Arrow
Old-school composer
EDIT: Site back up.
Whoa, cool. I haven't been here in two months, and my username hasn't been purged. And I'm still an admin on top of it! ^_^
Just wanted to show you guys a miniature little game I'm working on. It's based around the realtime RPG engine I had made in mIRC called Wavestorm. In fact, this RPG I'm creating was originally gonna be something else entirely, and as I decided to use the Wavestorm engine, it started morphing from 'random RPG using Wavestorm's engine' to 'Wavestorm RPG using random characters'.
At any rate, very little is done. So far, I've just been working non-stop on the battle engine. A lot of the options that will appear in the final are here already, though crude-looking. More than likely, everything about the game besides the battle engine and the character names will change; the world, the art, character graphics, animations, spell visuals, everything.
The demo can be found at http://www.dszone.info/Extra/Wavestorm/Demo.zip.
And since Mystic suggested I attempt to make this post non-ad-spammy, without "100% promise and 0% content", here are some screenshots. Remember, like I said, graphics (and almost everything else) will change; while I'm working on the battle engine first, I'm just sticking with default RPGM2K3 graphics. So don't be surprised at the lameness of the pics.
The main world. It's small. In fact, it's just a solitary island; only a bit of land for you to walk around and get in battles on.
The main menu, which you get to by hitting the Escape. Escape also doubles as the cancel key, while space is the action key. The menu's straightforward; "Skill" are magic spells. "Active" lets you choose between Final Fantasy-ish active and wait options for the ATB system.
Our first battle! Aww... In case you didn't notice, the top hero is me, Jarel. The bottom three are three of my RL best friends. Six other optional characters that you can switch in and out of your party are also in the game, and all six of them are also RL best friends. As you can see, this game will be the biggest instance of self-insertion this side of SAGE.
Battle options. The colors are always magic spells. For those of you who never played Wavestorm, that's how the game was based. Each hero was attuned to a specific color, and that color came with a list of 7 elemental-based magic spells you could cast. For example, as a Blue hero in that game, my spells are all water based for the most part. Fuse and Switch are special options, and I'll explain them later.
Here, our COURAGEOUS HERO prepares to cast his most powerful Blue spell, Sapphire Tide.
And that spell pretty much destroyed everyone...
...except for a lone slime, who Justin then promptly took care of with his most powerful Yellow lightning-based spell, Topaz Discharge. Waste of MP for one baddie, but it sure looked pretty.
In an identical battle elsewhere on the island, Cynthia gets the first hit in, and tears the field up with her most powerful Green earth/space-based spell, Emerald Fragment.
Cynthia's spell took them all out, so I had to get into another battle to be able to show Josh's super powerful Red fire spell, Amber Holocaust.
This is the next thing to pop up after you choose Fuse in the main battle engine. You have the option of spending 50MP to give a little of your color energy to another fighter.
The hero you chooses glows for a second, and then...
...upon receiving that energy, they now have the ability to do combo spells. The menu will change, adding in a double color combo option for the fuse+original color you have. Since Josh is Red, and I gave him a Blue fuse, he now can cast Red/Blue spells.
The combo spells are called 2nd Tier by the way, while the original color sets are called 1st Tier. In the mIRC version of the game there were 3rd Tier spells too, but it would take too much code to implement that here. As a result, there's only 2nd Tier, and also, characters can only have one fuse at one time. If someone else fuses you, their fuse will overwrite the one you have. Fuses are also supposed to disappear after a turn, but I'm having trouble getting that to work. Here, Josh takes a look at the 3 new spells he has access too thanks to the fuse. Every color combo gives you three unique spells.
Josh casts the amazing Sepia Geyser here. Unfortunately, I haven't even started creating default spell animations for any of the 2nd Tier spells, so they all just show a silly little punch animation.
But they're still super powerful!
