Dead Content The Reconstruction - Something Different

[Deltree]

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Our world is a broken, tired place, wracked by disaster, famine, epidemic, slavery, and racial tension over years past.  Yet, we always rebuild; we always bounce back, thanks to the efforts of the guilds - groups of volunteers seeking to recover and improve to prevent the next great tragedy. You control one of these guilds. Train its members, watch them grow, find new allies and rivals alike.

Latest News:

February 4th, 2008: Version 1.09 is available for download!
Changes:

• Regeneration rates now factor in to battle as well.  So, a character with a Body regen rate of 1 will recover 1 Body point per turn.  To compensate, enemies now do more damage than before, so be wary and back up to rest when necessary!
• Fixed a bug where using one of Lani's skills would drain from Fero's health by accident.  Oops.
• Fixed a bug in the Chapters 1-2 Interlude scene.
• An additional scene now appears at the very end of the demo.  It's not much, but it's there.
• Minor graphical and dialog tweaks, as always.

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Features:

• Unique take on the RPG formula: rather than HP and MP attributes, you balance the body, mind, and soul strength of your heroes - and your enemies.
• A colorful cast of characters from many races and backgrounds.
• Strategic board-game-like turn based battles focus on unit placement and exploiting elemental and weapon/armor weaknesses for full potential.
• Upgrade your heroes' stats and skills individually with essence gained from combat and other sources. No level-ups to worry about, no experience grinding necessary!
• Too many allies in your guild for your main party? Rather than leaving them out, let them support one another to gain essence.  Certain pairings will give special bonuses, as well!
• Score big! Many quests can be repeated with incentive to perform faster and better for more points.
• Fifty page glossary included detailing important historical events and definitions of peoples and places you'll come across.

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Races:

You will make many friends during your tenure, and so it would be best to know what sorts of people you'll come across.

HUMANS
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Ubiquity on two legs, humans exist in all corners of the world and have a tendency to take control, whether by invitation or by force.  Notoriously ambitious, they develop and govern many parts of modern society, and tend overall to be well-meaning, if not a bit blind to the needs and manners of other races.  Two of the larges Human cities are Wadassia and Nal.

FORTIANS
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While pure Fortians are human-like in appearance, members of any race can choose to adopt the Fortian lifestyle.  Fortians are strict and calculating, often brilliant scholars and historians, and also exhibit incredible magical tendencies. They wear distinctive eyepieces signifying rank.  Fortians reside in Fortifel, while those outcast from their society live in Sanctifel, just on the other side of the mountain.


FIH'JIK
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Slightly larger than humans, the Fih'Jik believe their homeland to be blessed, and most of them devote their entire lives to gaining favor with what they call the Supreme Diety.  Religious strife has plagued their kind for centuries, resulting in near-constant civil war between the two home cities of Do Ssha and Kir Ssha.  More and more often today, Fih'jik abandon their ravaged homeland to live in peace with the other races who would have them.


SHRA
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Boasting incredible lifespans and affinity for strength and magic alike, it's no wonder the lizard-like Shra have been so readily adapted for enslavement by nearly all other races, particularly humans.  Their temperment ranges from mild to savage, but are receptive of both discipline and education, depending on their sort of master.  Several Shra live freely as well.  Their home city is unknown, if such even exists, but they are usually captured and imported from an area known as the "Shra Lowlands."


More Screenshots (Click for full size):

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Download the Demo

Download here - Version 1.09 (36.0 MB) Updated February 4th, 2008

Known Issues:

• Sometimes when transitioning between battle and adventuring on certain maps, images of the health bars will be left over.  I haven't pinpointed where this is occuring exactly, but it's a harmless bug for now, and it goes away on its own after a few seconds.
• Please post any other issues discovered in this thread/in a private message.

 

[Xilef]

The character sets looks very flat and thin. Perhaps shortening them and widening them?

 

[Diedrupo]

You've got to be kidding me. That looks really cool. I'll download it later tonight to check it out.

 

[Deltree]

The character sets looks very flat and thin. Perhaps shortening them and widening them?

I was trying to avoid the SDF style as best I could, if that's what you mean. If it's because of the flat-looking shadows, I did that to give them some "pop" off the backgrounds, since I wanted everything to have sort of a washed out storybook quality.

Of course, it could also just be my crippling inability to draw well.

 

[The Man]

I think this is rather refreshing and signature. I like the style. I'll definatly give it a go.

 

[Kinnison]

This is so cool, nice game.

EDIT:
Tried the game, somehow the battle system reminds me of a game. For the tileset, everything has been altered to blend smoothly with the characters and the environment, which is excellent.

BTW, the game lags a little but the time doesn't lag at all. Guess the anti-lag wasn't doing its job in my com :-/

 

[Deltree]

I wrung out as much of the lag as I could; it used to be much worse. Fortunately the timer doesn't mean anything except bonus points.

Bug Notice (Fixed 11/19/07)

Spoiler

There is a bug I'm working on right now that occurs after finishing the quest "Watch Your Ankles" (the muddy place with all the rock jumping). If you save your game afterward, the system will crash with some kind of marshal dump error and the save file will be corrupted, and you'll have to delete the save file itself (it will be 1kb in size) before you can reload another game. So, skip over this quest until the next update.

