Work In Progress: Fall of Jayshn (IntRenAiMo 2008)

[Chimerical]

Was the UI inspired by WoW? =P

I was like... this is familiar! But great job so far!

[monele]

herenvardo : Sounds all good ^_^. Keep up the good work

[herenvardo]

Was the UI inspired by WoW? =P

I was like... this is familiar! But great job so far!

Although it would be lying if I said that several months of WoW addiction didn't have any influence (and even my avatar is a proof of such influence), it can neither be said that the UI is strictly based in WoW's UI.
Going into specifics: the "buyback" option and the item description popups in the shop UI are heavily inspired by WoW.
OTOH, if you look at the Stats screen you might notice that it resembles more to Diablo II's inventory window (the inventory grid in the bottom, and the items shown within the "avatar" rather than around) than WoW's character window. However, if you're old enough, have good memory, and take a deeper look, you might realize that the inspiration for that UI comes from a much more ancient source: no less than the immortal classic XCOM: UFO Defense

Besides that, there are other points where WoW has been a heavy influence. If you check the abilities' names listed in http://herenvardo.googlepages.com/combat.html, you will see familiar names such as "Sinister Strike", "Cheap Shot", "Pyroblast", "Holy Smite", or "Mind Flay", to put some examples (no, there is no Polymorph, although I felt really tempted ). Also, the gold/silver/copper money system is strictly inspired by WoW; and in my design notes the gear items are grouped as Tier1, Tier2, Tier3, and Tier4 for each class (don't worry, you won't need to get into a 40-man dungeon to get them )

I hope you still try the game when it's ready despite this "confession"
BTW: if you are curious, here am I.

[herenvardo]

Update (sorry for not posting this earlier).
As you migh have already noticed, once again we failed to make the deadline So we'll have to wait for next year's or two years ahead's intrenaimo to go on... just kidding
The bad news are that I lost contact with the main artist (Trecevidas) from March 19th until a couple of weeks ago; and have been unable to contact with the musician since the beginnings of March (considering that he's my brother, that's a bit worrying), so the project has not advanced as expected (the graphics and music parts have not advanced at all lately), and thus we failed the deadline by far.
But there are also some good news First, and most important, is to say that, unlike two years ago, the project has not been abandoned nor "undefinitely posponed": it is still work in progress and, despite progress might be slow, there is progress nonetheless. I'm afraid to put any deadline, since I seem to be cursed with failing them, but I expect to have all the scripting part done and heavily tested by the time when Trecevidas and my brother finnish their own tasks in the project; then I'll put it all together and post the finnished game in a couple of days or so. Of course, that still depends on how long do they take to their parts, but I'm quite bad at both drawing and writting music, so I can't do much more than that.

I also want to mention that the original ideas for the game suffered several cuts with the only goal of making the deadline (we had in mind releasing "what we could" by the end of march, as long as it could be considered "complete", and then include all the secondary stuff for a later "1.1" version). Since we are not making the deadline anyway, there is no reason to keep all this stuff out of the game, so there will only be one full version with all the content (plus as many bug-fix releases as needed, although I hope these will be few, if any at all). I still need to confirm some details with the artist but; as a summary, these are the main features that had been cutted off from the project but are back in:
In the Ren'Ai aspect, the original cut limited the romance stories to three pre-paired couples of characters, from which the player would be able to chose the "playing character" when starting the game. With the full version, the game will be featuring 6 characters (3 girls and 3 guys) of which each can be paired with each other. That makes a total of 30 different stories, and each of these can be played from the two uhdtonhmsr*. Breaking the number into something that will have more meaning to this community, the game will feature:

