[FULL] Bloodsphere v.1.1

[Alex898]

Demo v.2 Available: 3+ Hours of Gameplay
Demo v.3 Available: 4+ Hours of Gameplay, glitches fixed
Complete Game v.1 Available: 25+ Hours of Gameplay

Story

On the continent of Sera, power has been evenly split between three nations
for decades. Reins, an industrious nation in the north. Balkia, a shining star
in the deserts in the south, and finally The Nobungian Union, a group of
allied tribal states in the east. War raged between all three nations, until
the Nobungians buckeled under pressure and agreed to peace. Despite that,
the feud between Reins and Balkia has continued for an additional 20 years.
Few people today even remember what caused the war to begin with, making it
a pointless struggle. Both the Leaders of Reins and Balkia are too bitter to
seek a ceasefire, and will not stop until the other nation is destroyed. While
they slowly destroy each other, the Nobungians sit and wait.


Our story begins with a young Reinian soldier named Lucian, injured on
the battle field from a stray arrow to the leg. Lucian has been sent home,
where he will finally be reunited with his love, Kira. Kira is the daughter
of one of the most respected men in Reins, Darius. He is the Head Captain
of the Knights of Rein and has held this position since the mysterious
death of the last man to fill this position, Gabriel.


The very same night of Lucian’s return, a sinister force has returned to
Reins, one that was thought to have been destroyed long ago. A force
that seeks vengeance upon Darius, and will drag both Kira and Lucian
into conflict. Lucian and Kira’s reunion is going to be cut short, and
Lucian is about to be thrust upon a dangerous journey. A man who thought
he was finally free from fighting is about to learn that his struggle has
only just begun.

Features

-Sideview Battle System and some special battle features, including being able to steal items from enemies
-Lockpicking Minigame for getting to secret areas or opening certain chests
-Large Party System, with up to 8 members total in the final game
-Multiple Sidequests that can allow you to receive secret weapons and even a secret Party Member.
-Stealth scenes
-Deep Storyline with a unique and varied cast of Characters, as well as some unexpected plot twists
-25 Hours of Gameplay! Over 500 maps and 125 monsters.
-Half of the music is non-RTP, as well as many graphics
-Lots of Puzzles
-Learning Curve, with easy battles early on and very difficult and strategic battles later in the game.
-'Easy Mode' for new rpg players. Allows you to skip battles so you can progress the plot.

Characters

Spoiler

Lucian is the main protagonist of Bloodsphere. A Reinian Soldier who always looks to do what is right, even if it doesn’t concern him. He is not a chosen one or the son of a great hero, he is merely an unlucky man that has been thrown into the conflict against his will. All he truly wants is to be with his love, Kira.

Sirena has had a bit of a mystical and mysterious life. Her parents were murdered when she was a child by bandits and she was adopted by a priest named Silas. She was raised by him in white magic, and is very skilled in healing arts. However, she is a very sheltered girl and tends to be very shy, especially around new people. She is very nervous and just wants to live a life of peace, but like Lucian she is drawn into the conflict.

Karoes is a bit of an enigma. The man was thought to have been killed by the knight Darius many years ago, but he recently returned under mysterious circumstances. No one truly knows what his goals are, even those that are being manipulated by him. The source of his power comes from a relic he has called The Bloodsphere, an ancient gem as mysterious as Karoes himself is.

Kira is the daughter of Sir Darius and she is also Lucian’s lover, the two having known each other since they were children. She is a good spirited girl who has been distraught over the last few years, worried about Lucian after he joined the army. She is afraid she will never see Lucian again due to all the danger he has become involved in.

Marco is a knight of Reins. He is known as being a cold and tough person, rarely showing emotion, making him a near perfect soldier. He is always seeking ways to further his existence and his status in Reins, and deep down he vies to be Ruler of the Land.

Aireon has had a lot to live up to as the daughter of a former Reinian War Hero. Having grown up from a privileged background, many believe Aireon to be spoiled and stuck up, and she is known to harbor a strong and sometimes irrational hatred against Balkians. But beneath her tough exterior, she is someone who always believes to do what is right that follows a strict honor code, not wanting to disgrace her family name.

Erik is a bandit who resides in the Badlands, robbing anyone who tries to cross the desolate area. He is known to be a complete joker as well as a womanizer. Although he commits crimes and steals, there is more to the man than meets the eye. A bloody past led him to the life he lives today.

