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Hello,

After making a few posts in my previous topic for the Sword of Stone (a Game Gear game which development is complete), I decided to create a dedicated topic for my ongoing project.

This is a Master System game this time, so quite a bit more challenging ! I am still working with the same tools that work perfectly well, including devkitsms provided by sverx.

The game will not be your traditional RPG with stats, grinding etc... It will be instead story oriented, just like my previous game, but I will be getting a step closer to a more traditional formula. Even though grinding is something I will never put in my games lol.

You will play as Ashla, a young woman with purple hair (reason = that's because I was frustrated with my previous game and could not include purple anywhere). The setting will be futuristic and humanity will face challenges. Three different factions will emerge and soon in the game you will have the possibility to join any of these three, leading to an entirely different story line and progression.

Some places will be visited by all factions of course. Each will have good and bad endings. Once again, the progression will be guided by the skills you have, and it will be up to you to understand where you can go. This is a way to set the player on a right path without killing exploration, and something that is important to me.

The outside world will be a single map with scrolling (a novelty for me ! it was challenging to make work smoothly enough in C). Towns and dungeons will be fixed screens, in the same style as the Sword of Stone.

Battles will happen every time you change from a type of terrain to another : this is how I control progression. Some random encounters will happen on top of this. There will be a rudimentary inventory, simply to track key items and materials. I am not planing on equipment and complex management.

Battles will have a side view with some animation for the characters. Enemies will be fixed. They will not be your standard battles. Each enemy will have one to three weaknesses that you will have to hit in a single turn. Fail, and you are forced to escape and go back to the previous terrain. Or to exit the dungeon. There will probably be turns of rising difficulty for bosses and bigger enemies, everything is not set in stone yet.

Once again, I implemented Variable Width Font for the text, with two types of letters : discussion and narration. The book, which is the narrator, will always use the italic presentation with a beige color. The characters and NPCs will use the straight letters with a grey color. Speed is good enough on the real hardware and the text is nice on a CRT. Text and portraits are displayed on top the map : the VRAM is full.

I also implemented teleporting from the worldmap to the dungeons, so there is a good basis here. There are still a lot of things to do !

Capture3.PNG (225.1 KB)

worldmap

all_portraits_147.png (11.43 KB)

portraits

capture_174.png (40.22 KB)

battles_poc

Capture.png (105.28 KB)

text_characters

Capture2.png (123.49 KB)

text_narrator

Looks very interesting. I really like your art.

So, do you like purple? You is a space mutant. I will call Bart Simpson, LOL. Great graphics. Interesting plot. I dont liked a bit of battle_poc (capture 174.png) screen because it seems "simple" but i think yet is a preliminary scheme.

Thanks.

Battle visuals are not finalized yet indeed.

Hi, I am very interested! I like that purple. In my opinion, it would be very interesting to release your game with a language selection option with flags, like some later SMS games. I can help you with Spanish if you want.

Regards.

I think I've seen some of your work shared on Twitter, looks great!!

8BitBoy wrote

I think I've seen some of your work shared on Twitter, looks great!!

I don't have a twitter account so it must have been someone else !

Amazing! Fantastic!

You guys really make me happy with these things

Très prometteur et superbement bien réalisé. Bravo :)

Very promising and extremely well done. Bravo :)

Sharing a quick update after completing my first background and monster. Everything fits in memory, so that's good.

The monster will be fixed, the character will be animated when attacking. I have currently completed attack animations for 2 characters out of 7. This is taking quite a bit of memory, but there are several ways to gain space if it becomes a necessity.

I have also worked on the design of my towns. Here are some basic templates used to validate my work. I can now move on to creating the actual town maps.

Capture.PNG (103.75 KB)

battle_layout

Capture3.png (88.91 KB)

town1

Capture.PNG (70.69 KB)

town2

Capture2.png (47.82 KB)

town3

Oh, wow...

Hello,

Sharing a small update on my progress. Most of the battle logic has been coded. It will be a simple logic without stats etc... You simply have to hit the weaknesses of the enemies, and then you can progress. Each time you get a new character, a new weakness is unlocked. This process might lead to being unable to battle enemies once that the team becomes bigger, and is part of the fun of understanding where to go :)

Everything has been implemented in order to deal with the various teams you can have etc... I simply have to create the new enemies and backgrounds, there is still work to do on that part. Pixel-art takes a ton of time.