• 9 BxG paths
• 9 GxB paths
• 6 BxB paths
• 6 GxG paths

[EDIT]I must clarify, these are not straight paths, but character pairings; and there will be several choices and branchings on each of them, so the actual number of paths goes beyond count. [/EDIT]
This will be doable thanks to the highly modular CEAIE (Chat & Emotional AI Engine) that is already designed and halfway implemented. In some more understandable terms, the initial dialogue options in each game will only depend on which character is being played, but the evolution of these dialogues will go differently depending on with who the main character is speaking. Path switching in the middle of the game, while not easy, will be doable. The initial cuts were causing that on each play-through only the main character and her/his pre-matched pair would appear in the story, but now the party may include up to five characters.
I could go into deeper details, but I don't want to spoil so much stuff
On the RPG side, there are many smaller additions once the initial cuts are restored:
Gear: each piece of gear will have its own artwork (currently, the gear is displayed as enlarged icons in the inventory screen, but that was never aimed to be more than mere placeholders). In addition to the four current sets per character, there will be a fifth, epic gear set for each character; and by epic I don't only mean the devastating stat bonuses, but also the animated artwork (I hope Trecevidas will keep up to the challenge )
Bosses: 5-people parties and epic gear call for epic challenges. Several "optional" bosses will be scattered around the world to challenge the bravest and most skilled players, some of them even requiring unique strategies to be defeated. To keep the power-level balanced, and still enable those players who prefer to focus on the RenAI elements to finnish the game, the "final" boss will appear scaled to the current party: there will be a minimum of gear needed to face him (to ensure the player explores the world enough to find, at least, some additional characters ), but only those who are really prepared (ie: 5-people party on full epic gear) will face Jayshn's true and mightiest efnpojd* form.
Quests: The main quest will be kept intact, and the few side quests that had survived the cuts will also stay there, but to justify the additional gear and bosses additional quests will appear in the game. Some quests might reward gear, some will require bringing down one or more bosses, and a few will reward gear for defeating certain bosses (besides the bosses' own loot, of course!). While some of the quests must be completed in order (they form quest-chains, and there might also be some pre-requisites for some quests and/or chains), the aim is to provide a non-lineal game experience to the adventurers who decide to uptake these added challenges.
Game world: In order to grant the new bosses and quest-givers a home, as well as to have "meeting points" for each character that could be added to the party during the game, several areas will be added to the game world. The "zone" count raises from something around 10-15 areas to 25-30 different places to explore, where dangers, treasures, and maybe even nqxg* might be awaiting behing every corner.
Mob AI: (for those unfamiliar with the term, mob is a short-hand for moving object, and usually refers to "fightable" creatures within the game-world) The mobs' AI has been improved to appropriatelly handle the variable and generally increased number of foes they'll be facing (the goblins will not act the same way against a well-equiped 5-man party than against a lone, starting character; and will not treat each character equally). This is mostly done by the threat mechanic: for those who don't get too deep into the aventure part of the game (the "RenAI gamers"), this will mostly benefit the player (specially once the party reaches 3 or 4 people). For the hardcore adventurer, this will be the only thing that makes the highest challenges in the game defeatable at all.

There are also lots of technical improvements, of which I want to highlight two:
Automatic gear selection: Each piece of gear in the game is only equipable by one of the six characters, and only in a certain slot. Since each item will be strictly better or worse than anything else it might compete with (for example, there will be no chance to consider "should I sacrifice 1 point of speed for 3 more points of power?": if something that can replace that item gives more "power", it will give the same or more "speed", and the same with all stats); the game engine will play smartly, and make sure the best available gear is always equipped (in other words, all my code to manage the equipment control UI has been a waste of time ^^; ). In addition, there will be an option to auto-sell obsolete gear when entering a shop. The UI will be kept there, however, since it is the only mechanism available to use "consumables" such as potions, and it will still allow seeing the details of equipped stuff and junk, and total stats of each character in the party; but it won't be needed to go there and check all the inventory after looting each group of monsters.
Quest log: for those engaging in the secondary quests, the interweaving of current and completed quests and quest-chains might become too complex. For this reason, a quest log screen will be added to the menu which gives details (original quest text, rewards, detailed counts of defeated targets and/or collected items, etc) of each quest and its current status (accepted, started, completed, finnished (turned-in to the quest-giver)).

Finally, I will be adding some easter-eggs into the game, which can be discovered in three different ways:
The first is to stumble upon them during game play, which can be quite random (hint: not all exjv* are fykw*!), so this method is reserved for the lucky people.
The second one, reserved to those with patience and some python skills, would be to dig into the source code of the game, which will be available because the game will be free software (GPLv3, for those who might be wondering).
The third way, available to anyone who wants to have some fun even before the game gets finnished and released, is to PM me with the translation of any "scrambled" word you are able to decipher, accompaining the answer with a bit of reasoning. The scrambled words are the ones that appear italized and marked with a * in this post and the ones I might be posting in this thread until the game's release. Also note that the words I've messed up have been choosen attempting to reveal a bit more of the game once translated. Note: to prevent "cheating", any word that gets publicly posted in the forum will be discarded, and the one posting it will be "disqualified". The "secrets" will be revealed to the participants upon the game's release (some of them could be added or removed before then, so it's the only moment in which it they can be exposed), based on the ammount of posts solved correctly. Above everything else, this is mostly for fun

[herenvardo]

Yet another update
Lots of things have been happening behind the scenes since my last post on this thread so, for the case that there is somebody still interested in this project, I'll attempt to summarize them:

