ID:83648
 
Sup? Decided a few days ago to start work on a new, or old project.
Generiquest to be specific.

And it is going through a fair lot of changes.
The major change is the code looks better, and is more organized. Might not seem like a major change, but when you're sifting through tens of thousands of lines of code spread over hundreds of files, it can be pretty hard to find anything. Which in turn makes working on the game really hard to do.

Other major changes include...

All maps are to some degree redesigned. Some are fairly similar, but more interesting, others are completely different and you probably would not recognize them.



Here is an example. It is the new town map.
The town is the relatively small top left section of the map. It has everything it previously had, but looks better and is more compact.
It also has a few new stuff, a castle like building which is a school (and place to get quests), farm land to the south and a graveyard in the middle. But everything else is more or less in the same place.
(Blank areas on the map are blank because players cannot access or see them, no point in mapping an inaccessible area)



That is what it looks like in game.


The next major update is quests. There will now be two types of quest.
The first type is usually related to a specific character or dungeon, and usually has some sort of (rubbish) storyline behind it. These ones are generally harder to do, but give better rewards.
The second type is called a task. Tasks are basic no nonsense quests, collect items, kill monsters, kill a boss and so on. They have no storyline behind them, and exist purely as a source of extra income/exp. All dungeons have 6 tasks (2 of each kind), and the bosses you have to kill for each task are unique to the task.

The quest log also looks much better, as seen below.




The next major update is with the general content of quests and dungeons themselves.
It should all be more fleshed out, more balanced and more fun to play.
Enemies (and bosses in particular) will be smarter, and more challenging to defeat.
Quests may provide more rewards than exp/money, such as access to new areas of a dungeon, or special ingame features.


The next thing to change is items and equipment.
All equipment will now have a minimum level requirement to be used (as people were previously abusing the no level restriction by giving their low level characters strong equipment).
Additionally, all items now have a "rarity" rating. Which is just a general indication of how rare it is.
Common items have a white name.
Uncommon items have a cyan name.
Rare items have a magenta name.
Epic items have an orange name.
Artifact items have a green name.

As seen below...



Item rarity obviously determines how rare it is, but it also determines roughly how powerful it is. Rare items are generally more powerful than Uncommon items of a similar level.


In addition to this, all store bought equipment (and some equipment gained from quests or dropped off of monsters) can be upgraded.
The upgrading process is simple enough. You take item, choose what to upgrade it too, then pay some money, and items to upgrade it.
To facilitate this, pretty much every enemy in the game will drop new items. Humans will drop stuff like metals or fabrics, animals will drop animal teeth, claws, horns and so on. Some will be rarer than others.

You can see the item upgrade window below.



As you probably noticed. All equipment will have multiple upgrade routes.
The most basic route is upgrading it to the next best of it's kind. IE, upgrading a Longsword to a Scimitar, there is nothing special about this, but it is cheaper than buying a new Scimitar from a shop.
The other route first involved reinforcing the weapon. A longsword becomes a reinforced longsword. Doing this opens up access to an entirely different selection of upgrades.
A reinforced longsword can be upgraded to an Orcish Sword (+str bonus), or a Military Sword (+bonus damage to human enemies).
An Orcish Sword can be further upgraded to a Warlords Sword (a high +str bonus).
A Military Sword can be upgraded to an Officers Sword (high +damage to humans) and then to a Heroes Sword (even higher damage to humans, and a small bonus to all stats).

The selection of 12 swords the shop sells can be upgraded to a total of 75 different weapons. (Only swords are finished at the moment, but other weapon types and armor will have similar routes they can be upgraded).



Those are pretty much all the planned stuff to be added at the moment, other than more of the game content finished (new skills for classes and so on).
I have no idea when these will be ready, but I expect sometime by the end of the month at the earliest.
Looks amazing so far, great job!
A question: do you make all the icons yourself?
Metamorphman wrote:
A question: do you make all the icons yourself?

Nope.
I'm not that good of an artist. I can draw stuff, but it's not that good and lacks any sort of style.

The tile set and character icons are mostly made by other people, for RPG Maker VX (but they are all designed for 32x32 tiles, so work perfectly with BYOND).
The item icons are some freeware icons designed for RPG use I found. (Though I did make a few, the longsword and Gladiators Blade for example)

I did the interface graphics, and a few others not included in those screenshots (attack animations and icons for special abilities).
But the majority of icons I am using are freeware icons from varying sources.
Ah, I see.
Nonetheless, I love the art. I also like how wide your game is in all aspects. Keep up the good work. :)
the biggest issues i had in the game were the balance and the HUGENESS of "small" map areas. i didn't like spending several minutes walking from store A to store B inside town

as such, the updates sound good, looking forward to it
Yeah, the graphics I am using for turfs are pretty hard to make good use of.
They are small, and most things have to be fairly compact to look decent. Hence the reason I am redesigning most maps.

