Deus ex Machina

[Perihelion]

[insert shiny banner here]

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.
--William Shakespeare

~ UPDATES:

7-25-08: Not had much to show for a while because I've been working on the "soft" game elements, but I'm having second thoughts on the plot. See my post at the top of the second page.
7-13-08: Updated the features section with some stuff I forgot to include, plus a new idea. Read an article of Despain's last night and decided map items would be cool, so I'm including them in a manner of speaking. The features section is now a disorganized brain-dump, but I have stuff to do now, so it can wait.
7-12-08: Updated the screens, finally. It took me longer than I thought it would because I spent forever tweaking tiles. Now I gotta go work on some essays for school.
7-11-08: Here I am bitching about the lack of good SF resources when I have a lovely tileset that's almost perfect for my needs, which I wasn't using in favor of a mishmash of RTP and shitty rips from god knows what because...ummmm... ??? But anyway, I'm fixing the maps I showed before, and I'll post 'em when they're done. I also added a blurb about the title and finally wrote something in the credits.
7-9-08: Dug this up with the intent to actually work on it this time! Also, some random reporter guy insinuated himself into my story, so I'm gonna have to figure out how to work him in.

~

One or two of you may remember me posting this a number of months ago in EPD. Unfortunately, life intervened, but since I have time now, I intend to pick it up again. Hopefully I continue to have time, but that remains to be seen! I'm also hoping that making a topic will encourage me to work more assiduously on it, so...here it is! Feedback is, of course, much appreciated. I like constructive criticism. One thing, though: I appreciate whatever input you're willing to give, but it'd be nice to know whether I'm on the right track with some of the other things. As of this edit, most of the posts have been about the screens.

TITLE DISCLAIMER

The thing about the title is that 1. the game is based on something that already exists, which has had that name for a good three years, and 2. I am awful at naming things. My novels all have terrible titles, too. These are poor excuses, of course, but um, let me justify myself for a second. I picked the title because it's appropriate on several levels. One, there's something that could literally be called a god out of a machine; two, it's a little tongue-in-cheek because said thing seems like it'd be a textbook case of a deus ex machina, except it gets the party into hot water instead of out of it; and three, the game has a bit of a play motif, and the term originated with respect to Greek drama.

But while I understand all of that, other people go "wtf are you thinking" until I explain it, and if I have to explain it, there's a problem. I'll see if I can't come up with something better, but again, terrible at names. :P

Spoiler: Story

Revolution! Politics! Alien computer viruses!

The year is 2437, and the human race has left its cradle. Chief of Terra's off-world colonies is Arcadia, an Earthlike planet orbiting Alpha Centauri A, which has flourished in the centuries since its settlement. Now Arcadia has begun to chafe under Terra's taxes and stifling trade laws, and murmurs of revolution are spreading. Civil war threatens from another source as well: the strife between Arcadia's Houses, old, rich families who control most of Arcadia's economy and military and form its de facto government. As of late, their struggles for power threaten to tear the planet apart.

Arcadia's domestic situation worsens with the assassination of Edward and Jessica Adelin, the joint Heads of one of the four Great Houses, in a plot to put their inexperienced daughter, Mina, in power and goad her into launching an offensive against another House. Meanwhile, a virus known as WING.VIT rampages through the universe's data networks and causes artificial intelligence systems to rebel against their creators, particularly devastating Terra's space fleets. Terra is not oblivious to Arcadia's unrest, and it believes WING to be an Arcadian offensive and readies itself to retaliate--militarily. It means little to Terra's leadership that even the universe's most brilliant minds have failed to unravel the virus's origins or even its programming--but extraterrestrial ruins were recently unearthed on Arcadia's barren sister planet, Ceres, and there may be some connection…

Spoiler: Characters

Sorry this is so long!  For those of you who don't feel like reading all of this, each character has a short summary after the name. I'm adding sprites as I draw them.

