Lemma Soft Forums

45 days 3h 31m for the deadline: a good moment to open this thread.
For those who don't know, Fall of Jayshn started as a project for NaNoRenO 2006. For several reasons, we failed to make the deadline. By may 2006 the project was finally dropped, with a vague hope to repick it someday... A few weeks ago I remembered the project and thought ¿why not now? so I started leaving some hidden spoilers and a week ago the official announcement was finally made.

So, here we are. With the aid of the main artist in the project, Trecevidas, we'll try to stream through this topic a steady flow of previews, as well as keep track of the status of the project. That said, I'll yield to Trecevidas the honor to make the first previews (actually, it's just that I don't have anything in presentable conditions )

BTW, I think it's so obvious there is no need to say, but anyway: comments and feedback are always welcome (at least on my part).

Hello everybody.

Well, I'm posting a couple of images for Fall of Jayshn. As you may expect, these images will be backgrounds for Herenvardo's videogame.
I hope you like them.
Anyway, you're able to criticise them (in a constructive way, I presume).

They all look great so far. ^_^ *really bad at drawing backgrounds*

Good luck on making the deadline this time. ^_^

I like the peaceful village scene. It's quite a cartoony style you've chosen, but it could work quite well.

I like the forest junction too, but I'd suggest that you try to add more "depth of focus" to it... as it is, it looks rather flat, because there's no difference between the distant bits and the close bits. I'd suggest shrubs or leaves that are large at the points close to the viewer, and much smaller further away; and also perhaps some slight haze that makes the far paths more obviously distant. You've not got much perspective effect on the path that the viewer's on: it might be good to let that narrow a little bit to establish the depth of the scene before it widens for the junction.

I will not leave all the glory for Trecevidas!! See, I also made a background to be able to have the image and scene statements without having to wait for the artwork to be done:

Ok, I'll admit it: in artistic terms, it sucks, but it's really useful
However, I've got a more serious preview for you: an early shot of the shopping UI (there are some layout tweaks pending, but you get the idea)... oh, and behind the UI stuff you can see another of Trecevidas' backgrounds
And I want to make a comment about the .gif previews: first, their reduced filesize means a 90% faster upload/download than the "good" files; and second, we have agreed that you'll have to wait for the release to see the artwork in full-quality

I think the only thing really missing from the village scene is this:

I'm sorry to disappoint you, Hyperguy, but featuring Trogdor in the game would arise to many copyright issues...

.. so we'll be featuring our very own dragon! (what did you think Jayshn is?)


EDIT: Real-time progress! find attached an updated screenshot of the shopping interface... almost done

Very very intriguing ^_^... I'll be following this

First of all, I want to apologize, as these shots should have already been posted.
I could blame to some connection problems... and I do A whole weekend offline, I thought I wouldn't survive Now that I'm back, let's go with the pending previews:

The first one, I think I had already posted it somewhere, but to make sure, here it goes:
http://herenvardo.googlepages.com/combat.html: this page contains a brief summary of the combat system for the game; although it shouldn't be taken as something definitive.

Next one: I've already shown several shots of the shopping UI during its development, so here it goes the last one:

The Shop UI, completed.

And something really new: I'm using lots of placeholders for graphics during testing, but the overall idea can clearly be seen:

This is the Stats & Gear screen, accessible from the game menu, will allow equipping and swapping gear, using potions and similar items, and so on. Besides the placeholders, which need to be replaced by final artwork as soon as it's ready, everything else is done; I might do some fine-tuning before the release if time allows, but otherwise this UI is finished.

Although I promise nothing, I hope to be posting some shots of the combat UI by next weekend . In addition, I'm trying to contact with Trecevidas, since he was supposed to be posting a new art preview this weekend and he hasn't... Hope I can get him to fix that "issue" ASAP

My god ! Your menus and UIs are fantastic ! The stats/gear page looks impressive too ! As a rpg fan (yeah, I LOVE menus !), I can't wait playing this !

