Novostrana (v0.30 - 14th May 2010)

[CountVlad]

Overview

Novostrana is a Fantasy RPG currently under development by RPG Magic.

In Novostrana you will meet many unique characters, travel through the vast wilderness, forests and marshes and fight many enemies. You will also be able to trade, perform alchemy, work with companions and participate in many more activities.

Novostrana will be free to download and play. No strings attached!

Feature List

• Over 80 unique areas to explore.
  
• Side Quests with many risks and rewards.
  
• Every person in the game has their own unique story to tell.
  
• Real-time on-map battles.
  
• Dynamic weather, lighting and time of day.
  
• Characters will do different things and be in different places in the game world depending on many factors, including time of day and weather.
  
• Dynamic Character Development where you choose how to upgrade your character.
  
• Your character actually wears the armour that you equip!
  
• Create items through Crafting.
  
• And much, much more!

Pictures

Spoiler: Pictures

For more pictures, go to: http://www.moddb.com/games/novostrana/images

Novostrana v0.30

Version 0.30 has now been released!
To download it, click here.

A patch has also been released that fixes a couple of serious bugs: http://www.rpg-magic.org/games/novostra ... _patch.exe

It features a whole raft of improvements from the previous version:

Spoiler: Changelog

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-----CHANGELOG-----

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----VERSION 0.30---

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1. Added Health and Vitality potions to the game.