Mina Adelin: Aristocrat, hacker, pianist. Jaded and unemotional but basically a good person. More or less.
Age: 26
Kinesis Type: Electrokinesis
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v325/ ... sprite.png[/imgzoom]
A Ph.D. candidate at one of Arcadia's most prestigious universities, Mina has a highly analytical mind, and she's a gifted programmer. She's very intelligent, and she can be suave and charming in a distant sort of way when she wants to be, but she tends to come off as emotionless. However, this can be an advantage: she keeps her head in a crisis when other people don't. Her ends-justify-means pragmatism is ruthless--there is little she will not do to accomplish her goals--and she has problems trusting people, which is perhaps unsurprising given her background. Though something of a political agitator in her youth (as much out of teenage rebellion as genuine loathing of the Houses' various slimy practices), she's grown cynical in recent years and currently has no interest in participating in politics. But circumstances being what they are, she gets on with the job and tries to use her influence to avert catastrophe and protect what she believes in. Her doctorate was to be in artificial intelligence engineering--specifically, the emergent properties of creativity in AI systems--and she also plays piano.

Zhi Xiang: Mina's best friend. Kindhearted but no-nonsense.
Age: 27
Kinesis Type: Cryokinesis
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v325/ ... sprite.png[/imgzoom]
The Xiang family was once considered a Great House, but its influence went the way of the dinosaur with the market crash of '88, and now few people even know the name. Zhi isn't bitter, though; on the contrary, it's probably why she's managed to escape the cutthroat cynicism most House children learn from the time they can talk, and she's glad of it. She's been Mina's closest friend since primary school. Her down-to-earth sensibility and sense of humor hide it sometimes, but she has a fundamental belief in basic human goodness, although it isn't a naïve one. She's seen enough bad in her life that her optimism has been thoroughly tempered, but it never loses its slow, quiet strength--she just doesn't put up with bullshit. She's very resilient, and when she gets knocked down, she picks herself up and keeps going with no hard feelings. She shares a university dorm with Mina and is currently studying medicine.

Cyrus Hunziker: Freelance reporter.
Age: 30
Kinesis Type: Pyrokinesis
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v325/ ... sprite.png[/imgzoom]
In-depth description coming…soon?!

Ellisin Celerous: Displaced heiress trying to regain her rightful position. Stubborn and unsubtle.
Age: 24
Kinesis Type: Cryokinesis

Although Ellisin has been the rightful heir to House Celerous since her parents were assassinated when she was four, the House's ward, Trent Perry, refused to surrender control of House affairs to her when she came of age, so she split from him to form her own faction, House Ellisin. However, she is not a subtle person--at all. She barrels through any problems that might arise with the delicacy of a cannon, and she tends to lock onto the first solution that comes to mind even if it's the most difficult one. Despite this, she isn't stupid; she can make that first approach work if she can foresee the immediate results of it, and she seems to do well in the long-term too despite not being one to look ahead much. She's stubborn to a fault, sometimes petty, and usually insensitive to the needs of others, but deep down, she'd like someone to regard her as a person rather than a symbol (or a brat). Though she was friends with Mina as a child, that ended abruptly when she learned that Mina's parents supposedly caused the deaths of hers. She appears to be behind the assassination of the Adelins.

Steven Kynes: Starship captain. Urbane, perceptive, and a good leader.
Age: 32
Kinesis Type: Cryokinesis

Captain of the Imperial Terran Starship Myrmidon, a kilometer-long battleship and flagship of the Third Terran Fleet. Reserved and urbane, he prefers diplomatic solutions to problems but has no qualms about using force when it's necessary. His loyalty lies with Terra and always will, but he owes his allegiance to her people rather than to her bureaucrats, and he's perceptive and honest enough to realize that sometimes there's a difference. Nonetheless, he sometimes finds himself faced with hard ethical decisions in his line of work, especially given the recent state of affairs.

Carmen Rosewell: Senator's daughter turned cop. Flippant and unsophisticated but wants to do the right thing.
Age: 27
Kinesis Type: Electrokinesis

Although Carmen is the daughter of one of Terra's most influential senators, you'd never guess it from meeting her. She always had her own ideas about what she wanted to do and who she wanted to be, and the years her parents spent trying to reform her left little impression; she's unrefined, tactless, and prone to practical jokes, likes brawls and comic books, and her apartment is a pigsty. Her strife with her parents culminated in a bitter fight that ended in her leaving Terra when she was eighteen. She eventually made her way to Skyhaven, a space station orbiting one of Arcadia's moons that's considered the armpit of the universe, and joined the police force. Despite having lived in Skyhaven for seven years, she's one of the most idealistic and innocent members of the party. She became a cop because it was the closest thing to a superhero, and while she's seen some ugly things in her line of work, the world is divided into good guys and bad guys for her. It disturbs her when life doesn't work like that, and she finds herself bewildered and out of her depth as the story progresses.