Zane is a young soldier, but is well renowned for his brain and brawn. He is an adept swordsman but at the same time is very smart tactically. This lead to him being promoted multiple times, making him a prodigy among the Reinian Army. He is also good friends with Lucian.

Lily is a teenage girl who travels all across the land, seeking adventure as well as making new friends. She is fairly talented in spells and magic and has a much deeper knowledge of the mystical arts than one would expect someone her age to have. Despite her sincere appearance and good intentions, she knows more then she lets on.

Drake is Lily’s older brother and from Nobunga. He is considered to be mentally unstable and has murdered many people over the years. No one knows why he commits his crimes or who he really serves, but the lone swordsman may prove to be a bigger threat than anyone expects him to be.

Cyrus is one of the most powerful and notorious mercenaries in the world, many men have perished or been arrested by his hand. There are only two things he cares about in the world: Money and Revenge. He will do anything for the right price, but if you cross him or make him angry, he will not stop until you are dead.

Screenshots

Spoiler

Lucian picking up some supplies

Reinian Knights searching for Lucian

Sideview Battle System

Lockpicking Minigame

Sidequest in which Lucian is hired to protect a ship from pirates

The Balkian Desert

A climatic showdown

The Border Mountains

Splitting up? It's a good thing you have more then 4 party members!

The Nobungian Forest

The only way to get the prize inside the chest is to complete the puzzle!

A battle later in the game.

The prince having a secret meeting

Even more old ruins...

Meeting the world's worst guard.

It would be a long drop...

Download Demo v.3
http://www.mediafire.com/?yymlmw1aw45
Download Bloodsphere Complete: v.1.1
http://rpgmaker.net/games/2269/downloads/2398/


Notes
I have been working on this game on and off for the last year. I managed to fix all of the major scripting errors I had so the game is alot better now.

Please feel free to leave any feedback on what you liked or what I can improve for the final version of the game. I hope you enjoy what I have so far.

Progress: 100% complete!

Credits
Battle System: Enu, Atoa, Kylock, Cairn
UMS: ccoa
Party changer: Dargor
Actor face: Jens009
Lockpicking: Eilei
Character Bios: Truthful Tiger, Italian Stallion.

 

[RadethDart]

Wow, I must say that this game was very interesting! I would really like it if you could finish it though ><.

 

[zchin]

I don't like the mapping you're doing, I don't see why someone would make a boat that shape (Screenshot 5), and I though that faceset in the second screenshot was from Naramura, and in the second screenshot, again, behind the crystal, there is a missing tile, it looks like your being lazy. In the fifth screenshot, again, there are swords right above the bed head! *Ship go into storm* ehh, doesn't look to pretty, (if you get what I mean), If you don't, I mean that the ship will move and shake maybe moving the swords out of place. And the chest at the bottom of the beds look like you stuffed something big in there, maybe a................ Body?
Anyway, I hoped this helped

Thank you and have a great day.

 

[Alex898]

Uh well the tile behind the crystal isn't empty, the crystal just blocks off the bottom of it so you can't see it.

 

[MCsephiroth13]

The only bad thing in this game seems to your mapping IMHO
Other than that, the events are great, story is great, and that lock picking system looks fantastic

 

[So fist]

Okay gave it about an hour and a half play through. Ran through all the way to chapter three. Here are my helpful notes.

Maps
Your maps would benefit from planning before making them. You do a lot of random haphazard clutter. Who has a bunch of random barrels in the middle of their house? Also you have too much symmetry. When was the last time you saw flowers growing wildly in a checkerboard pattern, or trees in straight lines. All said maps do get a bit better as the game progresses. Your outdoor maps also have open edges. Don't do that. Close them off. It never looks right that way. Your interiors have a tendency to be too big and empty. Also you seem to like to stuff your npc's into one room cluttered houses with a bunch of barrels in the middle of them for no apparent reason. Which goes back to my first point, planning. Before you map think of the rooms you want to have, their layout and function. Consider who lives in this room and what sort of person they are. When it comes to nature consider the climate. Arid? Temperate? Summer? Winter? And start thinking in terms of how the area is used, and what grows their. Typically growth occurs in pockets that reflect where their is adequate supply of sunlight, nutrient, and water to support the plants. Plants typically will be surrounded by a few like kinds since seed normally drops nearby if not right next to them. When you start thinking in those terms and planning before you start you'll start producing more believable maps.

