Update: New Places!

OK, I got a new router and finally got everything up and working, things “should” go smoothly now!
(Waits for everyone to stop yelling at me with things like “Its about time!” “What took you so long!” “I was tired of waiting on you, geeze!” then proceeds…)

I have a couple of new places to tell everyone about (yaaay!) :

New-Found Vaysta – This city is large compared to the tiny village of Erinna; the town has everything you can imagine: Pubs, an Inn, entertainment buildings (not sure about this yet…), merchants for weapons, items, and magic, the first Information Center (heavily under construction!) you will run into and a Questers building – again, first one you will run into. This is truly a busy place and a place you could stay in for a while longer; there is also not only just the merchant quarter but also the two ‘sections’ that keeps this town talking and moving: The Highmark quarter and the Lodds Quarter.

Armorrow Fields – The fields is a vast land full of creatures that range from simple to a quick death for you if not careful! The land has a few tree’s here and there, but mostly is a flat and barren field with barely anything in it; this makes it easy to get lost as well, since there is very little to see here in ways of decoration of vegetation.

Nier Forest – This is a rather dark place, but still lively and peaceful looking, flowers still bloom and animals still wonder around. The forest area is rather linear, with very few places for you to go – which is very odd for a forest, and causes a great deal of wonder by all that enter and leave. (Note: This is also the first place I will be testing a storm battle system at; I have it explained further down below…)
Testings:

I am currently testing a few new systems; a few of them you have already heard about (the Questing system, the Information Center system, etc.) and then there is the Weather Battle system (the newest – and most frightening for me – one).

Questing System – This will enable you to acquire missions/quests through-out the game to give you a purpose and to help with the flow of the story and your character’s growths.

Information Center System – This is where the player will be able to go to learn things about the place they are at/in and some of the people they meet. Its more like a tourist center, but I figured Information Center sounded better…

Guild Center – A center where the player can join a clan and have a specific set of quests or jobs  given to them by their clan they join; these clans will give the player items specific to the clan ‘type’ that they join. Lets say there are 3 different clans: The Diggers, The Slayers and The Seekers. The diggers would offer you items needed to enhance your weapons and also a few items that you can sell for a lot of money sometimes; the Slayers would give you missions and quests for beasts that need killing – the spoils of the kill would be yours and then there would be a little pay in it for you; and lastly the Seekers would be treasure hunters, with them you would be told where a specific treasure is rumored to be located at and you would have to go find it. Once its found, you would take it back to the clan center and give it to the leader of the Slayers clan and he would open it for you. He would offer to give you money for the items in the chest or you could just keep the items. Mind you those are just examples, I really don’t like this idea, but I know players probably would… I’m thinking of pushing this off to the second book and not the first book, I’m already loading a bunch more in the first one than I was prepared for. Anyways, thats one idea I’ve been playing with.

Weather Battling System – OK, now, THIS I am desperately trying to get working but can’t figure out… I know what I want and I know how I want it to work, and how it should simply work, but its just getting each map to go along with it and work together with it – and the scripting is a pain. When the weather changes, depending on where you are, the monsters would change and become harder to beat. So, if your in a forest, instead of small spiders and snakes and bats, when it rained you would be fighting wolf packs and pack leaders, giant spiders and spider queen guards, trolls (in some areas), etc. Things like this… For a desert it would be simple things at first like scorpions and spiders, vipers and sand Pods (something yet shown to everyone ^.^) and when a desert storm arrived, Sand Golums (example here: http://i1229.photobucket.com/albums/ee465/kitty202021/SandGolemImageExample.png), Sand Scorpions (their bigger), Mummies, etc. would appear. This is a difficult thing for me to do though, even though it sounds simple, because I don’t know how to script this to change the monsters on the field… Some thing I’m sure I’ll figure out later and also something I’m thinking of just saving for book 2… Not sure still.

Anyways, thats all the updates I have for all of you! I hope that eases your anger and assures you that I have been working on things, its just going to take a little longer than I expected (I’ll post a blog about whats happened later, can’t right now, but its related to my health and it isn’t pretty or nice. WHHHHYYYYY!??!?!?!? *sigh*)
Thanks for all the patience guys! Will try to get on here more often to update you guys! (I think there’s an app for this on my phone, I’ll have to see… If there is, then I might just update it all from my phone – its the sitting at my computer thats the problem – again, might upload a blog about my health later, can’t right now.)

BYE!!!

Update to the Game

OK, just got the router back up, thought I’d throw a new update out there for you guys….

Got a new location started after ages of re-working the previous area’s due to glitches I discovered while playing through the game again. Will need to figure out how to get a Pictures page up and going with this site then I’ll post images for you guys! ^.^

Very quick update!

I want to apologize real fast while my internet is up and running to everyone at RMN… For what ever reason I am having issues with my new router speaking with my firewall and it continues to make weird things happen, I am going to attempt to connect to RMN for a quick update note and then to also inform them that I am going to be posting updates onto Word-press.com for a while, until the router is up to date and working correctly.

I will be posting a few good updates tonight as soon as I can! Keep an eye out for them over the next either few hours or next day (its currently about 1:00 AM here in AZ right now, so probably wont be tonight).

Eriscadia: The Rise of a Game

What is Eriscadia really?