I completed 3 enemies and backgrounds. SFX have also been created and the characters animations are implemented as well. Two characters are completely drawn, so 5 remain. I have just started the third one. I also implemented a blinking effect on the enemy. With three parameters R / G / B I can pick which color to push to the max, so the enemies blink while keeping their actual gradients, which I think looks good.

And here are the three completed backgrounds and enemies :

Backgrounds are 7 colors so that's a bit challenging. Enemies use the remaining 9, and I can blink these specific 9 colors.

I still have months of drawing ahead of me before I can really dig into implementing town/dungeon maps and the story.

Hello everyone,

It has been 2 months and I thought I would share a few details in an update. I am actively working on the game of course, and many things have finally found their place in the overall game-design.

Battles have been fully implemented. This is an asymmetrical battle system, which means the player attacks while the monsters mainly defend. They can attack as well. The goal here is for the user to manage stamina for his entire team, in order to explore as much as possible.

Enemies can attack, which reduces stamina, otherwise they will build on defense, which means adding a new "coin" that needs to be destroyed. Using the right weakness, you can take out a coin in one hit. Each battle will be about you thinking "What is best way to take out the enemy fast so I can explore a bit more".

Enemies can eventually escape as well, and they will spend turns not doing anything. Because in these battles, you pick 1 character and do 1 attack, and then it is the turn of the enemy. This is not like your usual RPGs where you play all characters (I don't like doing the same things as others anyway ^^).

I have also been making new backgrounds, attacks and enemies so I am sharing a few screenshots. You will see that I am trying to maximize these 16 colors as much as I can (7 for the background, 9 for the enemy).

The game will let you play Ashla (the main character) and pick two characters you want among six. Each will have strengths that will make easier exploring some places. There are three stories to be told here, and the branching paths are at the very beginning of the game. At least, this is how it is planned.

Portraits and characters on the map have been finalized. Being able to pick any character for slot 2 and 3 means that there was a bit of challenge in how I handle my visuals as each character comes with his dedicated 2 colors (sometimes in slots 12 / 13, sometimes in in 14 / 15 of the sprite palette).

This is a bit off-topic, but exploring the possibility of having a choice of characters with dedicated colors made me understand clearly why this almost never happened in games, and developers always relied on a "joker" palette of 15 colors + transparent, even up to games like Phantasy Star IV (and I myself did in my first game).

Now that my battles are fully coded, I will work on NPC interaction in the maps as well as the Shop/Upgrade menu.

Also thanks to sverx and Maxim who suggested compressing visuals, I have added compression on all backgrounds, enemies and characters, which saved a lot of rom. It was very easy to implement thanks to the support in the BMPtoTile and devkitsms, so thanks a lot for the great tools.

I hope this was of interest :)

Capture.PNG (137.61 KB)

battle

Looks gorgeous, and your gameplay ideas sound very interesting. I like how you mix and match the parts for the different backgrounds pictures. Your character art reminds me a bit of Hergé, which is very unusual and I don’t think I’ve seen the likes of it in a video game, well, ever.

Kagesan wrote

Looks gorgeous, and your gameplay ideas sound very interesting. I like how you mix and match the parts for the different backgrounds pictures. Your character art reminds me a bit of Hergé, which is very unusual and I don’t think I’ve seen the likes of it in a video game, well, ever.

Thank you for the kind words :)

This is a gorgeous-looking game, great work!

Can't wait to play this, cireza - keep up the outstanding work!

Thanks !

Hello,

Back with some news after several weeks. I have finally completed drawings of all animations for the characters attacks. This represents 131 different pictures.

Also I managed to stick til the end with my idea of having 4 dedicated colors in the sprite palette (2 for ally 1 and 2 for ally 2), which proved very challenging to be quite frank. So much actually that I had switch to a unique palette a couple weeks ago and simply couldn't be satisfied with the results, despite some good efforts and people telling me it was actually not too bad ! I even made some palette study pictures for this...

