email to Chilger1211@gmail.com

All Music is by Mathew Pablo - http://www.matthewpablo.com/
The Sprites and Tilesets are from opengameart.org and http://untamed.wild-refuge.net/