Alexander White: A college student. Rash but has a good heart.
Age: 19
Kinesis Type: None (no synchmod)

For the most part, Alex is a fairly normal college student: mediocre grades but truly excellent athletics, skilled with machines, no girlfriend. His father died when he was young, and he has an indifferent relationship with his mother. During the course of the story, he joins the crew of Mina's ship as mechanic. Though fundamentally a nice person, he's rash and quick to anger. He hates being used by people, and he'd like more friends, but something always seems to go wrong. His most important relationship is with Ryan, to whom he looks up to as an older brother/father.

Ryan Miller: Self-styled crusader with an unpleasant mission. Brave, tenacious, and more or less noble.
Age: 24
Kinesis Type: Pyrokinesis

Ryan raised himself on the streets of Seattle after his parents died and eventually made his way to Arcadia, hoping to find better opportunities there. Perry, the ward of House Celerous, took him in as a calculated PR move, and since then, Ryan has been doing odd jobs for the House. When the House split, he sided with Ellisin, believing in her right to the House. Lately, though, he's been having dreams he believes are divinely inspired telling him he must eliminate the Heads of the Houses for the good of Arcadia, and Mina Adelin is at the top of his list. While he's willing to do unpleasant things if he deems them necessary and has no patience for naïveté, he considers himself a very moral person, and his principles guide his actions. Still, he doesn't get along too well with authority. He's a brother/father figure to Alex.

Conner Phillips: Smuggler. Likes his money, but otherwise is easygoing and playful to a fault.
Age: 26
Kinesis Type: Telekinesis

Conner is the captain of the Imperfect Retribution, a massive floating junkheap salvaged from somewhere that's peopled by him, two friends, several sinister kittens, and an AI named Bob. As a trader/smuggler and part-time mercenary, Conner's primary motivation is money, although not really because of greed; he just needs the stuff to keep his ship afloat. Generally speaking, Conner is incredibly laid back and refuses to take even the gravest situations seriously. He exudes a bright-eyed, childlike innocence in everything he does, but this is deceiving; he's a hard bargainer and an efficient captain. He likes to think of himself as reasonably witty and clowns around a lot, but he sometimes goes too far. He's completely unaffected by gore, and his sense of humor can get disurbingly morbid without him really being aware of it.

Spoiler: Features

I'm planning to use a modified version of the default battle system that incorporates neural implants called synchronization modules, the hacking thereof, skills and augmentations revolving around them, and nanokinesis [in a nutshell, programmable "magic" (gah, I hate using that word) that runs on synchmods]. There will also hopefully be a skill/augment programming system, a custom menu of some sort, some of the standard prettification scripts, etc. More detail in the gameplay section.

I will be including kinesis abilities that have field effects and must be used to complete puzzles, open new paths, etc. Since use of these abilities depends on the kinesis types in your active party, some/most dungeons will have more than one path available; however, if you want to get the treasure in the other branch(es), party change points at the beginning and end of dungeons make it fairly easy to get access to different abilities. I'm also thinking of including a Xenosaga-esque simulator system that lets you revisit old dungeons to get items/cutscenes in areas unlocked by abilities you get later, but I don't want to outright jack it, and I can't think of another way to do it. Regular backtracking isn't really possible with the plot.

I'll also utilize a universal level system so that characters outside of your party are exactly as strong as characters in it. This makes switching your party around and tailoring it for specific situations easy; you'll be able to form your party around hacking, kinesis, or physical damage depending on what's effective at the moment, or making sure you can heal statuses in a dungeon that uses lots of status moves, or using specific debuffs that a certain boss is weak to, etc. The ability to equip skills and modules helps you adapt to different situations, and most characters are viable in more than one role. (For example, Mina's primary offense is hacking, but she can do kinesis attacks on groups of enemies with her shell gun and has other crowd control abilities; Zhi heals, but she's the second best synch damager after Mina, so you might want to put someone else on healing if you're using a hacking strategy; Kynes is the strongest kinesis damager, but he can heal the most HP after Zhi; and so on.) In general, you should get your ass kicked if you rush into battle and blindly mash attack, or even blindly stick to one strategy; using different parties and different approaches from dungeon to dungeon will be to your advantage.