As for balance. I do not think it was that bad before.
Admittedly, certain things and aspects of the game were not explained in great detail.

You complained about the following...

Class selections and combinations.
To be fair, there was no real bad combinations. Some more useful than others, but all have some use.
Also, the tutorial exists to test stuff out as well as to tell people generally how to play.

I will add more info on classes and their roles as you are selecting them however.


You also complained about the initial skill you get to pick in the tutorial. Which is to be honest a moot point.
The skills you pick in the tutorial are all useful and can be reset later on in the game.

The town as you can see is much smaller and more compact now.


As for your complaints about Necromancer and their summons.
There ability has 2 functions. Firstly, it can be used to summon a skeleton or zombie (picked at random). These are intentionally weak cannon fodder (while they are getting killed, you are not).
The second use is that it can reanimate any recently killed enemy (excluding bosses). These have the same stats as the killed enemy.

Also, at later levels, Necromancers can learn abilities to make these summons stronger, tougher, last longer and gain abilities. IE, you can force them to explode, dealing severe damage, among other stuff.
Also, the general nature of Necromancer summons is they are temporary and throw away. You're not suppose to maintain them, they are cannon fodder basically.
Hunters are the class that have a single, permenant summon that can be maintained.

As for your complaints about the level of difficulty.
I personally did not find it that hard when testing stuff, nor did a lot of other people.
Admittedly, the game did not have step by step instructions for everything (you could probably have walked into a dungeon much to high a level for you), and the level of difficulty was above average.
I actually had to buff some enemies and bosses multiple times because some people were killing them much too easily. This could have been because of them exploiting the no level restrictions on equipment, which will be fixed now.

The level of difficulty in the game will still be above average, but provided you do quests, you will get pointed in the general direction on where you should go next.
IE, one quest takes you to an NPC and once finished, that NPC sends you on tasks in the next area you should go to. Additionally, any task quests will send you to appropriate locations for your level. So it should now be more obvious where you should be at what level.

As for boss enemies. They in low level dungeons will now be unaccessible unless you have a quest to kill them first.
IE, one problem people had was the Giant Rat boss in the inn basement dungeon. As of now you will not be able to fight the Giant Rat boss unless you have a quest to kill it, and even then it requires an item (cheese) to summon the boss to fight it. (Any tasks that require you to kill a boss are the same, the boss cannot be summoned unless you have the appropriate task)
After a while bosses will still roam around though, and will still attempt to kill you on sight. But at this point pretty much all enemies in the dungeon will do this and you should have learned by then.
Also, any quest that involves a boss or is of higher difficulty will say next to it's recommended level "in a group" (IE, "Recommended Level: 3-5 in a group").

Most of the problems the game had will, or should be fixed (excluding possibly balance, which is hard to get right).
have you tried picking a necromancer, getting the DoT spell, and killing enemies your level with just that? have you really?

it sucks and is not fun, especially since there was no description of the spell provided when i was allowed to choose which to get. that's just dumb

i'm sure there are builds that completely own at everything and are OP, but that doesn't mean the one i went with is fine. (it SHOULD have been perfectly viable, considering YOU provided it without any description of the spells beforehand so i couldn't have any idea what i was getting myself into)
Zaole wrote:
have you tried picking a necromancer, getting the DoT spell, and killing enemies your level with just that? have you really?

it sucks and is not fun, especially since there was no description of the spell provided when i was allowed to choose which to get. that's just dumb

i'm sure there are builds that completely own at everything and are OP, but that doesn't mean the one i went with is fine. (it SHOULD have been perfectly viable, considering YOU provided it without any description of the spells beforehand so i couldn't have any idea what i was getting myself into)

I did, Necromancer was one of the first classes I added.
I could do the tutorial just fine with either of their skills. And that was before Rats were nerfed. (They use to be much stronger before)

As a general rule, I would always at least give everything a quick test with a variety of classes.
I was able to complete the tutorial with every class and every skill they could gain at that level. Admittedly, some were harder than others.

By level 2 you should have had a second skill. Which made rats at the least very easy to kill for any class.
And by level 3 rats should be next to no problem at all for any player due to new equipment being avaliable and another skill.

WoW rip. Just kidding, but come on, do you really need that many rarities of items? All you really need is common, uncommon, rare, special :\
DivineTraveller wrote:
WoW rip. Just kidding, but come on, do you really need that many rarities of items? All you really need is common, uncommon, rare, special :\

I'm only using one more than what you listed.
And the "Artifact" rare items are called that for a reason. They are the sort of items you will be lucky to even see.
You might get to use them as part of a quest or something, but may never actually own one.

