Lexima Legends IV - Chaos Project

First of all: Blizzard is my alias, not my company name! The "company" name, if you will, is Stormtronics.

Intro

"Once long time ago, everything was Chaos
Then Chaos became order
And Chaos became life
After life is gone and order is destroyed
Chaos shall reign again and forever..."

This is how everything starts.

Background Story

Inside the legendary Tower of Memories, lies the Fire of Life....The eternal force that holds every single parallel universe together...
An old legend states that if the flame, the Fire of Life burns is to change into a color other than blue (Solar Cry) a horrible fate lies in store for the galaxy.
Two million years ago, the fire turned red... Nobody knew of this till it was almost too late. The flame changing color would have caused the destruction of all existence, had there not been two mysterious and powerful warriors. Nobody knew where they originated, nor where they were going.
But this was long ago... These two brave warriors, returned the flame to its original color. It is even said, that they were the reason for the Solar Cry... Thus all memories and records of this event were entirely wiped from existence... This is the reason, why the tower is called Tower of Memories...

Once again in the present the Solar Cry is about to occur. The consequences are sure to be fatal. However, this Solar Cry is different... The flame became green...
But because the Solar Cry is so powerful, what could surpass it's power, enough to make it happen? And more importantly...What is yet to happen, now the fire burns green? And so we go to the little planet Terra, where peace reigns... still...

This is a snipplet from the intro. Of course it is not possible to destroy every existence just by causing a Solar Cry. There is much more behind this. But the rest of the background story will be revealed during the gameplay.

The adventure begins

Jason is 21 years old and a normal young man, who just lives his life. He's going to college and bored, because it seems too easy to him.
After a little nap and a strange dream he decides to leave the library of his college and go home. He has no idea what is going to happen to him... Suddenly he finds himself in a room, that actually looks like a part of the college, but it is none! Confused about all of this he continues his way through a dark passage. Suddenly he enters a strange hi-tech laboratory. He turns around and can't find the exit anymore.
Exploring the strange laboratory he gets attacked by machines a few times until he hears a voice shouting for help. Fast he can find a person who is fighting against a strange monster. After a victorious fight he learns the name of the stranger: Endout. But the monster doesn't seem to be beaten! And so they start running for their lives. They run back into the room where Jason entered the old laboratory. Endout activates a machine and both of them jump into it. In the next moment they find themselves in on a little field surrounded with trees in the middle of the night.
They arrived near the peaceful village Reeva. After finding out about the problems in the village and finding the key to the door that leads them further to the west to another village called Lisk they encounter a man who tells them about his youth. He tells them that they should seek out the spiritual being in the forest further to the west. After finding this spirit and defeating him in a fight he asks them: "Are you ready to follow your fate and fulfill your destiny? If so, go first north, then west. Find Giada castle and find your destiny..."

Will Jason and Endout continue their journey...? Yes, they will. But... They have no idea what fate has in store for them. They have no idea that they are about to experience the adventure of their lives and find out more about themselves than they ever imagined to. They have no idea what threat lurks in the deep darkness of space...

The Characters

You will get the characters to know during gameplay. I will introduce all characters, but only 3 of them are available in this demo.

Jason



Race: Human
Class: Sword Specialist
Age: 21
Gender: Male
Speciality: Sarcasm and Humor
Background: One afternoon, as he wants to go home from college, he finds himself in room never seen before. Shortly after that he enters a strange laboratory...
More background will be revealed later during gameplay.

Endout



Race: Human
Class: Grappler
Age: 26
Gender: Male
Speciality: Martial Arts
Background: Will be found by Jason while fighting against a monster. Together they beat that monster and then...
More background will be revealed later during gameplay.

Lilith



Race: Devil Human
Class: Devil Girl
Age: 22
Gender: Female
Speciality: Dark Magic
Background: As she went out to find some food she will come across some strange ruins she's had never seen before around this area... Suddenly she gets attacked by a furious monster and shortly after that chased by two strangers: Jason and Endout.
More background will be revealed later during gameplay.

Vamp



Race: Vampire
Class: Vampire
Age: 74788423
Gender: Male
Speciality: Knowledge
Background: Vamp is not the real name of this vampire.
More background will be revealed later during gameplay.

Lucius



Race: Human
Class: Blade Master
Age: 29
Gender: Male
Speciality: Wielding dual weapons
Background: Lucius seems to be a kind of guardian over the Fire of Life. He also seems to know quite some background about Lexima and Chaos which he reveals in time.
More background will be revealed later during gameplay.