Speaking of dungeons, FF6 does a neat thing in that each dungeon is different. In one, your party is overpowered guys in badass mech armor; in another, you have to protect a certain character; in another, you split your party into three and do a mini-TBS thing; and in another place, your party splits up and each character does his or her own thing for a while. These are cool and keep the gameplay diverse and interesting, and I'd like to incorporate stuff kinda like that if I can. I don't have a lot of concrete ideas for it right now, but I'm gonna try to come up with some.

Also thinking I'm going to have non-random battles, but we'll see if you get enough fights that way.

Spoiler: Gameplay

The original aspects of DeM's gameplay mostly revolve around the use of neural implants called synchronization modules. In addition to the features listed below, every character will have a unique skill set involving both kinesis attacks and other skills. Due to balance issues, it looks like I'm going to be using a maximum of three characters in the party instead of four.

Feedback is appreciated, at any rate. Since this looks like a lot of work, I'm going to prioritize things and do this in stages so I can drop the less important aspects if I have to.

Nanokinesis is the manipulation of one's surroundings via clouds of nanomachines released into the air, and control of it is one of the abilities granted by a synchmod. This can take many different forms, but it tends to fall into one of three main types, for one of which everyone has a natural affiliation: pyrokinesis, cryokinesis, and electrokinesis. The exact behavior of kinesis depends on the program modules currently loaded into synch memory, and each type has both offensive and defensive programs.

As synchmods are connected to the modern equivalent of the Internet, they're vulnerable to hacking attempts, which give the assailant unmitigated access to the victim's mind if successful. This is extremely painful for the victim and, left unchecked, capable of killing.

Every character has a number of synch points that represents the defensive capabilities of his or her synchmod: that is, resistance to hacking attempts and certain kinesis attacks. These regenerate over time as antivirus programs and the like combat attacks. If a character reaches 0 SP, one of two things happens: if the assailant is a hacker in the process of hacking, the character is instantly KOed, and if not, all additional synch damage is translated into a comparatively large amount of physical damage until SP is restored.

The hacking skill allows Mina or an enemy to initiate a mental duel of sorts. The assailant's defense falls considerably, and s/he can perform no other action until getting KOed, succeeding in the hack, or breaking off the attack. Every turn, the assailant and the target do synch damage to each other based on their synch attack and defense stats, although the assailant gets an attack bonus to compensate for being unable to take other action. (Enemy bosses are slowed down rather than incapacitated.) A character being attacked slows down and cannot initiate a hack on another character.

My current intent is for kinesis, synch skills, and hacking to drain energy from equippable battery packs, which would make SP basically function as another HP gauge.

Synchronization modules regulate the behavior of general-purpose nanomachines embedded in the body. Therefore, instead of equipment, characters in DeM equip modules to their synchmods that cause the nanomachines to behave in different ways. There are three different types of modules: physical, synch, and kinesis. Modules boost their respective attack/defense stats or HP/SP, and some give characters additional kinesis skills (called programs) or other attributes like status/element resistance. Kinesis modules can only be equipped by characters with the correct kinesis type, of course.

Each synchmod has a set number of slots that can be upgraded in shops or with items found in dungeons, and stronger skills and modules use more slots. The operating system equipped determines whether those slots are allocated to physical, synch, or kinesis modules. Some also provide extra abilities or other bonus attributes.

Characters with the programming skill can use consumable datachips of some kind to create consumable items (common), modules (uncommon), skills (rare), and OSes (rare). Probably antivirus programs as well if I decide those should be equippable. Some of these can also be found or bought in stores, but some can only be made with programming.

Skill Points: Upon level up, characters receive a number of skill points that can be invested in innate skills. Ergo, the number of skills you learn is small; instead of learning a more powerful attack, you power up one that already exists. Since I've made all the characters more versatile, though, I might cut this so you don't have to lock yourself into one set of skills.
Shields: Every character can equip an energy shield, which provides a large boost to defense, synch defense, and/or kinesis defense. However, shields drain EP at a high rate when activated. They can be toggled on and off during battle.
Weapons: Instead of boosting your attack stat (modules do that), weapons have different effects. For example, if you equip Carmen with knuckles, she can use single-target martial arts moves; give her a riot gun, however, and her main attack switches to smaller multi-target damage. Weapons can also add kinesis types or status effects, and you rarely or never get more powerful versions of the same item; most or all of the weapons will be useful throughout the game.

