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0.3 is live!!! Update 20 January 2018
8 years ago
General
Phase Three is up! You can get it here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1C.....lBHqqLsOUhcieD
To anybody who downloaded 0.3.0 (all 1 of you), performance might be inexplicably bad. This was due to a known issue with GMS, which I've been able to work around and it should be fixed in 0.3.1, so if you have issues, try re-downloading.
I wanted to avoid talking about a lot of my game design decisions until some public version of the game is available. There are still a couple of specific ones I think work best if the player doesn't see them coming, but now that it's out I'll talk about some other stuff.
My biggest inspiration is Merlin's Revenge -- an old trilogy of action-RPGs from which I basically borrowed the central combat mechanics. While the other weapons are all more or less original and have different inspirations, the Orb and Toxicity Star are basically clones of MR's Energy Blast and Energy Pulse respectively. Unfortunately, because they run on the ancient Shockwave platform, the MR games are pretty much unplayable on Windows 10.
Another inspiration is Undertale. I'm not interested in replicating its meta self-referential outside-its-own-box-ness or its message or even its approach to player choice. There was one other thing it did very well: it constantly changes things up, all the time, so that one runs into interesting new encounters all the time. It also uses a mix of hardcoded and random encounters. I take the same approach in Misery of Magic. There are a lot of enemies -- over 40 types -- many of which only appear once. That keeps it a lot more intereting than reusing the same ones over and over. Then, I've got occasional puzzles as well to break up the game.
Then there's Lunar Shadow. It's a Cave Story mod made by the excellent Kim Tyranto which does a lot of things very right and which I highly recommend. It has this great writing style which has a balance of silly and serious and it's full of weird and whimsical things, which make Tirahnys seem like an interesting place with lots of stuff going on. I tried to do something similar, but I don't think I did it as well.
My approach to storytelling has three key ideas: Keep the player in control as much as possible, player choice has to be done through the mechanics, and the story and world need to be explained organically and in small pieces. So, no cutscenes, no throwing the player into a menu when there is a decision to be made, and no unjustifiable or excessively large exposition dumps. Instead, when you decide to do something relevant to the story, you're doing it yourself in real time. You get out-of-context pieces of the universe explained just by looking around and interacting with objects and other characters. While Emerald is, to some extent, an empty shell one can project oneself onto, at the same time he knows things, mostly background lore, that the player doesn't.
So yeah. Just wanted to talk about some of this stuff.
To anybody who downloaded 0.3.0 (all 1 of you), performance might be inexplicably bad. This was due to a known issue with GMS, which I've been able to work around and it should be fixed in 0.3.1, so if you have issues, try re-downloading.
I wanted to avoid talking about a lot of my game design decisions until some public version of the game is available. There are still a couple of specific ones I think work best if the player doesn't see them coming, but now that it's out I'll talk about some other stuff.
My biggest inspiration is Merlin's Revenge -- an old trilogy of action-RPGs from which I basically borrowed the central combat mechanics. While the other weapons are all more or less original and have different inspirations, the Orb and Toxicity Star are basically clones of MR's Energy Blast and Energy Pulse respectively. Unfortunately, because they run on the ancient Shockwave platform, the MR games are pretty much unplayable on Windows 10.
Another inspiration is Undertale. I'm not interested in replicating its meta self-referential outside-its-own-box-ness or its message or even its approach to player choice. There was one other thing it did very well: it constantly changes things up, all the time, so that one runs into interesting new encounters all the time. It also uses a mix of hardcoded and random encounters. I take the same approach in Misery of Magic. There are a lot of enemies -- over 40 types -- many of which only appear once. That keeps it a lot more intereting than reusing the same ones over and over. Then, I've got occasional puzzles as well to break up the game.
Then there's Lunar Shadow. It's a Cave Story mod made by the excellent Kim Tyranto which does a lot of things very right and which I highly recommend. It has this great writing style which has a balance of silly and serious and it's full of weird and whimsical things, which make Tirahnys seem like an interesting place with lots of stuff going on. I tried to do something similar, but I don't think I did it as well.
My approach to storytelling has three key ideas: Keep the player in control as much as possible, player choice has to be done through the mechanics, and the story and world need to be explained organically and in small pieces. So, no cutscenes, no throwing the player into a menu when there is a decision to be made, and no unjustifiable or excessively large exposition dumps. Instead, when you decide to do something relevant to the story, you're doing it yourself in real time. You get out-of-context pieces of the universe explained just by looking around and interacting with objects and other characters. While Emerald is, to some extent, an empty shell one can project oneself onto, at the same time he knows things, mostly background lore, that the player doesn't.
So yeah. Just wanted to talk about some of this stuff.