You can see some of these experiments here and by scrolling down :
https://forums.sega-mag.com/t/projets-8-bits-cireza/2958/374

Sticking with 2 dedicated colors opens up for much better gradients (in my opinion), compared to a unique 15 colors palette for all sprites (as I did in my first game). NPCs will be drawn using the background palette as tiles (can't use the sprite palette as 4 colors change depending on the team), so this is going to work. They will not move around. This also means I gave up on having night palettes for towns (NPCs would become dark), but I had not intended to night palettes anyway and didn't really have any use for it in my game-design.

Battle system has been fully implemented and its generic aspects as well. This means that I can move forward building whatever "special attack" I want by simply stacking one after another the weaknesses that they hit. Each weakness will trigger the dedicated animation for the character, and then each weakness gets resolved in order on the enemy, according to some specific rules.

In this case, in order will be applied SWORD, then GUN, then FIRE, the LIGHTNING. A silver weakness will turn to NEUTRAL if not hit by the correct attack.

They will be applied to the enemy weaknesses in order as well (right to left). So FIRE first.

SWORD against FIRE : as this is not the right attack, it will turn FIRE to NEUTRAL.

GUN is then applied to NEUTRAL, which destroys it. We move on to the next weakness.

FIRE is applied to LIGHTNING, again this is not the right one, so it becomes a NEUTRAL.

Finally LIGHTNING is applied NEUTRAL, which destroys it.

So this was clearly inefficient.

The situation becomes :

A bronze weakness means that it can only be destroyed by applying exactly the correct attack to it. So only GUN will do.

Janet Justice Shot will do.

Other interesting weaknesses or attacks :

The HEART shield :

The HEART can absorb up to 5 hits and cannot be skipped (4 quarters + the heart itself). This means that you have to destroy it before being able to attack the next weaknesses. This enemy here is quite strong and the goal will be to avoid it in order to not deplete all your stamina in an exhausting fight.

The SKIP attack :

This very powerful attribute means you can skip a single weakness of the enemy and attack behind it. In this case, the first NEUTRAL weakness will be ignored, and Ashla will hit with SWORD directly on the final weakness of the enemy, which is a SWORD : this will instantly kill it.

Note : a BRONZE weakness and a HEART cannot be skipped

Capture.PNG (134.44 KB)

example

Capture2.PNG (125.99 KB)

example2

Capture3.PNG (129.21 KB)

example3

Capture4.PNG (97.65 KB)

example4

Capture5.PNG (93.53 KB)

example5

It looks really really nice! And the battle system is one I definitely want to test, it sounds really great!

Good job!

Awesome cireza, I am very interested. All you have told about the game sounds great!.

Author	Message
cireza Joined: 27 Feb 2023 Posts: 136 Location: France	[WIP] SMS : RPG by cireza Posted: Tue Oct 10, 2023 4:37 pm
cireza Joined: 27 Feb 2023 Posts: 136 Location: France	Hello, After making a few posts in my previous topic for the Sword of Stone (a Game Gear game which development is complete), I decided to create a dedicated topic for my ongoing project. This is a Master System game this time, so quite a bit more challenging ! I am still working with the same tools that work perfectly well, including devkitsms provided by sverx. The game will not be your traditional RPG with stats, grinding etc... It will be instead story oriented, just like my previous game, but I will be getting a step closer to a more traditional formula. Even though grinding is something I will never put in my games lol. You will play as Ashla, a young woman with purple hair (reason = that's because I was frustrated with my previous game and could not include purple anywhere). The setting will be futuristic and humanity will face challenges. Three different factions will emerge and soon in the game you will have the possibility to join any of these three, leading to an entirely different story line and progression. Some places will be visited by all factions of course. Each will have good and bad endings. Once again, the progression will be guided by the skills you have, and it will be up to you to understand where you can go. This is a way to set the player on a right path without killing exploration, and something that is important to me. The outside world will be a single map with scrolling (a novelty for me ! it was challenging to make work smoothly enough in C). Towns and dungeons will be fixed screens, in the same style as the Sword of Stone. Battles will happen every time you change from a type of terrain to another : this is how I control progression. Some random encounters will happen on top of this. There will be a rudimentary inventory, simply to track key items and materials. I am not planing on equipment and complex management. Battles will have a side view with some animation for the characters. Enemies will be fixed. They will not be your standard battles. Each enemy will have one to three weaknesses that you will have to hit in a single turn. Fail, and you are forced to escape and go back to the previous terrain. Or to exit the dungeon. There will probably be turns of rising difficulty for bosses and bigger enemies, everything is not set in stone yet. Once again, I implemented Variable Width Font for the text, with two types of letters : discussion and narration. The book, which is the narrator, will always use the italic presentation with a beige color. The characters and NPCs will use the straight letters with a grey color. Speed is good enough on the real hardware and the text is nice on a CRT. Text and portraits are displayed on top the map : the VRAM is full. I also implemented teleporting from the worldmap to the dungeons, so there is a good basis here. There are still a lot of things to do ! Capture3.PNG (225.1 KB) worldmap all_portraits_147.png (11.43 KB) portraits capture_174.png (40.22 KB) battles_poc Capture.png (105.28 KB) text_characters Capture2.png (123.49 KB) text_narrator

