Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[kaijyuu]

Phase 1: Code one's own game engine from scratch, and make a demo.
Phase 2: Release to friends to work out any bugs and make it as presentable as possible.
Phase 3: Submit to Equestria Daily, ponychan, etc and try to get a real project going.



This is phase 3.

Spoiler: Screenshots, rather big (click to show/hide)

Download: http://www.mediafire.com/?8pf589ca3a66k31 (demo 2.3)


This is my project of the last 6 months or so. Motivated, of course, by lovable equines of multiple varieties and colors. Several hundred hours of work with 5-20 minutes of gameplay to show for it (depending on how much you die to the extra bosses), but that's what you get when you don't use normal game engines. On the flip side, I can do pretty much anything I want.

Yes, the graphics suck. I'm not too much of a visual artist. This is primarily a gameplay demo. I'm hoping to get some real spriters later.



Included:
- Ponies. Lots of ponies. Expect the theme of the show; no death here, just stuff knocked out with stars floating over their head. Weapons are hair ornaments and dresses. Armor is stuff like scarves.
- Short tutorial explaining my battle system. It's my take on the ATB battle system seen in final fantasy 4-9. Expect the highest similarity to FF6.
- Battle system is 100% real time. There are no in-battle cinematics. Menus are largely eliminated from battles, too; you'll never press more than 2 buttons to select an ability.
- No magic points. Instead, there's a resource called "AP" for casting strong offensive attacks; all support abilities (defending, healing, etc) GIVE you AP instead of taking it away. This is to encourage a "parry-riposte" type gameplay as you react to incoming attacks. The better you defend yourself, the better attacks you can unleash.
- Minor weapon/armor customization in the form of gem slots. These give you bonus elemental or status damage or resistance, depending if placed on a weapon or armor.
- 3 bosses, ranging from "easy," "hard," to "I somewhat doubt you'll beat it."
- Various menus you take for granted in JRPGs implemented, from items to shops to conversations. I mention this because menus are friggin' annoying to make, and JRPGs have tons of them.



Again, this is primarily a gameplay demo. I'd love feedback most of all on that, along with any bugs. The graphics suck, I know, and the sound has issues (music repeating, for example).

If you want to try it out (it's only 30 mb and not very long, unless you want to try and beat the extra bosses), I'd love to hear what you think about, well, anything. Please do NOT hold back any criticisms, complaints, or ideas. Being "nice" and sugarcoating this is far from actually being nice. Vitriol filled criticism that explains "why" is FAR more constructive than polite words of encouragement or whatever (though that's still nice, heh).


So yeah, ponies. In RPG form. Tell me what you think I can do to make it the most attractive to get some spriters/etc, so I can finish this under a year.

[Dsarker]

I'm posting just to watch, for now.

[Trapezohedron]

I'm also posting to watch and see how this develops. I'm interested in this.

Also, the fonts on the RPG menus somewhat resemble Comic Sans, and that can't be a good thing. Would be better if the fonts were set to something less "curvy".

[kaijyuu]

Re: Font.

That's the second complaint I've gotten for it, heh. I actually went for curvy; but I'm definitely open to suggestions. Any free TTF can easily be implemented.

[Dsarker]

Caslon Antique.

[Vector]

All right, so I've been playing this some.

1. The battle speed is way too fast at first.  We need more time to get used to the menus and control scheme.  It's fine if you generally want to have fights at this speed, but it was genuinely annoying to get a hang onto.  Also, you need better tuning for the healing/fighting ratio.  If you want it buff/support-heavy, that's fine, but I felt like most of my moves did nothing and were just futile attempts to stop a tide of insect bites.

2. You need an explanation in here on how we gain AP, and the numbers for the gauge need to be bigger.

3. Whoever the yellow horse is that explains your abilities, you need to make it so that we choose whose abilities to see individually.  The explanation is too long to get an easy grasp on.  It'd also be easier if you had a diagram showing which button alignment you press to get to what thingus.

4. Seriously, you need a way for us to look in the home menu for the abilities we've gotten thus far.  When we get something new and cool, we aren't going to be going "hey, let's track back to orange chicko!"  We want to know what it is immediately.