Ariana



Race: Human
Class: Alpha Sentinel
Age: 24
Gender: Female
Speciality: Guns and Ammo
Background: After saving Jason, Endout and Lucius from a bunch of thugs, she teams up with them for some adventures. Soon she will find out that this will be her greatest adventure ever...
More background will be revealed later during gameplay.

Sydon



Race: Human
Class: Dragon Trancer
Age: 34
Gender: Male
Speciality: Dragon Transformations
Background: Sydon joins Jason's party to pursue a mutual goal.
More background will be revealed later during gameplay.

Features

Experience the story of the 4th part of the Lexima Legends series made with RPG Maker XP!

• multiple battle transition animations
• a lot of background story connecting this part of the "Lexima Legends" series with the others
• Bribing People System -> you can bribe specific people for valueable information, items, skills, and, and, and...
• interactive Day and Night System
• encounter different NPCs during night and different ones during day
• monster behaviour variation during night and day (you will even encounter sleeping enemies!)
• NPC personality - NPCs won't say exact the same stuff all the time
• interactivity with the environment (play piano, put fireplaces off, look at pictures etc.)
• easy understandable turn-based fighting system
• Soul Rage System, Meta Status System and Meta Limit System to enhance the play experience and give you alternative ways to fight your enemies
• get EXP for every killed enemy; that means you get EXP even if you escape and killed an enemy before
• dynamic EXP distribution; more active actors will get more EXP
• special StormTronics CMS v6.4b - Hybrid Edition DX (with many extras such as window-skin change, font change, battle music change, menu style and many more) that are not available in the normal STCMS
• 3D Pseudo Battle Camera
• many custom scripted additions to the battle system and the common system of the game
• many original and already well known skills like Death-Roulette, Absorb HP/MP, etc.
• nearly all special custom systems realized with highly optimized scripting instead of laggy Interpreter-in-Interpreter eventing
• 100% non-RTP monsters or heavily edited RTP monsters
• the only RTP used: tilesets, animations, sounds, some music, a few battle backgrounds and several NPCs
• over 20 hours of gameplay
• lots of puzzles, side quests and minigames
• Experience Distributor NPC
• various game modes can be unlocked by beating the game and the modes themselves
• custom intro scene
• custom shop layout
• custom save/load screen layout
• Advanced Analyze System
• can update savegames from earlier versions so you don't have to start over the game each time you update
• optimized basic script-code for less lag
• the RM game with the most custom scripted additions EVER! (and believe me it will stay this way for a long time, maybe forever)
  
• beta tested
• and many more...

Screenshots

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Download

Download locations for full releases and patches can be found here.

Credits

The credits can be accessed from the title menu and will be displayed at the end of the game.

Everything else

If the game installer didn't install the fonts properly and even the game failed to install the fonts properly, install the fonts manually into your %SYSTEMROOT%\Fonts folder. %SYSTEMROOT% is usually C:\WINNT or C:\WINDOWS. WINNT can have problems when installing the fonts and it is generally recommended to play the game on Windows XP, but so far nobody had problems with Windows Vista / Windows 7 either. Keep in mind that the locations for savegames and screenshots differ in Windows Xp and Windows Vista / Windows 7.

That's all. N-Joy! =D

Cool. Welcome back Blizzard; I'm looking forward to playing this.

After years of development, Chaos finally spreads!

Presenting, the prestigious the winner of the award for Longest Production time for a Completed RPG Maker Game;

Chaos Project

Definitely. ._.;;; It's been over 4 years since I started (November 2005) and almost 4 years of actual work (I started working on it properly in March 2006).

Wow, I remember playing a demo of this years ago. I actually got a slight rush of nostalgia seeing this again.

Downloading now, I can't wait to see how much has been done since the last time I played it!

"A lot" isn't even close to how much has been done ever since Final Demo. xD

...It crashed just as the two warriors get hit with Frost-Nova, the part just after Jason says he is going to take a nap. Windows just suddenly gave me the usual "This program needs to close". If you need to know, I am using Windows 7 x64.

Do you know what could have caused this?

Damn. So it's not an error happening on only one PC.
I added a last-minute mod for handling of cached data. At first it was causing problems, but I fixed it and reuploaded the game. Looks like I should remove it for good.

EDIT: Ok, I've got one positive on this file: http://www.sendspace.com/file/n47kav
It isn't crashing anymore where it used to if you use this RGSSAD file. If I don't get a crash report in the next two minutes I'll start uploading a fixed installation on CP again.