One last note on the maps. Don't use the screen tint overlay to recolor a map. It looks terrible that way. You're better off getting a recolored version of that tileset by requesting one or doing it yourself (which is pretty simple if you know how to use tools in gimp or photoshop.

Battle
Battle system works alright. Pretty generic. I do like that the enemies react to your leveling, I.E. they run away when you are basically too much for them. However this serves as an exploit since whether I kill the enemy or watch them run, I am still awarded the same experience and gold. Which means fights with creatures you've met that threshold with are quicker and way easier and give enough reward to use them to be over levelled in the next area and just walk through the game. Which is what I'm doing. The skills work well though i haven't seen many. So far Eye Poke has been a total boss destroyer as after using it the victim can't touch me for like four turns or so. The white mages heal skill is way better than the minor healing potion.

Items
Which leads to items. Potion of minor healing is over priced and worthless. It makes way more sense to buy minor sp healing potions for the same price. Those potions purchase me two Healing casts with the white mage making it a no brainer. Hell two minor healing potions don't even equal one cast of heal with the white mage. Make the item cheaper or fix it. Also I don't really notice much of a difference with purchasing the first armors in the game. I got hit just as often and for the same damage as I was when I had none. No reason to buy it.

The remainder is spoilered because it will potentially carry story spoilers.

Spoiler: Characters and Story

Okay to start off your main character is wooden and ill defined. Making him wholly generic and unremarkable. Really he's being punished by the storytelling style which is a lot more narration and telling than it is showing. I know that he loves Kira, because he tells everybody that but that shows me nothing. While it gives him a reason to quest it doesn't give me a reason on its own to particularly care. She might as well be a crystal it would make no difference because I haven't embraced him or her as a character. To put it short you kidnapped her way too soon, and you need to create moments where relationships and personality are shown to the player. That's the key to good storytelling. Creating authentic feeling moments where characters show their guts. The characters may benefit more concept work in these regards. Its fine to work in archetypes Lucian is a by the book gentlemen and Erik is free spirited foil to Lucian's conservative reservations or whatnot. But you should try and figure out ways to show off those aspects of their personalities into ways that govern their behavior: manners of speech, desires, conflicts, ect.

There are also way too many cutscenes at the beginning. It would help immensely if there was some real gameplay in between, and as stated previously your main plot will only be strengthened by giving the player a chance to get to know Kira's and Lucian's relationship.

Some looming logic questions threaten the plot. How is it that Karoes can be infamous and yet only the elders of the society know of him. Why such secrecy? Why does Aireon not search the monastery, is she incompetent and or retarded? If not you should figure out a way for her to not search it and save face. What the hell is Marco left in charge of? At first I thought it was just the prison but now he's commanding everybody? Why does everyone just believe in Marco lies? It seems like everything he's doing is just given to him at face value with little question. He just got the job for christ sakes. And if everybody believes Kira's dad is a traitor, why would you trust the traitor's appointee to head order giver and blowhard? Anyway just some thoughts.

Puzzles
The tumbler puzzle is nice. I've only played one but considering that I can keep playing it until I solve it with no consequence I foresee issues. If the puzzles are repetitive in the sense that nothing ever changes in the puzzles other than the number of tumblers it will get old fast. Since I can just spend all day on these puzzles you should have features that add to the difficulty curve. One innovation when it comes time to add to the difficulty curve could be doing things like having one tumbler effect other tumblers. Like every time you lift one it brings the other down one. Or every time you lift one more than twice consecutively it drops one down completely. ECT.

So far no bugs other than the exploitable feature found. It's not broken, which is a good start. Now you just got to make it immersive which is the trick of it.

 

[Alex898]

Wow! Thanks for the indepth notes Captain Murphy. The mapping I am definetly going to touch up, I think it gets better the further you get but alot of the earlier maps do need to be improved in retrospect. I will keep your tips in mind as I work on the maps.

As for the battle system thing, that is a very nice find! None of my testers or anyone else that had played my demo noticed the XP problem when enemies run away, which is something that I am really going to need to figure out how to fix (for obvious reasons). Its kind of funny cuz I made it so the enemies escaped so that people can't completely overlevel but now it ended up that doing that just makes it easier to over level. Eye Poke actually for me ended up being one of the most balanced skills in the game. While it can completely screw up bosses or enemies for a few turns if it blinds them, there is a chance when you do it the boss won't be blinded, and since the skill does less damage when it connects than a normal attack it makes it risky to use the Eye Poke skill cuz you can end up wasting your turn (and 200 SP).