Kagesan Joined: 01 Feb 2014 Posts: 878	Posted: Tue Oct 10, 2023 5:05 pm
Kagesan Joined: 01 Feb 2014 Posts: 878	Looks very interesting. I really like your art.

segarule Joined: 23 Jan 2010 Posts: 439	Posted: Tue Oct 10, 2023 5:29 pm
segarule Joined: 23 Jan 2010 Posts: 439	So, do you like purple? You is a space mutant. I will call Bart Simpson, LOL. Great graphics. Interesting plot. I dont liked a bit of battle_poc (capture 174.png) screen because it seems "simple" but i think yet is a preliminary scheme.

cireza Joined: 27 Feb 2023 Posts: 136 Location: France	Posted: Tue Oct 10, 2023 6:07 pm
cireza Joined: 27 Feb 2023 Posts: 136 Location: France	Thanks. Battle visuals are not finalized yet indeed.

Aranya Joined: 02 Mar 2011 Posts: 168 Location: Valencia,Spain.	Posted: Tue Oct 10, 2023 6:40 pm
	Hi, I am very interested! I like that purple. In my opinion, it would be very interesting to release your game with a language selection option with flags, like some later SMS games. I can help you with Spanish if you want. Regards.

8BitBoy Joined: 15 Aug 2019 Posts: 262 Location: Lancashire UK	Posted: Wed Oct 11, 2023 11:42 am
	I think I've seen some of your work shared on Twitter, looks great!!

cireza Joined: 27 Feb 2023 Posts: 136 Location: France	Posted: Wed Oct 11, 2023 3:40 pm
cireza Joined: 27 Feb 2023 Posts: 136 Location: France	8BitBoy wrote I think I've seen some of your work shared on Twitter, looks great!! I don't have a twitter account so it must have been someone else !

law81 Joined: 21 Oct 2015 Posts: 303	Posted: Thu Oct 12, 2023 9:15 pm
law81 Joined: 21 Oct 2015 Posts: 303	Amazing! Fantastic! You guys really make me happy with these things

Ricco59 Joined: 05 Sep 2021 Posts: 57	Posted: Sat Oct 14, 2023 8:46 pm
Ricco59 Joined: 05 Sep 2021 Posts: 57	Très prometteur et superbement bien réalisé. Bravo :) Very promising and extremely well done. Bravo :)

cireza Joined: 27 Feb 2023 Posts: 136 Location: France	Posted: Sun Nov 26, 2023 1:53 pm
cireza Joined: 27 Feb 2023 Posts: 136 Location: France	Sharing a quick update after completing my first background and monster. Everything fits in memory, so that's good. The monster will be fixed, the character will be animated when attacking. I have currently completed attack animations for 2 characters out of 7. This is taking quite a bit of memory, but there are several ways to gain space if it becomes a necessity. I have also worked on the design of my towns. Here are some basic templates used to validate my work. I can now move on to creating the actual town maps. Capture.PNG (103.75 KB) battle_layout Capture3.png (88.91 KB) town1 Capture.PNG (70.69 KB) town2 Capture2.png (47.82 KB) town3

willbritton Joined: 06 Mar 2022 Posts: 671 Location: London, UK	Posted: Sun Nov 26, 2023 2:09 pm
	Oh, wow...