2. Changed HUD to display Health and Vitality bars more accurately.

3. Changed 'Skill Points' to 'Vitality Points' and 'SP' to 'VP'.

4. Running and Jumping will now lower VP.

5. VP will recharge over time and recharge faster when sneaking.

6. Implemented new book viewing system.

7. Added new books and documents.

8. Redesigned the title screen background.

10. Added Running and Jumping as Skills.

11. Shadows have been removed.

12. ABS Pre-Menu disabled.

13. Hotkeys disabled.

14. Shop Loyalty system replaced with a Settlement Prosperity system.

15. Some controls have been remapped.

16. Some dialogue bugs corrected.

17. A new start has been implemented.

18. Mr Baldadrir is now called Vilfred.

19. Vilfred is now a Village Headman.

20. Mapped the 'M' Key to open the music selection menu and removed the option      from the Journal.

21. Added new 'Statistics' option to the Journal.

22. The way bandits work has been changed.

23. Evil dialogue options and actions have been removed.

24. Fame has been added to the game, but due to the low number of quests it has    not been implemented yet.

25. An inventory weight limit system has been included.

26. You can now buy a bag to increase the weight limit.

27. Created new enemy groups.

28. Adjusted all weapons to have a greater reach to make combat easier.

29. Adjusted prices of all Weapons and Armours.

30. Changed some menu vocabulary.

31. Improved enemy AI.

32. Added interiors to all buildings in Willenke Village.

33. More buildings and interiors added to Willenke Village.

34. Updated title screen quit script to show a dialogue with forum details before    quitting.

35. Added shortcut key to Journal.

36. Added a wait system so you can make time pass by.

37. Added lock-picking system.

38. Added door interaction system.

39. Max HP and VP calculation has been tweaked.

40. A Work Bench system has been implemented.

41. More NPCs have been added to Willenke Village.

42. All NPCs in Willenke now have Scheduals.

43. Doors will be locked when houses are not occupied or the residents are          asleep.

44. Contextual dialogue added to NPCs in Willenke.

45. Added new icons.

46. More music added to Jukebox.

47. Proper track names are now displayed in the Jukebox.

48. A wooden background has been added to the Character Creation screen.

49. More Devil's Flowers added to Hirgil Marsh.

50. Random NPCs added to Willenke Inn.

51. Added a few more items to the game.

52. Updated a few items.

53. Character Creation has been overhauled.

54. Classes added to the game.

55. Your HP and VP will now be restored on Level-Up and the bars will be full        when you start the game.

56. Random chest items lists set up.

57. More enemies and enemy types have been added to the game world.

58. Fixed several bugs in the Axe of Evil quest.

59. The game will now check how many people are in your party before it adds a      new member.

60. Fixed a bug where the number of distributable level points was being              incorrectly calculated.

61. Some character graphics have been recoloured and some new ones added.

62. Fixed a bug where clouds would be shown when inside after sleeping.

63. Added more sound effects to some parts of the game.

64. Mining Equipment and a Mining system has been added to the game.

65. Added a new Level Up! HUD symbol.

66. You can now see what you are wearing!

67. The Game Over screen has been changed to look a bit better.

68. Enemy processing has been improved.

69. Added more Quests to the game.

70. A new game manual has been included.

 

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----VERSION 0.20---

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1. First Installer version of Novostrana.

2. Levelling and Stats have been completely overhauled.

3. A saved game auto-updater has been included.

4. All areas that were previously locked out are now accessible.

5. More areas have been added.

6. More quests have been added.

7. More NPCs have been added.

8. Can now check for updates.

9. New start and backstory implemented.

10. The game will now ask if you want to start the game in full screen mode.

11. A new credits script has been included with an up-to-date credits list.

12. Installed Blizz-ABS.

13. All Weapons and Armours have been rebalanced.

14. Fixed several issues with levelling-up.

15. Added new crafting system.

16. Added Dynamic Shop system.

17. Large pieces of dialogue have been split up a bit.

18. Tilesets should now work properly.

19. Fast Travel System added.

20. Banking System added.

21. Added new item limits system.

22. Documents system improved to show instructions text.

23. Item storage system added.

24. Night lighting has been rebalanced.

25. Shadows have been completely re-done.

26. Shadows can now be turned off.

27. A new game manual has been added.

28. An improved time system has been included, but not implemented yet.

29. Two "note" items have been converted to be viewed in the document viewer.

30. Items have been checked to make sure they can be used properly and whether      they should be consumed or not.

31. A shop loyalty system has been implemented.

32. A few other things which I have forgotten!

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More Info

If you would like more information about this project, please visit:

Our Profile on ModDB

The Novostrana Minisite

 

[Star]

Here's my review on the game

The Good:

I like the overall freedom this game has and all the features that give it great potential. Although I wish the characters did animations for the ABS, I found it very playable and not so boring as other battle systems. I'll have to spend some more time playing because I haven't gotten very far, but I hope you do continue this project and maybe add in a bit more custom stuff to make it even better.

The Bad:

When I hit wait on accident, I couldn't leave the wait menu without actually waiting.

Also I wish you could enter maps from every direction, instead of hitting road entrances. I know it's a pain in the butt, but it's more sandbox like.

Lots of mapping errors, so far it's priority seems to be an issue. When setting the priority for trees and things that have height, Make the priority look like this

5 5 5 5
4 4 4 4
3 3 3 3
2 2 2 2
0 0 0 0

There are also event errors that got me stuck in the swamp to where I had to quit

I also think the vitality went up a bit slow, but for some reason, holding sneak (c) increased it faster.

 

[CountVlad]

Thanks for the feedback.
It's a good thing you pointed out the wait thing or I would have missed it! I meant to do that, but kinda forgot.
Nearer to the beginning of the project I did think of adding a script where you could enter from any direction, but by that point I had 50+ maps that hadn't been aligned with each other, so it would have been a mega pain to re-do them all. That said, I'm thinking of redoing some maps anyway, so I may add the feature later.
Thanks for the priorities tip. I'm not very good with tilesets. I'll try it.

When you get stuck in the swamp like that, it may help to jump (tho some places you can't). Let me know if that works.

 

[ChinWizard]

Found quite a few bugs and general gameplay that were annoying enough to make me stop playing. First of all, as StarGundam mentioned, the vitality crawls up way to slow. I suggest lowering or disabling vitality usage when in non-combat zones, as it would make navigating towns a lot more fluid. Is there any point to sneaking, apart from vitality recovery?

