Humanity

[saxuallyAPeasing]

I've been working on this RPG for a bit now (mostly revising it after getting to a certain point) but I thought I'd share it.

Humanity starts out relatively predictable with a general, Morgan Natellus, discussing unexplained disappearances with the King, Scott of Altera. He concludes that, after drawing a circle diagram, that it had to do something with a forest in the middle of Altera. Scott allows him to investigate, telling him to bring the prince, Andrew, along so he may gain experience in the real world.


Andrew, Morgan, Harold Natellus (his brother), and Michael Homas (a friend) soon reach the forest. While inexperienced, a charm Andrew wears protects him from the creatures of the forest. After searching the forest, the party discovers a "Blood Gem" (nothing more than a glass ball filled with blood). This seemingly worthless gem proved to be able to open a hidden passageway.


Inside the passageway is a temple, red and strangely luminous. After following the path to a stairway, the party is ambushed by a man in green robes and a scarred mercenary. The green-robed man, seemingly a mage of great power, quite literally decimates the party, aside from Andrew, who his death magic cannot affect. The mage seems to get an idea suddenly, and puts Andrew to sleep. The mage then kills the mercenary rather suddenly.

After the battle, focus moves to Feldman Organus, a small-time knight in the town of Jamon.

The Bishop, Raymond, visits Feldman, says that "he" should come to any moment and leaves. Feldman goes upstairs to find the scarred mercenary awake and standing. The man is upset that he cannot see out of his right eye, then turns around to check to see if something else is unfamiliar. The man turns out to be Andrew, and says that he was scarred by a green-robed man. He says he needs to report the man to the Alteran authorities at the castle, but in reality he wants to talk to his father and see if there is an impostor prince. Feldman, having a report of his own to talk to the king about, agrees to go with him.


The two find a ship in the town, but neither know how to steer it, so they have no choice but to explore the island Jamon. After getting to Jamon mountain, the two find a pirate, Jake Ceremellon, who is scared about the undead in the mountain. He is the owner of the ship and agrees to give them passage if they find a treasure inside the cave. After exploring and being ambushed, the two find a "Water Gem," which, like the "Blood Gem" is nothing more but water inside of glass.


Upon returning to Jamon, Jake is extremely upset about the worthlessness of the gem and refuses to give the two passage, until Feldman suggests selling the gem to archaeologists at Altera Castle. So Jake agrees, but insists that he follow them to make sure he wasn't cheated.


The party travels a short distance south of Jamon to Altera, specifically the town of Bagania. A thief, Wesley Gentel, almost steals their money and tries to start a fight. Andrew recognizes the name Wesley as his longtime childhood friend, but Wesley recognizes Andrew's false face as his parents' murderers. The party is forced to fight Wesley, who afterwards refuses to listen to Andrew and flees to raid a ruined castle.


In the previously unaccessable castle (Wesley opened the door), Wesley is found talking to a knight in green armor. The knight identifies Andrew immediately as his true self, and (quite crudely) identifies himself as a seer of souls. Because Andrew is a respectable prince, the knight gives him the "Earth Gem," noting its indestructability and worthlessness as a treasure. Before being able to tell them his name (Eric M...), he fades into nothingness. It turns out that a bishop and his subordinate was evasedropping on the conversation, and proceeds to tell the "prince" about the gem's location. But first he releases a zombie creature to attack the party. Afterwards, Wesley agrees to join Andrew, and their goal becomes finding the impostor.


That's the beginning in a summary. (there's more of the RPG now, but I don't wanna ruin it in case anyone's interested) As you might suspect, I am a fan of recoloring/splicing Fire Emblem portraits. I also composed/arranged my entire soundtrack (aside from a few songs my friend composed). So, naturally, on a solo project problems arise:

-The DBS sucks, and I've tried writing new ones to no avail. I need a good CBS that works with 4 party members.

-I'm a horrible mapper! Ugh... with a good chipset I can make relatively asthetically pleasing scenes, but in terms of architectural sense and gameplay sense I'm really bad at it. I need someone (experienced) to go through my maps and help make them more... sensical? Is that the word? Whatever.

If you can help PM me with an example of your goodness. If you have comments/criticism, I'd appreciate your replies in this topic.

[Meiscool-2]

Fire Emblem faces, yay.

Just take your own time to make the maps better. I wrote a tut on good mapping IMO, if you think it would help you, you should read it.

[Archem]

Yeah, the maps could use a little bit more work. The forest area looks a little too geometric, and the civilized areas look under-developed and poorly planned, not to mention that the interiors look kind of empty and bland. I'm sure the game is fine, but a little polish on the loose ends can make it a lot better.

[shadus]

Sounds good.I can tell you've not just another nOOb with a game.
Keep working on and you'll have good game.