5.

Spoiler: ??? (click to show/hide)

Note not only ponies in triplicate, but that you should have an owned/equipped ratio--it says I don't have any dream scarves, but I do have one equipped to the dark purple one.

6. It'd be helpful to have some sort of "end of battle summary screen compilation," rather than the slowly scrolling dealio, so that we can get the picture all at once without having to wait.

7. Total agreement on the font, bro.

8. When I try to set flame shards to both accessory and trinket, I'm unable to do the change simultaneously.

9. Some way to switch between ponies within the item and status submenus would be great.

10. Still, this was pretty fun.  Thank you.

[kaijyuu]

Vector played my game?! *squee*

1. Right right. I've been progressively slowing it down since I first made it. First, everyone had turns every 4 seconds or so, with enemies every 8; now it's up to around 6 and 11 (though bosses are less). It's difficult to show just how the game works with so little time, though; I don't want it to start boring and get interesting later. Perhaps I'm erring too far on the side of making sure it's fast paced and not spam attack.

I'm getting quite a bit of feedback similar to this, so yes, expect it to be slowed down and made easier for the start. Not doing so for the showoff bosses, but they won't be in the final game anyway; they're just there to show off the complexity my engine is capable of.

2. That's the first part of the tutorial, with the bite, heal, and fireball being enforced. It's to show you how AP works. If it's not clear, I'll see what I can do about explaining it better.

3. Oh that. I'll be getting rid of her in the end in favor of a skills menu that lets you rearrange your abilities and see descriptions (so if you don't like the default positions you can change to something else). Wasn't high on my priority list though, hence the long, long conversation menu.

4. See 3.

5. There are 6 playable characters, but 2 aren't implemented yet. I might just make quickie portraits for them so that doesn't look weird.

6. There isn't much to say except experience and bits gained. The money spider and 9-10 level ups will NOT be normal, obviously. Still, will take it into consideration; I like my scrolling menu but I obviously shouldn't stick to it if something else is better.

7. Yep. I need something bold and readable for those menus, though; I'm thinking something sans-serif. I chose the curvy font probably due to subconscious feminine curves, but I might go for something more blocky.

8. Doing simultaneously might be more trouble to implement than it's worth. They do different things in the accessory and trinket, after all. Ideally you'll be setting only a few at a time anyway; those are my "filler" items for item boxes and stuff, since consumables do not exist. You won't gain more than 4-5 flame shards, for example, in the final game unless you buy a lot.

9. Left/right shoulder buttons works in both situations, if you're using the gamepad setup. Left/right arrow buttons works for status menu... for the item menu, hover over their portrait on the left and use the arrow buttons. Not ideal but I'm out of buttons for the keyboard setup.

10. Thank you so much for trying it and the feedback. Massively helpful.

[LordBucket]

First impressions

1) Would like to be able to use both arrow keys and numeric keypad for direction.

2) Twilight needs a walking animation.

3) PLEASE get rid of the letter-by-letter text delay and slow scrolling battle text. It adds nothing but compell us to wait.

4) I dislike the gamepad controls. It's unintuitive to be shown control in the lower right saying to press X, Y , A and B to do things when I've selected other keys. I'm doing the tutorial now, and it says to press bright yellow circle letter B to attack. So basically I press through the keys I assigned to figure out which one is B. I selected a start key, but that start key can't be used to select the "start a new game" option on the opening menu. It's possible all of this is standard convention for console games...but I'm playing on a PC.

5) (Lengthy rant deleted) The combat interface is not unintuitive and seems to add unnecessary keypresses. Also, the keys to do similar things appear to be different for different characters for no obvious reason. The key I press combined with an arrow key to get Twilight to throw a fireball is different than the key I press combined with an arrow key to get Applejack to throw apples.

6) The tutorial gets stuck if you attack yourself to death.

7) Finished initial combat tutorial, teleported right, and in the next fight for some reason 3/4 of my party couldn't do anything other than regular attack. All the strange arrow key + button moves didn't work anymore.


Would like to give you more, but the interface...it is painful.