Secondly, your visual equipment script would remove my clothes at random points in the game, such as when I loaded a save file. The clothes would sometimes return, like when I ate a loaf of bread. Also, whenever I unequiped a piece of equipment, it would seemingly delete itself instantly - I couldn't find it in the backpack or the EQUIP menu.

On a lighter note, the open environment of the game holds great potential, and it was fun to roam around. The combat was good, but became little more than button mashing in the end.(Jumping over enemies was fun, but almost useless since you still take damage.) Also, a tutorial or quick popup explaining the controls would've been nice; I didn't enjoy having to close the game and bring up the manual to find out how to swing my sword.

The mapping was good enough to hold my interest - not amazing but it didn't really need to be as it held the game together well as it is.

The story so far was a bit bland and linear, I would've liked to have more options to begin with; although I didn't get very far so perhaps there was more on offer down the track.

Overall, it's a decent start and I'm looking forward to watching it grow.

 

[CountVlad]

Thanks for the comments.
Sneaking is supposed to be so that you can sneak up behind enemies, but I haven't tried doing that.
I think I may have to get hold of a different VE script (if I can find one) seeing as this one has loads of bugs in it.
I'm going to include some kind of tutorial at the beginning of the next version, but I'll also make it so that you can skip it if you want to. Haven't decided on the details yet.
Hopefully the next version will be a bit better story-wise as I've been focussing on programming and scripting in the previous versions. This time I'll be focussing of Quests.

 

[Star]

The first lady by the well didn't have a response to the second choice. If certain parts aren't completed due to demo purposes, you should put in there "Haven't been made yet." Like you did with that guards shack.

As for try jumping. That's what I did to get there in the first place, only problem was that I couldn't jump back. It wouldn't allow me no matter how many times I tried. And the vitality crawled up so slow that I got fed up and closed the game instead.

Also this game can be way too hard. Some bandits nearly kicked my arse until I ran away.

Also, I entered into the right of Stephen's Smithy and ended up on the left side.

Spoiler

Heres another area with passability errors. I could walk on this house, at least the walls

Also I fast traveled to Wellstadnt (spelled wrong maybe?) and entered the first house and got creamed with

Spoiler

I think you should test your game fully, and every map before you decide to upload it anywhere. Hopefully you will take my advice not as being critical, but more as admiring your game and wishing for it to be better. I'd like to play this one some more, but until you fix a lot of things, I'm afraid too. Just keep in mind, if your game wasn't worth a shit, I wouldn't have replied here in the first place. So that means your game caught my eye, so keep it up and don't lose it.

 

[CountVlad]

Darn it! Forgot about the Well lady! lol.

I'll have to re-do most of the outside maps at some point, because I'm not all that happy with them anyway. When I do that I'll make sure that you can jump properly in the Marsh. Most of the maps were actually designed before I installed the jump script, so some of them can be a little tricky.

Hmm... I was thinking about the difficulty the other day. The problem is making it so that it's not too easy later. I'll probably lower the difficulty a bit once I have a few more enemies that are a challenge for high-level players.

The thing with the Smithy was deliberate because of the position of the Chimny, but I might change that later so the chimny is at the other end of the building.

lol. Spotted another bug I was going to change but forgot about (passability).

I've released a fix for the graphics bug, which can be found in the first post.

 

[blo0p]

I read what you have so far and it sounds like a fun game to play. cant download the demo at the moment because i am at work but i will once i get home.

:D

I am not sure if it is possible but i would look into creating a script that would change the level range of enemies as you level up as well. so that the low level areas still have some value to them when you re-visit. Don't get me wrong, you won't want to make them level identical to you, but say for every 3 levels you gain they gain 1.5. (you still want to give the character a sense of advancement but at the same time you want to keep providing a challenge) similar to the way oblivion or fallout plays.

anyways i look forward to testing it out!

 

[CountVlad]

That's one of the features I absolutely hated about Oblivion. Sorry, but it's true. Although it sounds good on paper, I feel it totally kills any kind of challenge/sense of advancement/sense of reality.
I look forward to reading what you think about the game, tho!