*looks at MagBou*.... *looks at your stuff*..... Uguh ._.
That's one incredibly detailed UI . I just hope the game doesn't force you to micromanage stuff too much (I like the option but not being forced).

Loooooking good so far. But deadlines? I can never make them!

There is a hard to achieve balance: we are trying to keep several RPGish features, but at the same time we are trying to keep them simple enough. As a summary:
Character identity in combat: Each different character have different abilities to use during combat, to make playing with each feel different enough. But we have avoided large lists of abilities with complex effect, reducing the count to just a standard attack and two special abilities for each character. In addition, the different characters have different stats, and rely differently on them, but we have kept the stats and combat rules as simple as possible (without sacrificing balance). For example, a Rogue won't last too long if the enemies pick on her, but you can expect she to unleash insane ammounts of damage really quick (high skill and power stats but poor endurance and hitpoints); on the other hand, a Warrior will normally be really though, holding his ground against almost any attack, but won't do too much to take down the enemies (amazing endurance and hitpoint scores, but low skill and speed, mostly due to the burden of carrying heavy plate armor).
Gear: After many simplifications, there are only six slots in which equip gear: head, chest, main hand, off hand, legs, and foot (originally there were going to be more than 20 slots, including wirst, waist, neck, ankles, fingers (rings), and so on). In addition, each piece of equipment is restricted to a single class, and its bonuses are focused to enhance the most relevant stats for such class. For example, Rogue equipment will have huge skill bonuses, while Warrior equipment will grant lots of hitpoints. Finally, the "choices" of equipment have been reduced to four items per class and per slot, and the choice between two different items will always be quite obvious: which one of these would you equip?:
Dagger of Misschief: +1 power, +10% skill; Dagger of Subtlety: +3 power, +30% skill; Dagger of Assassination: +6 power, +60% skill or Dagger of Merciless Slaughter: +10 power, +100% skill?
The scaling for all gear items goes in a similar way. Actually, the main point of gear is to provide a "character development" feel without having to introduce complex rules about experience points and levels.
Potions: Basically, they are entirely optional: most combats can be handled without using potions. But if you mess things to much during an encounter, potions will give you a chance to save the field without having to load the game.

In addition, I already mentioned that combats will be made entirely optional by using an insta-kill cheat. This will make all the gearing, stats, and potion stuff completely irrelevant to the outcome of the game (there is a combat where the cheat will not work, but if it takes place you'll get the "game over" anyway )
So, in general terms, I think micro-control is possible, up to the point that a creative player might find quite abusive combos to easily deal with the toughest creatures; but it's not at all forced.




Thanks for the positive feedback ^^. Anyway, I think once you get the basic points, it's all a matter of time and patience (except for the unhovered nightmare, but that's another story). I believe the results are worth the effort: the say+menu based interface I had been using for testing while writting the actual game content was simply horrific; and completely unplayable on some cases.


Then I want you to know that all this stuff is mostly an experiment for what I'm planning to do on my next project (already anounced on my signature). As a starter, I'll mention that many RPGish elements that have been kept out of Fall of Jayshn will be part of the WoB series, such as experience and leveling, character customization, fully-fledged dungeons, crafting skills, improved combat and emotional AI, and so on... anyway, I won't start with that until I get FoJ finnished.

Wooaahhh... That's a pretty amazing looking equip system. I wouldn't even have thought something like that was possible on ren'py!

Neither did I, until I got started on it
I will admit that the shop and stats UIs have taken more than 500 lines of code, but most of it is not really complex (there are lots of lines just to place lots of widgets on the screen, but there is no big deal in that); the popup item description when hovering items in a shop and the code for managing equipment have been a bit tricky, but the former is just an "extra", and the later was just a matter of paying attention to what my code was doing. Long story short, see it by yourself in the attached scripts

BTW, this will be almost nothing compared with what I've in mind for the WoB series