cireza Joined: 27 Feb 2023 Posts: 136 Location: France	Posted: Tue Jan 02, 2024 1:41 pm
cireza Joined: 27 Feb 2023 Posts: 136 Location: France	Hello, Sharing a small update on my progress. Most of the battle logic has been coded. It will be a simple logic without stats etc... You simply have to hit the weaknesses of the enemies, and then you can progress. Each time you get a new character, a new weakness is unlocked. This process might lead to being unable to battle enemies once that the team becomes bigger, and is part of the fun of understanding where to go :) Everything has been implemented in order to deal with the various teams you can have etc... I simply have to create the new enemies and backgrounds, there is still work to do on that part. Pixel-art takes a ton of time. I completed 3 enemies and backgrounds. SFX have also been created and the characters animations are implemented as well. Two characters are completely drawn, so 5 remain. I have just started the third one. I also implemented a blinking effect on the enemy. With three parameters R / G / B I can pick which color to push to the max, so the enemies blink while keeping their actual gradients, which I think looks good. And here are the three completed backgrounds and enemies : Backgrounds are 7 colors so that's a bit challenging. Enemies use the remaining 9, and I can blink these specific 9 colors. I still have months of drawing ahead of me before I can really dig into implementing town/dungeon maps and the story.

cireza Joined: 27 Feb 2023 Posts: 136 Location: France	Posted: Sat Mar 02, 2024 5:37 pm
cireza Joined: 27 Feb 2023 Posts: 136 Location: France	Hello everyone, It has been 2 months and I thought I would share a few details in an update. I am actively working on the game of course, and many things have finally found their place in the overall game-design. Battles have been fully implemented. This is an asymmetrical battle system, which means the player attacks while the monsters mainly defend. They can attack as well. The goal here is for the user to manage stamina for his entire team, in order to explore as much as possible. Enemies can attack, which reduces stamina, otherwise they will build on defense, which means adding a new "coin" that needs to be destroyed. Using the right weakness, you can take out a coin in one hit. Each battle will be about you thinking "What is best way to take out the enemy fast so I can explore a bit more". Enemies can eventually escape as well, and they will spend turns not doing anything. Because in these battles, you pick 1 character and do 1 attack, and then it is the turn of the enemy. This is not like your usual RPGs where you play all characters (I don't like doing the same things as others anyway ^^). I have also been making new backgrounds, attacks and enemies so I am sharing a few screenshots. You will see that I am trying to maximize these 16 colors as much as I can (7 for the background, 9 for the enemy). The game will let you play Ashla (the main character) and pick two characters you want among six. Each will have strengths that will make easier exploring some places. There are three stories to be told here, and the branching paths are at the very beginning of the game. At least, this is how it is planned. Portraits and characters on the map have been finalized. Being able to pick any character for slot 2 and 3 means that there was a bit of challenge in how I handle my visuals as each character comes with his dedicated 2 colors (sometimes in slots 12 / 13, sometimes in in 14 / 15 of the sprite palette). This is a bit off-topic, but exploring the possibility of having a choice of characters with dedicated colors made me understand clearly why this almost never happened in games, and developers always relied on a "joker" palette of 15 colors + transparent, even up to games like Phantasy Star IV (and I myself did in my first game). Now that my battles are fully coded, I will work on NPC interaction in the maps as well as the Shop/Upgrade menu. Also thanks to sverx and Maxim who suggested compressing visuals, I have added compression on all backgrounds, enemies and characters, which saved a lot of rom. It was very easy to implement thanks to the support in the BMPtoTile and devkitsms, so thanks a lot for the great tools. I hope this was of interest :) Capture.PNG (137.61 KB) battle

Kagesan Joined: 01 Feb 2014 Posts: 878	Posted: Sat Mar 02, 2024 8:29 pm
Kagesan Joined: 01 Feb 2014 Posts: 878	Looks gorgeous, and your gameplay ideas sound very interesting. I like how you mix and match the parts for the different backgrounds pictures. Your character art reminds me a bit of Hergé, which is very unusual and I don’t think I’ve seen the likes of it in a video game, well, ever.

cireza Joined: 27 Feb 2023 Posts: 136 Location: France	Posted: Sun Mar 03, 2024 11:55 am
cireza Joined: 27 Feb 2023 Posts: 136 Location: France	Kagesan wrote Looks gorgeous, and your gameplay ideas sound very interesting. I like how you mix and match the parts for the different backgrounds pictures. Your character art reminds me a bit of Hergé, which is very unusual and I don’t think I’ve seen the likes of it in a video game, well, ever. Thank you for the kind words :)

thatawesomeguy Joined: 25 Jul 2007 Posts: 732 Location: Melbourne, Australia	Posted: Sun Mar 03, 2024 12:11 pm
	This is a gorgeous-looking game, great work!