Eriscadia: The Fall of Nations is a game that is being created using the Enterbrain© game engine RPG (Role-Playing-Game) Maker, version VX, found here. Eriscadia is nothing more than a 2D role-playing game based off of a made-up era back some where surrounding the early 16th to the 17th century, the game places you in control of – instead of the normal 3 or 4 heroes – 5 – 6 heroes at one time. The game is still heavy in the testing stages and will not truly be available for anyone to download until there is at least 30-minutes of playability in the game.

History of the game:

Eriscadia is technically my first “real” game; by real I mean its an actual full-length 30+ hour long game. Is The Fall of Nations (FoN) really going to have 30 or more hours worth of game play in it? No. The FoN is only one part to a series of games (referenced as ‘Books’ from here out) that is being created and released; FoN will probably be some where from around 8 to 10 hours of actual game play, this does not include any cut-scenes that take place or events that take place, so in full, it could end up being a 12 to 15 hour long game. Give or take a few of course and also depending on if the player actually skips the dialogue in the game or not.

Eriscadia started out with the code-name of “Project 1″, every name I made didn’t come out correct and sounded cheesy or (in one instance) I would be contacted by a company that had the name already registered or something and they would claim that I had to change it. Really, the name was my hardest feat through-out this entire project; the name “project 1″ had been created along with the game back in the beginning of 2003, using the Enterbrain© engine RPG Maker 2000. Earlier developments and testing for the game had begun back in the late ’90′s with the engine RPG Maker 95, to those that remember that engine, two thumbs up because you’ll also recall how difficult that engine was to work with and that developing anything real “fancy” with.

After several newer engine releases from Enterbrain©, and after re-starting multiple different times (since your game does not transfer from one engine to the other – causing you to have to re-start with the use of every new engine), I decided that RPG Maker engine XP would be my final engine (that and I was tired of re-starting). I got a good ways into my game, had developed a large chunk of the world and then, the most dreaded of all things happened… Enterbrain© released RPG Maker VX. Long story short, I weighed the pro’s and con’s of not using the engine and the con’s of not using it out-weighed everything else. I made the change back in very early 2008, the games development – still under the name of Project 1, mind you – started all over again, using what was developed out of RPG Maker XP as a guide for re-creating it in the VX engine.

Slowly over time, life, as always, became very busy and too difficult for me to juggle both a new job and a full-length game hobby; so, I put a hold on the game’s development. Sadly, this “short-term” pause on the game turned into a 2 year gap… I lost my original version to the engine, had to go out and repurchase it due to also loosing the e-mail kindly sent to me by Enterbrain© showing proof of ownership, had to pay another $60.00 to purchase it, then began development all over again due to the loss.

A short ways into the game, I discovered that the game wasn’t really making any sense; I decided that I would stop throwing the game together and coming up with things as I developed the game and stopped on making the game entirely. Instead, I devoted my time to sitting down and drafting up the games story, the flow of the game, the development of the world and even deciding on how the first game and the last would eventually tie into each other via another game in-between.

The game was originally posted up around 2007 or 2006 (I can’t remember any more) up on the website http://www.rpgmaker.net (RMN) (the original website for all helpful things related to the RPG Maker engines and others), I decided after almost  a full year of developing the game on paper and in word document, that I would pull the game down off of the site and re-post it up there once I had an actual decent looking game ready.

Finally it happened. The spring of 2010 the game was well enough created on paper and so forth that I could now place it into the engine itself; this started slowly at first, and then quickly began to take off, it was also around this time when I was given a suggestion by someone at RMN on how to come up with a name for my game. So, I took the name of the world the game takes place in and decided to also take what happens in the game (technically) and add that to the title. Therefore, Eriscadia: The Fall of Nations was officially born! The game still only has a few moments of playable glory, but so far, there is nothing about the game that I can say I dislike… True, it still has gone through a few changes, due to the lovely people over at RMN guiding me correctly and kindly, but the game is now where it is today due to all this hard work.

What will be in the game:

You can expect a lot of drama and adventuring, most of all. But, there will as well be the usual love triangle, the sad stories of past lives, and even betrayal! The game will more than likely remind a lot of people of a few different commercial game’s that are out there, such as some of the Final Fantasy series due to how some things are explained, perhaps even a few things from Chrono Crusade and many others. No, things were not taken directly from these games, but these were games I grew up playing, so a lot of them were my basis for the creation of this game back during its very raw period.

I have played with a lot of the scripts that can be placed into the engine and have discovered that very few of them work for me in the game; so you will see fancier things in the game such as being allowed to play as a 5-man-team instead of the normal 3 or 4 only allowed teams. There will as well be moments when you will have 6 members in your team due to picking up a straggler or being forced to take a new temporary partner through out the game.

As the game progress’ along, from book 1 all the way through to book 3, you will continuously find things that remind you of past things that have taken place and possibly give you chances to change things that you didn’t get the chance to change in the past.

You will get the chance to ride boats and fly in the sky using a zeppelin (eventually); you will as well get to ride on a floating city (if it works correctly, still in very early development).

 

And so…

There it is, the lengthy history of Eriscadia: The Fall of Nations.The game is well under way and is planned to have a short, btu still playable demo released around Thanksgiving longest time frame would be a Christmas release date. Life might extend that date, but those are the planned dates… Keep an eye out for it and thanks for all the great words of advice and encouragment! A very special “Thank You” though goes over to my sister-site of http://www.RPGMaker.net and all the very specially gifted people over there for the encouragement and advice given to me there.