More or less, this project has been unofficially in hiatus for like nine or ten months now. Scoring Happy as a hire and then having him vanish was a torpedo to the hull: motivation and dedication to complete this hemorrhaged until it was all gone. This is just a badly belated attempt at courtesy by making the project's limbo status official.

To the fans: I am very sorry.

I was working on Lionheart today. Really. I ran into a frustrating snag where the victory music keeps playing on the map after the battle is done so I had this other window open where I was chatting with unity about some of her "rainy day" game ideas and then for reasons I don't fully understand all of this just kind of came out of me organically into a random forum post like giving birth or some shit.

So I figured rather than leave it buried in the forums I'd share it with you here.

Because the alternative would be making another game page and eff that who wants makerscore amirite?

To prevent confusion let me state that this blog concerns a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT GAME THAN LIONHEART. A game that while it has an hour and change of gameplay (four times that if you play as all four different classes) will probably never see the light of day.



Ok, so when I first came back to RPG maker this year (this was back in maybe May, June, July, August sometime around then) I was working on this game called Impetus. I didn't upload it to the site or anything and I haven't promoted it at all and at the time I told myself I was doing it just for fun/just for practice. I hadn't done any RPG Making for 2 full years so I was trying to re-learn RPG Maker and to learn the pecularities of Ace.

Impetus was an exploration-focused choose-your-class-at-the-beginning science-fiction roguelike-like dungeon crawl set on a large civilian/commercial orbital space station called Atlas Station that had just been impacted by a mysterious planetoid called Leviathan. The planetoid was filled with living biomass and alien bioweapons so the impact didn't just massively damage the station, it also unleashed a ton of alien monsters and a deadly alien plague

Overall, Impetus was not set anywhere near Earth or in a galaxy where anyone remembered Earth or knew anything about any of Earth's cultures or customs. I wanted to create a setting that felt a bit more like 'high tech fantasy in space' with a total made-up culture and society as an intentional contrast to all of my other scifi stuff which has been much more grounded in the future of our reality.

It had a bit of voice acting at the beginning (recorded by my girlfriend LOL) of the intro. So I actually wrote a script for the intro sequence:

<GNN LOGO APPEARS WITH JINGLE>

<FADE IN ON NEWS ROOM>

<NEWS GRAPHIC: CRISIS ON ATLAS STATION>

NEWSREADER: We now return to our ongoing coverage of the crisis on Atlas Station. If you are just tuning in to this breaking story, yesterday morning a planetoid approximately the size of our moon appeared, moving towards Cassandra Gemini at alarming speed.

<NEWS GRAPHIC: LEVIATHAN>

NEWSREADER: Sometime last night, this celestial body--which government briefings refer to as "Leviathan"--impacted Atlas Station, Cassandra Gemini's largest orbital platform where nearly a million citizens live and work.

<NEWS GRAPHIC: ATLAS>

NEWSREADER: Casualty reports are still coming in at this time, and the names of the dead are not known, but casualties are thought to be in the hundreds of thousands. Atlas Station suffered major structural damage upon the impact, the extent of which is unknown, but as of this broadcast has maintained its orbit. Leviathan, the rogue planet, appears to have become fused somehow to the station's superstructure.

<NEWS GRAPHIC: BAPHOMET>

NEWSREADER: Numerous civilian reports of vicious, "dragon-like" creatures alighting from the disintegrating planetoid Leviathan and attacking or abducting Atlas Station citizens remain uncomfired at this time. The most recent government press release decries civilian holocam footage of these creatures as a hoax, and denies the veracity of reports that these monsters have attacked citizens on the surface of Cassandra Gemini.

<NEWS GRAPHIC: DROPSHIP>

NEWSREADER (Receiving Breaking News): This just in! I'm receiving a late breaking report that the Planetary Governor was making an inspection visit to Atlas Station at the time of the tragedy. His current whereabouts are unknown. The Regulators, an elite special forces unit, has been dispatched to Atlas Station to locate and secure Governor Markov. We will keep you updated on additional developments as they unfold...

So, in the beginning you choose your class as either Assault Trooper, Griefer, Silhouette, or Biomechanic. At the start of the game it's strictly a one-character RPG deal (I was using a side-view ABS and I was happy with how it was looking and playing) as your shuttle/dropship crashes and you crawl away alone but my intention was that later on you'd gradually meet up with the three other classes you didn't pick and you'd have a complete balanced team by the end of the game. Each class would meet the other classes in a different order and different places (a little like the earlier RE games in that respect).



Individual Details:


Ostensibly your objective besides to meet up with the other members of your squad was to rescue Governor Markov but that setup was purely meant as an "excuse plot" for an exploration and combat focused roguelike/dungeon crawl. See, the cool thing about this game was that every map was exactly 17x13 and every map was complete modular. Basically, I made maps as puzzle pieces that could be reusable with set connections. Every map was like an individual piece of a jigsaw puzzle that could be assembled different ways. So you'd have repeating areas with slight aesthetic differences, like corridors and stairwells and elevators and residences, grocery stores, pharmacies, cafes, banks, pawn shops, gun shops, hydroponics blocks, engineering blocks, operations and security and so on.