 

[hima]

I definitely needs to play this game! It looks awesome I'll download the demo and come back with more comments later.

EDIT : I can't download The link seems to be broken.

 

[Deltree]

That's strange; it seems to be working for me this morning.  Try it again.  Maybe Hypermart was on the fritz.  :-\

 

[Xephyr]

I'm dl now.  I'lll post with my thoughts after I'm finished

 

[Deltree]

The newest version (1.06) is being uploaded right now, so grab it if you can.  It fixes a bug with switching targets in battle that would cause some weirdness or hang ups.  Sorry for the inconvenience!

 

[Xephyr]

Well, that sure was interesting. 

The battle system is brilliant, really.  I loved it.  It was too talky for me, and the story certainly wasn't the greatest in the history of forevers.  The battle and gameplay kept me palying till the end of the demo though.  Great work.

>_> also, I hate the charsets.  sorry.

 

[Deltree]

Hey, as long as the core gameplay works, I'm content.  I know the pacing is rather poor for it being so early on, and hope that it'll all wrap together more nicely in the full version (which should come along some time before the sun implodes).

The first few people I showed it to said they liked the talky bits.  :-X  Diff'rent strokes and all that, I guess!

 

[hima]

  I finally be able to download and play the game.  I really like the battle system and how the game works. It's very interesting I have not finished the demo yet as I encountered some problems.

  The problem is that the game is really lag and slow for me. And I don't think it's my computer Mine is 2.01 GHz and has 1 GB RAM. It doesn't lag at all at beginning of the game until the Adventure Mode and Battle Mode. The lag and the slowness is so bad that when I press the buttons, they're all messed up. I press left for 5 seconds but then a second later it just started to move ^ ^;;

And also during the battle, this really ruin the gameplay. I press enter once, but the game thought I press it twice and automatically choose the target for me :S  I don't know if this has to do with me, trying to change the group and then it cut into the battle mode "during" I'm opening the group window. Because after that, everytime I want to cancle any action during the battle, it calls up my troop status menu instead

Do you use events to create the battle system? I really hope you can fix this because I think this game really has potential. And I don't want to be the one who miss it ^ ^

 

[Deltree]

I did, and you it, it's really strange, I've had two people so far with reasonably good computers say that it was unplayably laggy (both said the same thing too - that when pressing one key, it takes a few seconds before it registers the movement).  That just seems like an unusual symptom.  I have three computers I test it on (my laptop, which is pretty high end; my desktop, which is a couple years old; and my work machine, which is 5 years old) and it's playable on all three.  It's using an anti-lag script and also defaults to High Priority mode when it's started - whether that's causing some sort of conflict, I'm not sure.

If you do find out any way to alleviate the problems, please let me know.  I'd like to find some sort of pattern in what could be causing it so I can try to fix it if it's something on my end.  You weren't, for instance, running any anti-virus programs or the like at the time, were you?

 

[hima]

Now I found the source of the problem. It's because you set the game to start at high priority.  I think if the computer is good enough to run the game at normal priority, frame skipping will occur if you change it to higher priority.  I change it back to normal and it works perfectly fine now!

Though, I'd like you to change it to script, because there is a much less chance that the game will lag from script. But if you've gone too far to change the whole thing that's fine too, it's fine as it is.

So the only bug left is changing party while detected by enemies. XD Don't forget to fix that!

 

[Deltree]

Great, thanks for the tip!  It's 99% events, because I'm old school like that.  I stuck the priority switch in because it seemed like a good idea at the time - I was having massive performance issues way back when I started the project, which turned out to be due to an unused script, but I left the priority switch in there anyway as didn't think it'd cause any harm.  I'll take it out for the next version; if people really want it, they can set it themselves.  8)

And the switching-while-being-attacked thing is a good catch!  One of those things I'd never think to test.

 

[Xephyr]

Great, thanks for the tip!  It's 99% events, because I'm old school like that.  I stuck the priority switch in because it seemed like a good idea at the time - I was having massive performance issues way back when I started the project, which turned out to be due to an unused script, but I left the priority switch in there anyway as didn't think it'd cause any harm.  I'll take it out for the next version; if people really want it, they can set it themselves.  8)

And the switching-while-being-attacked thing is a good catch!  One of those things I'd never think to test.

You did NOT just say that battle system is 99% events.


o.o and I thought I was a good eventer.

*quickly runs off to begin getting better at events*

 

[Deltree]

*whistles innocently*

I only used in-line scripting for two functions: drawing text/boxes/pictures onto the screen, and accessing "pointer" variables (as in, using a variable to refer to another variable, like $game_variables[$game_variables[100]]).

 

[Deltree]

Version 1.08 is up now.  Stuff that's been changed:

• Some graphical changes here and there
• Building links on the Chain is now much more effective.  Your party's attacks and healing spells improve in effectiveness every 3 links now.
• Dialogue modified and expanded in some places.

Work on the second chapter is progressing slowly but surely.  I've got all the enemies done, and the quests and NPCs designed.  Barring any more major bug fixes or other necessary changes, that will be the next major update.