The Crash
Backing up things is a good idea... but sometimes it's not enough. It was good I had backups when I had to format and reinstall Windows on my computer; but while restoring them the external hard disk where they are stored decided to reveal what seems to be a manufacture fault and stopped working Fortunately, the disk was still under guarantee, so I got a new one; but all the data on it was lost (I was "offered" a recovery service by the manufacturer, but the cost was simply far beyond what I could have afforded). Surprisingly enough, of all my work and projects, this has been the least affected by that disaster: most of the code needed rewriting so, although it'd had been good to have the original code as a reference, I won't be doing much more work due to this accident. All the bgs made by Trecevidas reached me through e-mail, so there are still copies securely stored on my GMail's archives. The only thing I was really regretting of having lost was the UI code for shopping and for the stats screen but.. voilà, it happened to be that I had posted in this very thread the supposedly "final" version of that code, so I recovered it from here.
I still had to re-download and re-install Ren'py, and have to do some file management, but essentially no substantial work has been lost. Of course, I'm now taking more paranoid precautions: I have a second backup made daily by my scripts on a separate computer, via an Ethernet connection; and I'm weekly saving an extra copy of critical stuff on my website's server, which is located in California; so my work should be much safer now ^^;

Team rechartering
I already mentioned on my previous post that, having failed to make for the deadline again, we were going to restore all the stuff that have been cut from the project for timing reasons. This would have meant a lot of added work for Trecevidas, and that could have been a problem... so I sought for solutions.
Another artist has joined the project (she's not in these forums yet, so don't bother trying to guess who she is ). This should help speeding up the work (or at least, making the pace steadier), and improve the final quality. In addition, I hope that the addition of a girl to the team will help making the male characters deeper and better represented (the project is not only aimed at an hetero, male audience ).
On the music aspect, there are no news: work on it has not yet begun; but I know the musician well enough to be confident that music will be ready by the time when the project starts taking a more defined shape.

Code refactoring
Partly because of the extension of the game, and partly because I simply wanted, most of the code is being refactored and better organized, improving reusability and mutability. If there would be a sequel (I don't plan to make it, but who knows?), most of the code could go unchanged, modified only "values" to adapt to the new game. Similarly, if someone decides to use the code as the basis for a new project, the sub-engines should easily bend to anyone's needs.

Names update
Until now, we had been using many placeholders for places' and characters' names (such as the town of Anolecrab or the country of Niaps, which are Barcelona and Spain reversed, respectively). Finally, names for everybody and everything have been made, and the scripts and filenames are being updated to reflect this.

New previews
Ok, I'll admit it, there have been no previews for a while; so I think it's a good time to give something away

First, let's put one more of Trecevidas' backgrounds: an overview of one of the towns in the game:

Overview of the town of Silnetta.

For the second one, I must add: Spoiler warning! It is a diagram of the adventure plot (it doesn't deal with the romance component of the game); and I'm posting here with the intention of showing the structural complexity of the game and the freedom of choices that will enjoy the players while playing through the story. I don't expect you to understand everything in the diagram (as a stand-alone thing it may be quite cryptic), but to give a glimpse of the whole picture.

The game's plot.

[PyTom]

Off-site backup is always a good thing. I strongly suggest that people who are even halfway serious about their project put their game into a version control system. This gives two major benefits:

- It lets you go back to any previous version of a game. If you make backups, and you delete an important file, you can recover it easily. (Incremental backups also allow this, but are more difficult to get right.)

- It lets you back up remotely, assuming you have a web server somewhere.

Recently, I've switched to using Bazzar as my VCS for new project. It has a number of cool features, but one convenient one is that it can use any computer you can upload files to remotely (over ftp, sftp, or http) as a server. So there's no need to install specialized server software.


I'm not a huge fan of that background. Apart from being a gif (which ruins the quality with dithering dots), many of the lines are huge, so it appears that the picture is lower-resolution than it actually is. Speaking as a player, I wouldn't want to look at it for long periods of time.

[herenvardo]

Off-site backup is always a good thing. I strongly suggest that people who are even halfway serious about their project put their game into a version control system. This gives two major benefits:

- It lets you go back to any previous version of a game. If you make backups, and you delete an important file, you can recover it easily. (Incremental backups also allow this, but are more difficult to get right.)

- It lets you back up remotely, assuming you have a web server somewhere.

Recently, I've switched to using Bazzar as my VCS for new project. It has a number of cool features, but one convenient one is that it can use any computer you can upload files to remotely (over ftp, sftp, or http) as a server. So there's no need to install specialized server software.

Honestly, I've tried several VCS's and backup solutions, both free and commercial (and will keep trying more of them); but I yet have to find someone that is both flexible and simple. Until I find such a thing, I'll keep relying on batch files and Windows scheduled tasks.

I'm not a huge fan of that background. Apart from being a gif (which ruins the quality with dithering dots), many of the lines are huge, so it appears that the picture is lower-resolution than it actually is. Speaking as a player, I wouldn't want to look at it for long periods of time.

On the gif dithering issue, I have to reply with a self quote from an earlier post in this thread:

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

Plus, I have to add that the gif conversion's side-effects have shown up much more on this background than on the previous ones. I don't remember what did I use to convert the old previews, but this time I used MS Paint straightaway and, I promise, I'll be using something else from now on. IIRC, Paint has a pre-defined palette for gifs and 8-bit BMPs, and is not capable of generating a palette that adapts to the colors actually used on the image.