Something tells me I should probably start learning Ruby.

Spoiler: Screenshots

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v325/ViridianMoon/1.jpg[/img]
Title screen, for use with (she who is not to be named)'s awesome script. I like it 'cause it's shiny, but does a 3D title screen look out of place with the rest of the game?

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v325/ ... dem001.png[/img]
Walking down to the beach.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v325/ ... m002-2.png[/img]
Updated version of the dorm common room; original is here for comparison. The upper right corner is kinda empty-looking, I know; I wanna add a sideways couch, but I failed at drawing it, so I guess I'll figure it out at some point. Does the pink tile look okay? It's from k10k.net, so it wasn't meant to be used this way. Also, the carpet/floor/whatever on the top is there because the parapet thingy looks like a screen if I use a floor tile with regular edges. It looked fine with the wood I had before, but wood would look odd now. And does my holographic projector thing look as bad as I think it does?

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v325/ ... m003-2.png[/img]
Updated version of Mina and Zhi's room; original is here for comparison. Does the balcony look okay without a door, and should it have something under it?

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v325/ ... dem006.png[/img]
Does the building look retarded, and if so, how do I fix it?

Spoiler: To-Do List

My near-future goals build towards releasing some kind of demo. It will probably be short and feature none of the serious modifications I intend to make at some point, but it'll at least give people an idea of where I'm going with this. After I get something substantial in the way of game, I'll start working on the battle system, menu, etc.

This is mainly for my own reference, blah, blah.

- finish sprites for the major characters that appear in the demo (need to do: Zhi poses, finish Cyrus and Ellisin)
- get some placeholder portraits, maybe Facemaker
- finish and revise script through the demo
- develop Cyrus's character and figure out how he works into the overall plot
- resolve issues present in the original story, primarily lack of a strong antagonist
- map Caenn; finish mapping Kair and the Adelin manor
- do dungeon and puzzle design for the first dungeon
- finalize map-usable skills and put them in
- make some nice gory tiles, also corpse sprites
- finish Ceres tileset
- create additional graphics, including Universalis logo and hacking animation
- make intro shinier

- outline the rest of plot; make decisions on major cuts and additions
- finish sprites, including emotions and poses, for all main characters
- make battlers and portraits; either get someone to draw them or pixel them myself (animated pixel portraits might be cool)
- figure out what I'm doing about spaceship graphics (maybe steal from EVE?)
- start learning Ruby

- script battle system modifications
- script item creation system
- create custom menu and graphics

Spoiler: Credits

The full list will appear with the demo. However, I'd like to thank KiearaPhoenix/SakuraPhoenix for her amazing SF tileset, which is exactly what I needed and basically made this project possible. And of course thanks go to Will the Great, Turducken, EmPleh, Frozensky, and lasthero for writing the original version of this with me, because without them the story would be much, much less than it is.

 

[Despain]

title screen and premise had promise, inconsistent rtp graphics ruined it

 

[Perihelion]

The problem with making a SF game is that resources are nonexistent, so I've had to splice together whatever I can find. I'm not a great tile artist, so I can't draw everything myself. *shrug* With that in mind, unless you have an alternative that doesn't involve hours and hours of pixeling, I'm content with the way it looks.

Edit: Well, I meant in a general sense. I can certainly look at it again and improve some of the issues with consistency, though. Sorry if I got a little defensive. :P I guess I spent so long looking for neat things to stick in that I forgot to think about how it all looked together!

 

[ebhz.Ash.4rm]

Stone stairs in a room with wooden, tiled and carpeted floor. Would an interior designer really mix the three, or does Mina have no sense of style at all.

3D title screen is really out of place too.

Also if you can't get the resources and rush production because you don't have the patience to hire a spriter or try to at least make what you need by frankenspriting, the game will look very awkward. There really shouldn't be stone steps in a house that's as advanced as the other screenshots make it look.

 

[Perihelion]

Stone stairs in a room with wooden, tiled and carpeted floor. Would an interior designer really mix the three, or does Mina have no sense of style at all.

3D title screen is really out of place too.