[kaijyuu]

1. Hrm... multiple keys for the same buttons? Not sure. I could do it, just dunno how worth it it'd be.

2. Yep.

3. First part is on my to-do list, battle text has been sped up already since the demo you're playing. For battle text specifically, it's rarely important and can be ignored, save the places where bosses are telephoning you their attacks and the tutorial.

4. Yeah my initial design was for a controller, obviously. I let you decide which buttons are which so as to try and alleviate some of the pain of using a keyboard. It's true that you might press buttons at random to assign your keys and then not remember, but I dunno how I could fix that. A new graphic for each individual keyboard key, rather than the controller equivalents, maybe? Possibly when I get some people making art assets.
Re: Start button. Can do. It's "pause" pretty much everywhere else but for the title screen it can work. Although... I thought we'd moved past "start" starting the game since the NES

5. Don't be afraid to hit me with lengthy rants, by the way. I'm not hypersensitive.

Please do explain what's adding unnecessary key presses. After all, the point is to eliminate as many as possible. If you've got ideas to remove chokepoints, then I'd love to hear them!

I'm thinking of making the ability defaults more consistent, but you'll be able to move around your abilities by the next demo too (which will be the one I'm showing off to the pony community at large, taking into account all this feedback).

6. Added to bug list.

7. Wacky. AP is reset at the start of battle, along with hitpoints and everything, so maybe you didn't have enough of that to cast fireballs/etc? Healing/support should've worked, though.

Getting the interface as smooth as possible is highly important to me, so yeah, no holding back on criticisms there

[LordBucket]

1. Hrm... multiple keys for the same buttons? Not sure. I could do it,
just dunno how worth it it'd be.

Computer keyboards have two sets of arrow keys. It's common practice for both of them to be functional in a game.

Please do explain what's adding unnecessary key presses.

1) Having to scroll through party members via up and down
2) Needing to press left/right arrow + a button to activate abilities.

For example, if Rainbow Dash is selected and I want Twilight to Heal Rarity, here's the sequence

1) up arrow to select Applejack
2) up arrow to select Twilight
3) right arrow to make the B button become heal instead of melee attack
4) B to actually do the heal
5) down arrow to select Applejack
6) down arrow to select Rainbow Dash
7) down arrow to select Rarity
B again to target the heal

That's 8 keypresses. You can reduce it to six if you press up arrow from Twilight to wrap to the bottom, but that's subject to change. The demo only has 4 ponies in the party. With all 6 of the mane cast, the number of keypresses goes up. As is, we routinely have to press multiple arrow keys just to change the currently selected pony. With a full mane cast of 6 ponies...that's going to become as many as 3 keypresses even with screen wrapping.

And worse, the number of keypresses varies based on the state of each pony. If Applejack is unconscious, then if Dash is selected and you want to act with Twilight, you only need to press up once because it skips the unconscious Applejack. But then once you select heal, if you want to heal Dash instead of Applejack, you have to press down twice because it doesn't skip over Applejack. Having the number of keypresses required to select ponies vary depending on party state means the player has to sit and watch the screen to see who's selected rather than simply pressing a consistent set of keys to do what they want.

Also, it's very strange that right arrow + Y = heal, and left arrow + B = fireball, but right arrow + B and left arrow + Y do nothing. Why? Wouldn't it be simpler to simply have a "select' button? And have that same select button activate the selected ability?

Also, keymapping is nice...but if the player has mapped nonstandard keys the display should reflect that. It's bizarre to have the game constantly telling me to press B to do something when I have it mapped to something else. The ABXY keys are not positioned conveniently close to each other on a keyboard. Nobody is likely to want to use those keys.

If you've got ideas to remove chokepoints, then I'd love to hear them!

1) Add targetting/selecting shortcuts for party members. For example, F1-F6.
2) Remove the interface concept of navigating via arrow keys to select ponies
3) Assign keys to abilities. For example, 1=direct damage 2=support ability 3=AoE 4=Defense ability, etc.
4) Remove unneeded keypresses when there is no choice. For example, at present, it's necessary to press a button to target Applejacks heal all ability, even though the user isn't actually selecting anything. They're just pushing an extra button for no reason. Similarly, if there were a "damage all enemies" ability, there should be no need to press a key to target after activatign that ability.