Trigger Warning: Absurdly gigantic image.



I did all of that with an eye towards somehow making it into a REAL roguelike, i.e. whenever you started a new game the overall game map would be a completely different configuration of those components. But I never actually was creative or skilled enough to figure out a way to event or code that. Anyway the station was going to be INSANELY MASSIVE (and ideally different every time) consisting of two towers with six decks each and a causeway connecting them in the middle. Keep in mind that each of the 12 decks would consist of 40-60 modularly connected maps full of monsters and treasure.



There was tons I liked about this project. I thought the battles looked great and I liked the way I had the skills and character customization set up (players could use skill points to buy both active and passive skills), I had the random treasure system all set up, there were on touch encounters that could be avoided with various field-map skills I'd evented, cameras that could be blinded with chaff grenades or slipped past with a cloaking device, and every single locked door had like four ways to open it: finding a keycard, using an autohack tool, placing a demolition pack on the door, or hacking it if you were playing as the biomechanic.

I kind of gave up on this project for a lot of reasons. By the time I got down to the second deck of the first tower the mapping and map connection process of my "little just for fun learning project" felt insanely tedious--WAY TOO MUCH GAM FOR ONE MAN TO MAK, so to speak. I had no idea how I'd actually implement roguelike map randomization and permadeath and I wasn't even sure that I wanted to push those random elements. More importantly, I had no idea where I was going with the story (or the world-building) beyond the initial hook, so the idea of writing up audio-logs and in-game notes to build up the story and setting in epistolary form seemed daunting. Ultimately, I was much more excited about the team of Regulators I'd created and the slick ass character select screen I'd made and the underlying game systems than the actual mission I'd given them, which wound up leaving me kind of cold. And then, most importantly of all, Lionheart and its still invisible sister project Grand Grimoire came along and became my labor of love. So since then Impetus has languished silently in profound non-completion, with a ton of work done.

"Happy Days Are Here Again"
Also: Lionheart Devblog #01.

I bring the exciting news that the incredible Happy (nee Rei-) of Ascendance and Ill Will fame has been brought on to help with this project. First off, he will be taking over with the mapping after a certain point. The next ten or twelve maps in the project I'll be making myself, but after that it will be all him. After all the maps are done, he will be sticking around to help with the game's general prettiness and further down the line, even composing some custom music! Obviously, this is awesome news.

As you can see if you are looking at this game page--and I hope you are--I've gotten some much appreciated feedback from Kel and pianotm as well as a Let's Play from kory_toombs. And I'm waiting on some more feedback I've requested from some other voices in the RM scene. I don't know yet if I've won any of the "prizes" from the Revive The Dead competition--it's too soon for judges' feedback to be in--but I'm not holding my breath. This was a pretty rough build.

Besides that, I have been slowly plodding forward since the rushed Halloween Demo Release. I've created very little "new content" in the last few days (honestly, just one map, and I'm eh about it), and largely have been focused on fixing every little thing that annoyed me in the demo content with its niggling imperfection. Here's a laundry list of stuff that's been resolved or is currently being worked on to end the post:

• Added a dark background to the text that appears over the 'Map of Chimer' during the optional intro and the "two years in two minutes" scene, greatly enhancing readability.
  
• Corrected a few pesky passability issues. Some of these were things that I fixed for the demo-release and had to go back and 're-fix' in the full project.
  
• Added orthogonal and diagonal running animations for the main character, Garinol, and enabled dashing on the most field maps (except the really small ones) starting as soon as you leave the tent. A message pop up when you head into the first mountains (around the time you see the first save point) reminds players you can hold Shift to Run, useful for players not familiar with RMVX (Ace).
  
• Added Combat Manuals for Garinol, Lila, and Lucan as soon as you gain control of them in the command tent at Fellfrost Landing. The manuals are Key Items that can be read from the item menu as often as you like, and briefly summarize each character's "fighting style". This should make the early game much less overwhelming for new players. It also helped me pin down some of the mechanics by explaining them textually in full sentences.
  
• Some little stuff so little even I can't remember it. Like the icon I was using for the 'Numb' state said 'Sluggish' so I edited it in paint.net to say 'Numb' instead, removed some unwanted pixels from Garinol's running animation as I implemented it, crap like that. Stuff that is almost unnoticeable in gameplay but can chew up hours fixing. gammak is a cruel mistress.
  
• Added prices to all of the items and equipment that exist in the game so far, in preparation for having actual shops and meaningful currency drops at some future point.
  
• Currently, I'm struggling with re-implementing Cooldowns into the game. Hopefully, in the future, Smite Evil, Guard Break, Sword Break, Mind Break, Mana Break, and Speed Break will all use Cooldowns rather than limited uses per battle, and many enemy skills will use Cooldowns as well (starting with the Ice Atronach boss).
  
• Finally I'm hoping to get the 'Equip Scene' modified so that the player can see the effects that different equipment will have on their EVA (Parry), HIT, and CRIT rates as well as the other stats, so they'll be able to make informed decisions about what gear to use.

Some time in the reasonably near future I should get a game page up for Grand Grimoire, Lionheart's sister project, set in the same world and using the same graphics and mechanics.