As such, they are classed as a different rarity to normal items.
Me like maps. You should give your buildings some shadows, even if they're just very basic.

http://files.byondhome.com/Foomer/randomstuff/shadows.png
Foomer wrote:
Me like maps. You should give your buildings some shadows, even if they're just very basic.

http://files.byondhome.com/Foomer/randomstuff/shadows.png

Then to fit the theme everything needs shadows, so the mob itself...
Haywire wrote:
Foomer wrote:
Me like maps. You should give your buildings some shadows, even if they're just very basic.

http://files.byondhome.com/Foomer/randomstuff/shadows.png

Then to fit the theme everything needs shadows, so the mob itself...

Well, if you didn't notice, some things already have shadows, such as the trees and the fence, so it can't be anything but an improvement.

(But frankly I'm amazed you managed to scrounge up something negative to say about a simple suggestion.)
Adding shadows to stuff wont particularly be difficult, and that edit with shadows looks pretty good!

Anyway, I'll probably make a somewhat regular update report, just to keep me interested enough to do stuff.

At the moment I have finished...

The tutorial. It is entirely remade, is similar to what it use to be, but has better instructions and is easier to follow.

The first dungeon is entirely finished. Contains 5 quests, 6 tasks, 3 enemies and 1 boss.

The second dungeon is entirely finished. It contains 6 quests, 6 tasks, 3 enemies and 1 boss.

I have made a start on the third dungeon. At the moment the basic map is finished, and I have everything planned out for what I will add.
I intend on adding at least all the enemies (including bosses) by the end of today. And hopefully will have it finished by tomorrow, or Wednesday at the latest.
(I generally try to add a dungeon within 3 days. First day includes planning it and mapping it out, possible making a start on enemies to populate it, the second day I finish enemies and start quests, the final day I try to finish everything off)

I have made a start on finishing off any unfinished classes.
At the moment Rogue is now finished. (They use to have 8 skills, now they have 24).
This leaves 4 unfinished classes, but I plan on finishing the Elementalist class by Wednesday (they are missing 8 skills).
I will probably continue adding abilities for classes everyday after that, anywhere from 4-12 depending on my mood, but intend on having all classes finished by the end of next week.

As for equipment upgrades.
I have finished all 1 handed Swords. All Two Handed Swords, Katanas and Daggers have been planned out. But adding them is a fairly dull and laborious task, so I wont have them all finished anytime soon. But I intend on adding at least a few everyday.

I have yet to make a start on updating the help files the game includes. I'm not looking forwards to it, but I'll get it done before I release the game.
Incredible. Sometimes I wish I had your patience, then I could do something wonderful like this with the BYOND engine. Keep up the good work, I'll definitely be looking towards the final release.

Is there any particular reason why only seasoned, popular developers can use the high-quality, beautiful RPG Maker icons, or else they are called a variety of derogatory terms? That is one of the things about the BYOND RPG community that I will never understand.
he uses RPG maker icons because he is a programmer who has made a game but needs art, not someone who thinks copy pasting art from other sources is all that's needed to make his game good

hence, replace "popular" in your comment with "actual" in order to make it accurate
Zaole wrote:
he uses RPG maker icons because he is a programmer who has made a game but needs art, not someone who thinks copy pasting art from other sources is all that's needed to make his game good

hence, replace "popular" in your comment with "actual" in order to make it accurate

There was a variety of completely original(Minus the icons), very well coded, fun RPGs and various other games on BYOND two years or so ago that used RPG Maker icons, and they were all shunned to oblivion. Perfectly good developers, that only needed art for their games to make them complete, and every single day they were swarmed by idiots cursing them out for using RPG Maker icons. Unless, of course, that was a temporary thing.
Firstly, I have had several people in the past comment on me using RPG Maker graphics.

I use them for two reasons.
Firstly, I like the style, and the large variety there is to offer.
Secondly, I am not capable enough to draw my own graphics in the style I desire (in this case, a colourful, not serious style). Nor do I have the patience to draw the hundreds of graphics this project requires.

I need graphics, and they are the best choice at the moment.

Also, it should be noted. Not all of the graphics are RPG Maker graphics.
Some of the turfs and mobs are. But the majority of the graphics I am using are freeware graphics, made with a similar style and with the intention of being used with RPG Maker VX (but the makers of them do not say they have to be used with RPG Maker VX, and in some cases they even say they can be used however people want, even edited or used in a game that is sold).


Also, for the record. I do not have a great deal of patience at all.
I just had a horrible job at one point. When you're forced to do hard, manual labor for 12 hours for 4-5 days in a row, programming is not a matter of patience. It is a matter of "this is easy compared to my old job".
BYOND is full of people who have no life and loiter around online looking for things to complain about. You have to remember this. If there's anything negative that they can say without getting chewed out by people with more clout in the community than themselves, they'll say it.

Personally I don't care whether the graphics are original or not as long as they're used in style. Unless of course they're "borrowed" without permission from someone else's game.
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