Also if you can't get the resources and rush production because you don't have the patience to hire a spriter or try to at least make what you need by frankenspriting, the game will look very awkward. There really shouldn't be stone steps in a house that's as advanced as the other screenshots make it look.

Thanks; I'll work on that when I get home.

 

[ebhz.Ash.4rm]

The stairs, getting more graphics or a new title screen?

 

[Perihelion]

The stairs, getting more graphics or a new title screen?

The stairs specifically, and I'll look at the title screen as well. I'm fond of it, but I'll agree it doesn't go extremely well with the game. As for graphics, I've scoured the Internet for SF resources, so unless I draw more, there won't be many forthcoming. I need to do some of that at some point anyway for stuff I couldn't find, but I doubt I'm going to be able to draw graphics for the entire game. I can probably add a few things myself to make it look better, though. Such as stairs, and I should probably reshade some of the bookshelves so they look the same as the others while I'm at it.

 

[Devon Jacobs]

Your mapping needs work, there are places that are inconsistent. Such as the castle exterior where the plants are planted on the road. In the house middle shot, a paper is floating next to the table. In the top room, the couches are blocked by the table, and the bunkbeds look like one is on the wall and there is no way to get up. The sliding door is completely out of place as well as the desk next to it. The backyard looks awkward as you cant tell what is holding the tree up. An lastly the hologram moniters have nothing supporting them.

 

[Perihelion]

Thanks for the comments, Devon; the issues have been noted. I appreciate the input, everyone! I'm going to work on the maps now and post new screens when they're done.

Edit: You know, upon actually sitting down and looking at these maps, I have to wonder what the hell I was thinking when I made them. It was at least six months ago, so I don't remember at all, and I guess I stopped paying attention to them once I got used to them, but... I have this lovely SF tileset by kiearaphoenix that has most of what I need to make a good-looking SF game, possibly the only such SF tileset on the Internet, and I used mismatched bits of RTP and rips from god knows what? Did I get that tileset after I mapped these and forget to change it, or what? I have no idea, but man, I feel like a moron now.

 

[Glitchfinder]

I'm fine with the screens, etc. (that really never bothers me anyway). What really bothers me is the name. I mean, if you translate the latin, the title of the game is God from a Machine: God from a Machine. Why do that to yourself? I mean, at least come up with something that doesn't repeat. And, although you may know what Deus ex Machina means, do you really want to imply that your game will have a lot of unexplained plot twists? (Think of the original Andromeda strain movie, where an unstoppable virus that kills people in under a minute, and evolves within seconds to beat any strategy to subdue it, simply mutates to the point where it no longer harms humans) The only reason Deus Ex Machina exists is because some writers have a tendency to write their characters into an airtight steel barrel about to implode on the bottom of the ocean, with the nearest vehicle being an obliterated submersible from a shipreck exploration team. (not always literally, but I think you get my point. Think about how the Yu-Gi-Oh! anime had a tendency to make up new rules or cards whenever they put Yugi into a really tight spot)

 

[Perihelion]

I'm fine with the screens, etc. (that really never bothers me anyway). What really bothers me is the name. I mean, if you translate the latin, the title of the game is God from a Machine: God from a Machine. Why do that to yourself? I mean, at least come up with something that doesn't repeat. And, although you may know what Deus ex Machina means, do you really want to imply that your game will have a lot of unexplained plot twists? (Think of the original Andromeda strain movie, where an unstoppable virus that kills people in under a minute, and evolves within seconds to beat any strategy to subdue it, simply mutates to the point where it no longer harms humans) The only reason Deus Ex Machina exists is because some writers have a tendency to write their characters into an airtight steel barrel about to implode on the bottom of the ocean, with the nearest vehicle being an obliterated submersible from a shipreck exploration team. (not always literally, but I think you get my point. Think about how the Yu-Gi-Oh! anime had a tendency to make up new rules or cards whenever they put Yugi into a really tight spot)

The subtitle was supposed to be more of a translation for people who don't know what it means and kind of imply I'm emphasizing the literal translation and not the literary device, but yeah, it is a little awkward. I'll change the thread title. :P

The thing about the title is that 1. the game is based on something that already exists, which has had that name for a good three years, and 2. I am awful at naming things. My novels all have terrible titles, too. These are poor excuses, of course, but um, let me justify myself for a second. I picked the title because it's appropriate on several levels. One, there's something that could literally be called a god out of a machine; two, it's a little tongue-in-cheek because said thing seems like it'd be a textbook case of a deus ex machina, except it gets the party into hot water instead of out of it; and three, the game has a bit of a play motif, and the term originated with respect to Greek drama.