Using the Switch option gives you this menu. You now have the option of picking one of the six other characters not in your party; the character you picked with will hop out, and the character you chose will pop in. Works well for situations where an enemy is weak to a type of element not currently in your party, or when everyone in your party is getting close to death and you have no way of healing them. Because of that second point, however, I'm considering removing the Switch option closer to final release so as not to make the game too easy. There will be an option to switch characters outside of battle though, like most RPG's. It's not in the demo though.
Once you've chosen your character, you (complete with face picture) yell at them to come and help out.
They yell back saying they're on their way, and...
One flash of light later, and the exchange is made! That character is now in the battle in place of the one that just jumped out, with full HP/MP, and their own set of magic spells.
Angie is a White hero (no racist jokes plz; that's not what I meant. She's actually Peruvian in RL), and that means healing/holy spells. The other 5 sets are Purple for ice, Beige for time and blast, Black for gravity and shadow, Orange for light and sound, and Gray for wind. With 7 spells for each bracket, that makes for 70 spells easily available by everyone. Adding fuses into the mix makes for 45 combinations of colors, and with 3 spells a combo, that's another 135 spells you can access at almost anytime. That's a lot of firepower.
That's it for the most part. Spells are the only things in there; only a small few weapons and items have been coded. Obviously it's really incomplete, but I figured some of the few Wavestorm fans here might appreciate knowing that WS hasn't died.
The story is up in the air right now, but it's not gonna be a cliche' "the heroes get transported from Earth to a mysterious world; help them get home!" My friends and I, storyline-wise, will be native to this world so that such crap won't have to be used. More than likely, it will be a futuristic RPG, taking place about... 1500 to 3000 years from now on another planet. Earth has been long destroyed in a manmade Armageddon, and the few survivors (who left before the fiasco) settled this planet with their space-age technology and have been living quite happily. Another dimension is linked to that planet though, which has been causing some problems of sorts, and, well, commence hero call. You get the idea. Neo from #srb2 is the main one helping me with this stuff, story and spriting, so those of you who know him know that the story will probably kick tail, even if it sounds a bit cliche' now (though less cliche' than the 'transport from Earth' story).
Whoa, cool. I haven't been here in two months, and my username hasn't been purged. And I'm still an admin on top of it! ^_^
Just wanted to show you guys a miniature little game I'm working on. It's based around the realtime RPG engine I had made in mIRC called Wavestorm. In fact, this RPG I'm creating was originally gonna be something else entirely, and as I decided to use the Wavestorm engine, it started morphing from 'random RPG using Wavestorm's engine' to 'Wavestorm RPG using random characters'.
At any rate, very little is done. So far, I've just been working non-stop on the battle engine. A lot of the options that will appear in the final are here already, though crude-looking. More than likely, everything about the game besides the battle engine and the character names will change; the world, the art, character graphics, animations, spell visuals, everything.
The demo can be found at http://www.dszone.info/Extra/Wavestorm/Demo.zip.
And since Mystic suggested I attempt to make this post non-ad-spammy, without "100% promise and 0% content", here are some screenshots. Remember, like I said, graphics (and almost everything else) will change; while I'm working on the battle engine first, I'm just sticking with default RPGM2K3 graphics. So don't be surprised at the lameness of the pics.
The main world. It's small. In fact, it's just a solitary island; only a bit of land for you to walk around and get in battles on.
The main menu, which you get to by hitting the Escape. Escape also doubles as the cancel key, while space is the action key. The menu's straightforward; "Skill" are magic spells. "Active" lets you choose between Final Fantasy-ish active and wait options for the ATB system.
Our first battle! Aww... In case you didn't notice, the top hero is me, Jarel. The bottom three are three of my RL best friends. Six other optional characters that you can switch in and out of your party are also in the game, and all six of them are also RL best friends. As you can see, this game will be the biggest instance of self-insertion this side of SAGE.
Battle options. The colors are always magic spells. For those of you who never played Wavestorm, that's how the game was based. Each hero was attuned to a specific color, and that color came with a list of 7 elemental-based magic spells you could cast. For example, as a Blue hero in that game, my spells are all water based for the most part. Fuse and Switch are special options, and I'll explain them later.