[DragonBlaze]

Good story so far, but yeah, maps need some work. They're too open, and need more finer details.

-The DBS sucks, and I've tried writing new ones to no avail. I need a good CBS that works with 4 party members.

If you want a cbs, I'm making one right now that you can use if you want, but it'll only support 3 party members not 4. The problem with coding a cbs in rm2k3 is that you can only use 50 picture files. Each hp and mp digit requires its own picture. With 4 hp digits, an hp bar, 3 mp digit, an mp bar, a time bar, and a name/box picture, you already are using 11 pictures per hero. Having 4 heros would mean having 44 pictures just deditacted to that stuff. That only leaves 6 pictures to display damage, menu stuff, monsters, and heros, its just not enough. And displaying hp like 9999/9999 for each character would be impossible using pictures. You CAN use a tileset/charsets to display stuff like that, but it doesn't look as good or work as well as pictures. So yeah, you can use my cbs when I'm done, but it'll only support 3 heros.

The pic in my siggy shows what the defult version will look like, but the layout and stuff can be easily customized.

[saxuallyAPeasing]

@Me: Thanks, I'll check for it. I've never really had the knack to make maps, though, so I'll see what it does. x_x

@Dragon: Although it would take a bit more work(well, depending on how you set it up), you could use individual pictures for the numbers 10-99 instead of using two different pictures. You'd use 9 pics per hero, making 36 total. Of course, this is just a theory. ^_^;; Thanks for the offer.

[ZeroKirbyX]

Char bios. NOW!

[saxuallyAPeasing]

Really good tutorial, Meiscool. I went and edited a bit of the beginning forest...



How's that?

@0: Uh, maybe later.

[DragonBlaze]

That new map is better but there is still a bunch of stuff you can do to improve them. A big thing when making maps with that forest tileset is that the 'leaves' part needs to be layered a bit. What I mean is that where the leave are there is basically just a big black area that is just boring to the eye. A way to improve it would be to layer the leaves so that in the black area of the leaves, theres another layer on top and such.

 

@Dragon: Although it would take a bit more work(well, depending on how you set it up), you could use individual pictures for the numbers 10-99 instead of using two different pictures. You'd use 9 pics per hero, making 36 total. Of course, this is just a theory. ^_^;; Thanks for the offer.

Yeah, I  could do that, but it would require 1768 forks. (single digit 0-9, digits 00 - 09, 10 - 90, which is 110, then if you want any effects like the hp digits turn yellow when the hp is low and when dead, you would need an extra 111. In total thats 221 for hp, multiply that by 4 heros to get 884, and multiply that again by 2 for mp, and you end up with 1768. Plus the way I'm making my cbs, I'll require twice that too. So yeah, you could do that, but it would require more work than I am willing to do.

Anyway, if you want to have a battle system with 4 heros, you're probably going to have to make it yourself. If you do decide to try and make one, I'd be happy to help you out in areas where you have problems and such.

[saxuallyAPeasing]

Wow, that much work? e_o How about this... There are four members in the party, but only three get to battle at a time. Each hero has a "Change" command to switch out with the benched hero. If a hero is KO'd then you could either leave him there or switch him out. If all 3 heroes are KO'd, but you have one hero benched, you could flee(if it wasn't an event battle). It would be cool designing gameplay innovations to take advantage of that system... (Note that it shouldn't affect party order, cause I like having a set leader for the party [dialogue purposes]).

Regarding the forest:

Is this...


Better?

P.S. Here's a sample of my music. It's MIDI (woo...) but if possible I'll make the soundtrack good quality MP3 files before I'm done. The problem is that MP3's don't (as far as I know) have the command to set a place to loop back to.
This is the theme of the green-robed mage (Luther), but also his dungeon theme. (I have an alternate one that doesn't have the fanfare at the end).

[Meiscool-2]

It's better looking, probally a bit to open, but other then that, good enough to pass.

[Archem]

Hmm... Those stairs look a bit awkward, and the ground kinda rises a bit too much to just plateau off like that. Try doing more of a thinned incline in place of the stairs, and lower the raised area by 1 square. Also, do those animals do anything, or are they just for show? Because if they are of the latter, then I would discourage them altogether. But all in all, it's tremendously better.

[saxuallyAPeasing]

Well, the animals don't really do anything (except move/hop around >_>), so I can remove them.

Is this better?


Here's another part of the forest, so I can see if I'm getting the right idea:

(the unnatural-looking rectangle is intentional, that is the secret passage's poor disguise).

[Meiscool-2]

looking better. Now try the towns, more time should be spent in the towns then any other place.

[saxuallyAPeasing]

Well, I tried my hand at interior design first. Much easier.

What would you suggest for these?





EDIT: Bleh, photobucket shrunk the images. You can still get the jist of it though.