But while I understand all of that, other people go "wtf are you thinking" until I explain it, and if I have to explain it, there's a problem. I'll see if I can't come up with something better, but again, terrible at names. :P

In other news, the screens are still in progress! I hope to get one or two new ones up tonight, but my school requires an essay evaluation for incoming freshmen, so I gotta work on that for the next few days.

 

[Mustardy85]

You wanted to know what was so retarded about that building? Here it comes...

http://i246.photobucket.com/albums/gg88 ... stakes.jpg[/img]

RED : The patern of the windows is too repetive. Try a different pattern. Something like Bottom layer is all Curtains while top layer is empty. Or something else to put your flavour into it.

GREEN : All the green circles indicate that you did not layer the tilesets right. e.g. Bottom Left of the map, there is a rock tile that is being overlaped by that plant tile.

YELLOW : It's simply way too symetricle...

PINK : There is white all around the overheadplant tile... WTH?

 

[Perihelion]

Red: Sure, I'll look at that when I have a chance.
Green: Whoops, guess I missed those! Normally I find and fix layering issues like that, but another pair of eyes catches stuff you don't.
Yellow: The idea is that it's landscaped or something, but it doesn't really look that way since I didn't go too far with it. I'll do something with it, anyway.
Pink: That's the way the autotile is. I'll see if she made an updated one or add some brown in. I think that's what you meant, anyway--that the plant doesn't appear to be in dirt?

Anyway, thanks! I'll work on it once I finish school stuff. The biggest thing I was concerned about with that map is the style jarring with the interiors, though. It's supposed to be the exterior of the dorm in the previous screenshots because I don't have anything that works better, but it doesn't go particularly well. Wondering if it needs shading, etc., and if it looks too present-day for the interior. I should probably put a big window in the dorm room and figure out some way to show the balcony, too.

 

[dadevvtsvre]

Personally, I think the yellow things look fine. By the way, I think some of your features are really neat. The gameplay looks quite solid as well.

 

[ragnaroa]

Deus ex Machina? God from the Machine? Nice use of Latin. HIgh 5 :thumb: And I agree with Glitch, the title is redundant. How about explaining what it means in a different manner. I love the idea of the battle system, and I hope the DFB will be modified enough that it has something more to offer than the original DFB (in terms of eye candy and otherwise). I hope you know what I mean. Originality is respected in these parts, even though I personally don't mind. Put your heart and soul into this one, its got potential. Oh, and yeah, mapping.

 

[Perihelion]

Dadevester: Thanks!

ragnaroa: Woo, someone didn't hate the title! But yeah, a subtitle that isn't a translation might be a good idea; I'll see if I can come up with something. And I'm not sure what I'm doing with the battle system yet in terms of aesthetics. I entertain ideas of sideview with battle sprites, but it's a hell of a lot of work and not that important, so it'll be one of the last things I do if I do it. I'm hoping that the addition of some of my mechanics will differentiate it from the default, and I can at least tweak the GUI. And I guess I could always look for help once I have some game.

Anyway, thanks for the comments! :D

 

[seven]

No door to the balcony means people can see into the house, which means total lack of privacy. :x

 

[Perihelion]

No door to the balcony means people can see into the house, which means total lack of privacy. :x

Well sure, but where am I gonna get a sideways door? Uhh...hmm, maybe if I got a regular hinged one and just reversed the animations or something. I dunno, I'll have to play with it and see how it looks.

 

[seven]

A nice effect would be using your wall autotile, then just have it so that when the player presses space next to it, a door SE is played, the player turns on through, walks under the tile and onto the balcony, and then turn through off, and same on the other side. The player will hardly tell the difference.

 

[Perihelion]

A nice effect would be using your wall autotile, then just have it so that when the player presses space next to it, a door SE is played, the player turns on through, walks under the tile and onto the balcony, and then turn through off, and same on the other side. The player will hardly tell the difference.

Oh, that's a good idea! Thanks; I'll do that.