Here, our COURAGEOUS HERO prepares to cast his most powerful Blue spell, Sapphire Tide.
And that spell pretty much destroyed everyone...
...except for a lone slime, who Justin then promptly took care of with his most powerful Yellow lightning-based spell, Topaz Discharge. Waste of MP for one baddie, but it sure looked pretty.
In an identical battle elsewhere on the island, Cynthia gets the first hit in, and tears the field up with her most powerful Green earth/space-based spell, Emerald Fragment.
Cynthia's spell took them all out, so I had to get into another battle to be able to show Josh's super powerful Red fire spell, Amber Holocaust.
This is the next thing to pop up after you choose Fuse in the main battle engine. You have the option of spending 50MP to give a little of your color energy to another fighter.
The hero you chooses glows for a second, and then...
...upon receiving that energy, they now have the ability to do combo spells. The menu will change, adding in a double color combo option for the fuse+original color you have. Since Josh is Red, and I gave him a Blue fuse, he now can cast Red/Blue spells.
The combo spells are called 2nd Tier by the way, while the original color sets are called 1st Tier. In the mIRC version of the game there were 3rd Tier spells too, but it would take too much code to implement that here. As a result, there's only 2nd Tier, and also, characters can only have one fuse at one time. If someone else fuses you, their fuse will overwrite the one you have. Fuses are also supposed to disappear after a turn, but I'm having trouble getting that to work. Here, Josh takes a look at the 3 new spells he has access too thanks to the fuse. Every color combo gives you three unique spells.
Josh casts the amazing Sepia Geyser here. Unfortunately, I haven't even started creating default spell animations for any of the 2nd Tier spells, so they all just show a silly little punch animation.
But they're still super powerful!
Using the Switch option gives you this menu. You now have the option of picking one of the six other characters not in your party; the character you picked with will hop out, and the character you chose will pop in. Works well for situations where an enemy is weak to a type of element not currently in your party, or when everyone in your party is getting close to death and you have no way of healing them. Because of that second point, however, I'm considering removing the Switch option closer to final release so as not to make the game too easy. There will be an option to switch characters outside of battle though, like most RPG's. It's not in the demo though.
Once you've chosen your character, you (complete with face picture) yell at them to come and help out.
They yell back saying they're on their way, and...
One flash of light later, and the exchange is made! That character is now in the battle in place of the one that just jumped out, with full HP/MP, and their own set of magic spells.
Angie is a White hero (no racist jokes plz; that's not what I meant. She's actually Peruvian in RL), and that means healing/holy spells. The other 5 sets are Purple for ice, Beige for time and blast, Black for gravity and shadow, Orange for light and sound, and Gray for wind. With 7 spells for each bracket, that makes for 70 spells easily available by everyone. Adding fuses into the mix makes for 45 combinations of colors, and with 3 spells a combo, that's another 135 spells you can access at almost anytime. That's a lot of firepower.
That's it for the most part. Spells are the only things in there; only a small few weapons and items have been coded. Obviously it's really incomplete, but I figured some of the few Wavestorm fans here might appreciate knowing that WS hasn't died.
The story is up in the air right now, but it's not gonna be a cliche' "the heroes get transported from Earth to a mysterious world; help them get home!" My friends and I, storyline-wise, will be native to this world so that such crap won't have to be used. More than likely, it will be a futuristic RPG, taking place about... 1500 to 3000 years from now on another planet. Earth has been long destroyed in a manmade Armageddon, and the few survivors (who left before the fiasco) settled this planet with their space-age technology and have been living quite happily. Another dimension is linked to that planet though, which has been causing some problems of sorts, and, well, commence hero call. You get the idea. Neo from #srb2 is the main one helping me with this stuff, story and spriting, so those of you who know him know that the story will probably kick tail, even if it sounds a bit cliche' now (though less cliche' than the 'transport from Earth' story).