willbritton Joined: 06 Mar 2022 Posts: 671 Location: London, UK	Posted: Sun Mar 03, 2024 12:20 pm
	Can't wait to play this, cireza - keep up the outstanding work!

cireza Joined: 27 Feb 2023 Posts: 136 Location: France	Posted: Sun Mar 03, 2024 5:34 pm
cireza Joined: 27 Feb 2023 Posts: 136 Location: France	Thanks !

cireza Joined: 27 Feb 2023 Posts: 136 Location: France	Posted: Wed Apr 24, 2024 6:43 pm
cireza Joined: 27 Feb 2023 Posts: 136 Location: France	Hello, Back with some news after several weeks. I have finally completed drawings of all animations for the characters attacks. This represents 131 different pictures. Also I managed to stick til the end with my idea of having 4 dedicated colors in the sprite palette (2 for ally 1 and 2 for ally 2), which proved very challenging to be quite frank. So much actually that I had switch to a unique palette a couple weeks ago and simply couldn't be satisfied with the results, despite some good efforts and people telling me it was actually not too bad ! I even made some palette study pictures for this... You can see some of these experiments here and by scrolling down : https://forums.sega-mag.com/t/projets-8-bits-cireza/2958/374 Sticking with 2 dedicated colors opens up for much better gradients (in my opinion), compared to a unique 15 colors palette for all sprites (as I did in my first game). NPCs will be drawn using the background palette as tiles (can't use the sprite palette as 4 colors change depending on the team), so this is going to work. They will not move around. This also means I gave up on having night palettes for towns (NPCs would become dark), but I had not intended to night palettes anyway and didn't really have any use for it in my game-design. Battle system has been fully implemented and its generic aspects as well. This means that I can move forward building whatever "special attack" I want by simply stacking one after another the weaknesses that they hit. Each weakness will trigger the dedicated animation for the character, and then each weakness gets resolved in order on the enemy, according to some specific rules. In this case, in order will be applied SWORD, then GUN, then FIRE, the LIGHTNING. A silver weakness will turn to NEUTRAL if not hit by the correct attack. They will be applied to the enemy weaknesses in order as well (right to left). So FIRE first. SWORD against FIRE : as this is not the right attack, it will turn FIRE to NEUTRAL. GUN is then applied to NEUTRAL, which destroys it. We move on to the next weakness. FIRE is applied to LIGHTNING, again this is not the right one, so it becomes a NEUTRAL. Finally LIGHTNING is applied NEUTRAL, which destroys it. So this was clearly inefficient. The situation becomes : A bronze weakness means that it can only be destroyed by applying exactly the correct attack to it. So only GUN will do. Janet Justice Shot will do. Other interesting weaknesses or attacks : The HEART shield : The HEART can absorb up to 5 hits and cannot be skipped (4 quarters + the heart itself). This means that you have to destroy it before being able to attack the next weaknesses. This enemy here is quite strong and the goal will be to avoid it in order to not deplete all your stamina in an exhausting fight. The SKIP attack : This very powerful attribute means you can skip a single weakness of the enemy and attack behind it. In this case, the first NEUTRAL weakness will be ignored, and Ashla will hit with SWORD directly on the final weakness of the enemy, which is a SWORD : this will instantly kill it. Note : a BRONZE weakness and a HEART cannot be skipped Capture.PNG (134.44 KB) example Capture2.PNG (125.99 KB) example2 Capture3.PNG (129.21 KB) example3 Capture4.PNG (97.65 KB) example4 Capture5.PNG (93.53 KB) example5

baude Joined: 15 Dec 2015 Posts: 16	Posted: Thu Apr 25, 2024 8:52 am
baude Joined: 15 Dec 2015 Posts: 16	It looks really really nice! And the battle system is one I definitely want to test, it sounds really great! Good job!

Aranya Joined: 02 Mar 2011 Posts: 168 Location: Valencia,Spain.	Posted: Thu Apr 25, 2024 12:02 pm
	Awesome cireza, I am very interested. All you have told about the game sounds great!.

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