So, let's now imagine the above scenario with these four changes. If you want Twilight to heal Rarity, the sequence would be simply:

F1 to select Twilight
2 to activate heal
F4 to target Rarity

Done. Three keypresses instead of 8. And it's still only three keypresses, and the same keypresses regardless of how many ponies in the party, and how many are still standing, since there's no need to scroll over ponies and visually watch the screen to see if you're skipping over unconscious ponies. And in the case of Applejack, since her heal affects the entire party, it would only require two keypresses since no targeting would be necessary.

Also, given #3, this would also overcome the current limitation of only two abilities per pony, via left and right. 1-9,0,-,= would easily allow 12 abilities per pony. You probably don't need that many. But two seems insufficient.

feedback

Related: there needs to be a cancel/backup button. If I accidentally select heal with Twilight when I wanted to cast fireball, I should be able to cancel it rather than being forced to cast the heal anyway. I recommend escape.

Related suggestion: rather than having a box form around the selected pony, change the lower right "ABXY" section into a character portrait of the current selected pony. If no pony is selected, have it list some common keyboard shortcuts. Once a function key is pressed, that section changes to a character portrait, and the middle section that lists health and AP changes to show more detailed information for the selected pony, such as their health, status effect, available abilities and related costs and activation keys.

So...from default screen, I press F1. Twilight is now selected, I see her character portrait and abilities. I press 2 to cast heal, and get some sort of visual confirmation that targetting is pending. I press escape, and heal is no longer pending. I press 1 for fireball, and a targetting cursor comes up onthe parasprites. I press escape, and it goes away. I press escape one more time, and Twilight is no longer selected, and my information screen again shows HP/AP for all ponies.

Of course, ideally all of this would be mappable. I can easily imagine someone wanting to target with left hand but select abilities with right hand, for example.

7. Wacky. AP is reset at the start of battle, along with hitpoints and everything, so maybe you didn't have enough of that to cast fireballs/etc? Healing/support should've worked, though.

Not sure what was going on, but when I loaded up the game again after posting, the keyboard was totally unresponsive and I had to manually close the game. A stderr file was generated but empty. Started game again, same result. Deleted folder and recreated from zip file, and it worked fine again up to that same point. So, clearly more going on than simply interface weirdness. Hopefully this is not some bizarre windows-related SDL issue that only happens on some versions of windows. I've seen those before with other games.

[kaijyuu]

Ho boy.

I could add a dozen keybinds. I could add a dozen more hotkeys. I could even make the mouse used for targeting, to eliminate the select menu entirely. But if I do that... at what point did the game stop being a JRPG and start being a movement-less RTS?

Everything you suggested fits with my stated criteria: speed. However, I do value simplicity too. Having a million buttons lets you do anything you want with the flick of a finger, yes, but it's extremely convoluted and not at all intuitive. I hate RTS interfaces for that very reason; they let crazy people push triple digit APM, but memorizing what each button does takes time. I want something pick up and play. I would sooner make the game easier than give you the interface for (and thus expect) reaction times under a second in any situation. I want to pressure the player, yes, but not so much that they're screaming at the interface for not being fast enough for them. If it's unreasonable to throw up a reflect spell before meteor hits you, I'll make meteor take longer to cast.


That said, I'm all for removing clunkiness. Using the arrow keys to switch between the battle menus is clunky to me, because you have to release the key and press it again to change your selection (left/right will be used far more often than up/down for enemy selection, too). As such, I'm considering giving a keyboard setup that gives you 12 buttons instead of 4, so you can select any ability without going between menus. I'm hesitant though, because 12 abilities is quite a lot: both to display on the screen at once in my already too big HUD, and to gain the muscle memory to use. Alternatively, I could have modifiers; alt might switch to the offensive menu, and shift to the support menu (that would be identical to the gamepad setup only different keys... in fact you can do exactly that right now by selecting the gamepad setup and pressing keyboard keys).


Regardless of what I do, I need the default, suggested setup to make sense to someone who's gaming experience is limited to angry birds. Giving a quick interface on top of that is the challenge.

