About

Hi. Among other happenings (I’m slowly but surely going through all the cities and finishing them), we now have a Kickstarter page. I hope that we meet our goal, but if we don’t, we appreciate the support of every backer, no matter how much they gave. If we exceed the goal, we’ll issue quality physical rewards (soundtracks and disc copies of the game). These will be well-designed; no CD-Rs here!

I’ll keep you posted on our progress.

So, you may or may not know, but there’s a system in Alcarys Complex called the banter system. It allows any NPC or character to talk, in real time, without restricting the movement of the party like a cutscene would. If a banter box is interrupted for some reason – going into a menu, moving from map-to-map – it regenerates after the interruption so that the player can read it. The overall design goal of this system is to allow the story and narrative to pervade the entire game, rather than just set cutscenes.

The banter system was designed to communicate passive information, and one of the best forms of passive information is the radio. Since NPCs can spit banter, you can extend a Radio object from an NPC and it’ll spit banter too.

Naturally, when you have radio, you need radio content, so I started listening to radio serials and dramas in order to get an inspiration.

When I started doing this, I knew next to nothing about shows like Suspense, X Minus One, and This is Your F.B.I. As I got a feel for the shows I liked and the ones I didn’t, I started to notice some things.

I’d had a few template titles and rough concepts in mind for the kind of radio content I wanted. Talk radio was a given. I knew I wanted some kind of propaganda broadcast by Xirdalan State Radio, but I didn’t know how to go about it. I knew I wanted science fiction, so I made up Star Willows: Galactic Adventurer, and I threw in an idea that was too hilarious to pass up, The Intrepid Dr. Cuckold, about a master doctor who works way too much for his own good.

The funny thing is, I’d assumed that central characters were the norm, because I grew up watching television, and more often than not, the same characters show up again and again. I was really surprised to find out that drama serials with a strong central character are actually in the minority, outnumbered by self-contained plays often adapted from short stories (in fact, a lot of Bradbury, Heinlein, and Asimov’s stories were adapted for the various science fiction programs). There are quite a few dramas that rely on characters, like Lone Ranger, Sherlock Holmes, and Dragnet, but there are about as many that are completely self-contained.

Anyway, I’d written in some base advertising as well, but I generally had no idea what I was going to do with that aspect of the radio. So I listened. And I heard the sponsors: Roma Wine, Signal Gasoline, Auto-Lite Batteries, and so on. Old radio dramas weren’t shy about inviting the guest actors to sit in a comfy chair and sip some of the sponsor’s wine while telling everyone how good it was.

It’s not much, but I think it adds to the game, if only in a small capacity.

Major updates:

• I implemented the final version of the code that’s going to handle window mode, aspect ratio, and scaling. You can scale the game window up to three times the original resolution (for a total resolution of 2400×1440) if you have the display width for it.
• I’ve also fixed most of the crazy errors that occurred when a player decides to use any mode but windowed mode. There are still a few left that I have to hammer out, but for the most part, it works.
• I’ve started locking scenes. When I lock an aspect of the game, like a scene, or a town, or a game mechanic, it means I’m not going to touch it at all until the bugtesting period.

Raw devlog data below.

Continue reading Progress Report (15 – 22 February)

You know, I kind of like debugging. Sure, it’s a pain in the ass sometimes, but every bug killed is an inch closer to a finished game. And sometimes, you get little treats, like a bug report of the IGF demo (PDF) submitted by a graphic designer friend of mine who was “really bored at work.”

I went ahead and addressed the ones I could, and I ended up snagging seven: five were new and two were ones I’d addressed in the last couple of weeks. I consider it a warm-up, since I haven’t actually worked on the coding aspect of the game in about two or three weeks due to administrative stuff.

Also, in the process of fixing these bugs, I re-propagated the IGF scenario files and added a few things that have been worked into the design in the two months since the last build, including an edit to the Node system that allows you to bind unlearned nodes to slots. This is how you’ll unlock new skills in Alcarys Complex. The best part? You’ve already equipped the node so once you’ve learned it, there is absolutely zero time between skill unlock and skill use.

Anyway, I’ll let you know when the demo’s been updated.

2011 at a glance!

The main theme for Alcarys Complex this year? Even more polishing of already implemented features, plus a few that will really help round this game out and make it stand out from the JRPG crop.

As was the case last year, the vast majority of programming, design, environment, and character design is complete, along with a respectable portion of music and sound effects. What’s next?

We’re going to dedicate the first half of 2012 to finishing this game, including meeting completion goals and conducting quality assurance. There are a few issues we need to resolve before this can happen, but I’m sure we can do it. When we resolve these issues, we’ll let you know here. Thanks for reading.

After the cut is an approximate timeline of features.

Continue reading Alcarys Complex 2011 Wrap-Up