As for the potions, part of the trouble I had was balancing them with the later portions in the game. Early on they are not all that useful, but as you get later in the game Sirena's healing spell becomes alot more inferior to the potions which heal 25% of the total HP whereas Sirena's spell only heals a set number of HP, so when your party members have thousands of HP themselves the potions become much better. I originally had them alot cheaper, but found that once you got further into the game you had more than enough gold to buy a huge amount of potions. The other major advantage potions has is anyone can use them. For my party system, I have it so you can only have four in battle at a time and you can't change once the battle starts. Later on you will get battlers who have more health and attack than Sirena, so the player may choose to put them in the party instead of her. This makes it so that in order to heal in battle one will have to use the potions to do it. For the first few chapters though, I'll have to find a way to further balance this.

Story comments

Spoiler

For the relationship between Lucian and Kira, much of it is going to be revealed in flashbacks as you go on through the game, which actually is true for much of the plot. The main reason I had the game start with her kidnapping was to kind of give the player kind of an incentive to start going. I have played a few RPG Maker games in which it just plops you into that starting village without any real goals or boring goals that involve gathering items and it gets boring fast. That being said, you aren't the first person to say I should improve the relationship between Lucian and Kira in the beggining, so most likely I will end up eventually going back redoing how the prologue works.

And as for a few plot questions:

It's really hard to divulge alot of the information regarding Karoes since most of the details about him aren't revealed until a long time later in the game, but the gist of it is that he is a knight who attempted to kill the knight captain of Reins in secret around 20 years ago. Formerly a well respected soldier and war hero, the details of what happened were covered up to not ruin his reputation after he was seemingly killed by Darius. Because of that, not everyone knows the truth regarding him.

Aireon not searching the monestary is actually a big problem. I wanted to introduce the knight characters in that scene and to also give the heroes a greater sense of urgency; as well as show that Aireon and Marco do not necessarily see eye to eye. But it is kind of a plot hole that Aireon would not search the monestary. I think I will redo that scene and have Lucian + Sirena hide instead just so Aireons comes off as not being incompetent (since I actually didn't want her to appear to be that way)

Marco is supposed to be kind of in a General sort of position. The Prison is in the Castle of Reins which is also the headquarters for the knights, so he commands the army as well as oversees the Prison. As for why no one really questions him, alot of that goes into developing Aireon's character. Unlike the others, she questions his actions and doesn't completely trust him, that is what sets her apart from Natasha, Edgar and the others. Reins is supposed to be a corrupt nation, which makes it easy for people like Marco to get away with things.

Ironically enough, locks that you have to pick later in the game do have it so when you lift one it brings another one down, the first few locks are incredibly simple and easy to allow players to get used to feature.

 

[So fist]

You could fix the potion by having it operate on a common event with a conditional branch that operates in this manner:

#Variables
quarterhp == .25 * Actor's HP
default_restore == 400 (or whatever you think would be fair)

#conditions
if
quarterhp is less than or equal to default_restore
restore actor hp by default_restore
end if

if
quarterhp is greater than default_restore
restore actor hp by quarterhp
end if

 

[Alex898]

Hey guys! I am still working on this game and I managed to fix ALL of the major glitches i was having with my scripts! To celebrate, I uploaded a new version of the demo and have some new screenshots up, enjoy!

 

[Alex898]

Hello all, I just thought I would give you all an update since I haven't posted in a while. The game is now 75% complete and I have uploaded some new screenshots. I expect the final version to be ready in the fall, and if anyone would like to be a beta tester for it just let me know.

 

[Alex898]

Hey guys! The finished version of Bloodsphere has now been released, check it out!

 

[regi]

Hey, looks like you spent quite a bit of effort on this. Completed projects are always something to be proud of, and from the diverse areas in the screenshots, it looks like this is a long one at that.

That said, people have said this before, but it needs repeating: mapping definitely could use work. Many areas are too linear or too open, and some screen tints (the bright green and blue) just burn the eyes. I would definitely recommend Tindy's Mapping Guidelines and the Mapping Improvement Thread. I'm sure, with a bit of effort, your aesthetics will improve dramatically.