Related: there needs to be a cancel/backup button. If I accidentally select heal with Twilight when I wanted to cast fireball, I should be able to cancel it rather than being forced to cast the heal anyway. I recommend escape.

Any other button cancels. Since fireball is normally Y, pressing B, X, or A would cancel. I dunno how intuitive this is; someone else suggested making B be confirm instead of the same button you pressed to select the ability (and thus X Y and A would be cancel), but it's a wash to me which makes more sense.

Related suggestion: rather than having a box form around the selected pony, change the lower right "ABXY" section into a character portrait of the current selected pony.

The colored bar across health/etc is meant to show you which pony is currently active without having to look over to the side, though stuff on the ability menu wouldn't hurt either. I dunno how much crap I want to shove on that menu though; the text is already rather small, and making room for more stuff would just make it smaller. Besides, I expect people to gain muscle memory eventually and stop looking at it. That's why it's off to the side in the first place, and health/ap/currently active character is in the middle.

Not sure what was going on, but when I loaded up the game again after posting, the keyboard was totally unresponsive and I had to manually close the game. A stderr file was generated but empty. Started game again, same result. Deleted folder and recreated from zip file, and it works fine now. So, clearly more was goign on than simply interface weirdness.

Well it totally doesn't make sense to me. Were you using a gamepad or joystick? Those getting confused seems possible; SDL sucks at handling gamepads.

Deleting keysettings.sav from the saves folder would've fixed it, I'm pretty sure. Something there went wacko.

[LordBucket]

I could add a dozen keybinds. I could add a dozen more hotkeys.
I could even make the mouse used for targeting, to eliminate the
select menu entirely. But if I do that... at what point did the
game stop being a JRPG and start being a movement-less RTS?

Several responses:

1) What's your design goal? Is deliberately mimicking a console based JRPG of any particular value? This isn't a console game. It doesn't need to resemble one.

2) Mouse targetting is an option...but I would recommend making it an option, along side the keyboard controls, rather than the only way to target.

3) Combat does not need to be real time. You could make it turn based instead. Personally I don't feel anything is especially added to the game by alternating between a frantic rush to use AP and sitting there waiting for it be to available.

I do value simplicity too. Having a million buttons lets you do
anything you want with the flick of a finger, yes, but it's
extremely convoluted and not at all intuitive.

Multiple keypress combinations like left arrow + letter to activate abilities are not exactly intuitive either. Especially when arrow keys without letters do something entirely different (change active character) and letter keys without arrows do something else too (attack.)

"Function keys target ponies"
"Numbers activate abilities"
"Escape to cancel"

Is far more simple. It's not like you're having to actually separately memorize all those keys:  F1, F2, F3, F4 etc. "Function keys target ponies" is pretty easy to remember, and visually on the screen it will be apparent which which function key corresponds to which pony.

As for abilities, using Twilight as an example,  you have attack, fireball and heal. So:

1,2,3 = attack,fireball,heal

or

b=attack
left arrow + b = fireball
right arrow + y = heal

Which is easier? Personally, I think 1,2,3 is easier. Further, consider what happens if you add more abilities. With my control scheme, if you add more abilities, the rules stay the same: "numbers activate abilities." How do you add more abilities to your control scheme? What happens if a few months down the road you want 5 or 6 abilities per pony? Up and down are already reserved for navigation. So...what, do you go to multiple arrow presses to scroll through abilities? Left arrow + B = fireball, left arrow + left arrow + b = barrier shield? Or do you start using the other three of four buttons? So, left arrow + b = fireball, but left arrow + x = barrier shield? At that point, you've lost any semblence of the simplicity you're aiming for. Single keypress, "numbers activate abilities" is way more simple than any of this 'multiple keypress, cycle through menus, compact everything into four buttons" scheme that you're using.

EDIT: Played through again, and I now realize that's exactly what you're doing. I may not be your intended audience, but player feedback from me personally is: "yeah, I don't like that." You appear to be trying to force a console control scheme onto a computer keyboard, and the result feels about the same as if you were to try to force a car gas pedal style control scheme onto a telephone. Sure, you could hold down the number 1 for 3 seconds to mimic the effect of pressing a 3, hold it down for 4 seconds to enter a 4, etc. But you have buttons for 1-9. You may as well use them. It seems silly to suggest that it's "too complicated" to have "memorize" all 9 of those buttons, or that it's somehow "easier" to only ever have to press the number 1 for varying lengths of time to input different numbers.

Also, keep in mind that the control scheme I'm proposed is totally standard to a lot of games. Function keys to target party members, numbers to activate abilities is exactly the control scheme used in world of warcraft and quite a few other MMOs. Escape to cancel or back up to previous menu is used in just about every computer game made in the past 15 years. And not just computer games. It's a windows standard convention. For example, right now in your browser click on the file menu. Now press escape. It cancels the menu selection.

Using standard controls will mean instant familiarity to a large portion of your audience.

My best guess is that you're trying to present a control scheme that will be famliiar to the console gaming audience. But...computers aren't consoles. Most of us don't have gamepads. We use keyboards. Like I said in my last post, look at your keyboard at where ABXY are. There's absolutely nothing intuitive or memorable about those keys on a keyboard, and they're not physically located anywhere that makes them stand out. Trying to use gaming console conventions on physically different input device doesn't make sense.

I need the default, suggested setup to make sense to
someone who's gaming experience is limited to angry birds.

Why? What's your design goal here? I would assume that anyone sufficiently computer savvy as to be able to download and unzip your game in the first place is probably not going to be intimidated by using an extra half dozen keyboard keys while playing.

because 12 abilities is quite a lot

Simple solution: don't throw them at the player all at once. Characters learn new abilities as they advance through the game.

both to display on the screen at once in my already too big HUD, and to gain the muscle memory to use.
Alternatively, I could have modifiers; alt might switch to the offensive menu, and shift to the support menu

I just don't understand why you seem to think that hiding commands on separate menus and requiring multiple keypresses to activate abilities is "simpler" than simply putting them on the screen and assigning keys to abilities.

There's plenty of room on the HUD to fit more text. Copy and pasting even just the ABXY box on the lower right into windows paintbrush, I'm able to fit 2 colums of 6 abilities each using a 10 point font, with comfortable border space. And if you do what I suggested, use that space for a visually pleasing character portrait and the middle portion fo the HUD for character status and abiltiies, there'd be even more room. And by doing it that way you avoid the visual clutter of having a huge wall of text in the lower right all the time.

Any other button cancels. Since fireball is normally Y, pressing B, X, or A would cancel. I dunno how intuitive this is; someone else suggested making B be confirm instead of the same button you pressed to select the ability (and thus X Y and A would be cancel), but it's a wash to me which makes more sense.

The primary problem with that is that which buttons cancel change depending on which ability you're using. When casting heal, you use B, so Y will cancel. When casting fireball, you use Y, so B will cancel.

If you're going for intuitive, this is not the way to do it.

Well it totally doesn't make sense to me. Were you using a gamepad or joystick? Those getting confused seems possible; SDL sucks at handling gamepads.

No. Using a keyboard. Tried again, and this time, everybody except Rainbow Dash was able to use abilities. Not really sure what's going on.



Also, new bug: if a healer begins casting a heal, but is knocked unconscious before targeting it, they're still allowed to cast the spell despite being unconscious. I was able to have Rarity bring herself back from unconsciousness in this way. Did not test extensively, but I would guess that probably any ability can be used in this way.

[kaijyuu]

Submitted to ED, and made a ponychan thread.

/cross fingers



Also new demo up top, if the difficulty got you down. Showoff bosses fail at showing off if they can't be beaten by most people, after all. Also a bunch of bugs fixed, new font, skills menu instead of carrot top's humungous dialog (now she's a general tutorial NPC), and other stuff. Perhaps not worth downloading unless you want to see the bosses, but yeah.

[klingon13524]

Needs to be about 19% cooler
Change the font. Also, get an AAA budget.

[kaijyuu]

Needs to be about 19% cooler

More like 21%.

Change the font.

Suggestions welcome. Also, tell me WHICH font; there's 4 now.

Also, get an AAA budget.

Get me a contract with Hasbro and a game development studio, and sure.

I hope to make due with a team of obsessive fanboys.