Yep, that fixed the problem, so I assume everything is working fine for me now.

Ok, the download link from CP is updated. I'll add the sendspace mirror when it's done uploading.

It looks alright, I guess. The maps are kind of boring and generic, and every single screenshot I looked at lacks any type of lighting whatsoever.

Your battle art is gorgeous, but one thing that makes me cringe is that you have like 5 fonts going on at once.

The maps are kind of boring and generic,

Show me a map from an RMXP game that isn't boring and generic.

and every single screenshot I looked at lacks any type of lighting whatsoever.

The game has 829 maps. Let's say that 29 are dummy maps or duplicates so we round it to 800. With an average of about 1000 map squares per map it translates into about 1 Mpixels that are necessary to cover one average map with an image overlay that contains lighting. At an average 32-bit PNG compression rate of 95% this will make 800 images of which each is 200 kB big. This makes a total amount of additional 160 MB on the game size. People already complained that the game was 80 MB. The game also contains maps with size over 80x80 which would be an image of 6553600 pixels which translates into 26214400 Bytes of RAM that is required to hold that image (it actually needs more because of the sprite, etc.). Now imagine 10 of those images cached in the game. Yes, that would be a constant RAM usage of 262 MB until you restart the game and hopefully not reenter the big maps.

So 3 times more disk space, 4 times more RAM usage (average case, I'm too scared to calculate the usage of the two world maps since I already managed to crash the game due to RAM overflow by entering each world map once) and additional lag due to the display of a large sprite or the rework of 800 maps with events just so a few people could say "Oh, such nice lighting"? For a non-commercial game? For an RMXP game? I don't think so.

Your battle art is gorgeous, but one thing that makes me cringe is that you have like 5 fonts going on at once.

Count again. If you don't count the off-game screens (splash, intro, title, credits), the only screen where you have more than two fonts at once is the battle screen because of the damage text.
The title screen does hold the record, though. All in all 7 different fonts are displayed there (3 in the game logo, menu, version, "company" logo, the text "Some rights reserved"). I know it's probably overkill, but it's the title screen, it's supposed to look nice.

Adding dissonant fonts doesn't make something look nice.

Actually Arial, Geometrix and EurostileExtended-Roman-DTC are relatively similar and easy-to-read fonts.

Relatively similar is bad. That's dissonance.

"Relatively similar" is not dissonance.

dis·so·nance  (ds-nns)<
n.
1. A harsh, disagreeable combination of sounds; discord.
2. Lack of agreement, consistency, or harmony; conflict: "In Vietnam, reality fell away and dissonance between claim and fact filled the void" (Michael Janeway).
3. Music A combination of tones contextually considered to suggest unrelieved tension and require resolution.

1. inharmonious or harsh sound; discord; cacophony.
2. Music.
a. a simultaneous combination of tones conventionally accepted as being in a state of unrest and needing completion.
b. an unresolved, discordant chord or interval. Compare consonance (def. 3).
3. disagreement or incongruity.

Dissonance would mean that they are different and not similar.

You're not taking criticism very well are you I agree with Holk and Firerain, but it appears to be a solid game with lots of effort put into it. It's just lacking polish here and there, that's all.

I take criticism as it is. If it's unbased or if I had good reasons to do things in certain ways, I'd say I have the right to defend my point. i.e. If somebody said that the game has heavy graphical inconsistencies in styles (like battlers, tilsets), I wouldn't have said a thing since the game DOES have inconsistent graphics.

Peace, children, peace.

*downloads*

The logo and the huge VICTORY over the post-battle screen are really goofy looking. I'd tone down on the photoshop effects.

I do agree with Firerain about the maps. Some of them are pretty bland and without lighting they just look sort of goofy. You said you had your reasons for not including this, but it's still a valid criticism. You probably could have found a way of incorporating lighting without it being too much of a hindrance. Perhaps toned down on the size of your maps or made less of them. Are you certain 800+ maps is absolutely necessary? Are you certain the size of your maps is absolutely necessary? In my opinion, your maps are HUGE and the scale is just... bad.

The thing you need to realise is that people playing this likely aren't going to look at the bland maps (mostly because of lighting, imo) and think to themselves, "Oh, this is okay. He did this to save space." By the way, why are there pillars at random positions inside a cave?

I think in general you've just incorporated way too many effects, really. The little cloud animation (assuming it's clouds and an animation just by looking at the screenshots, welp) that plays over the text seems out of place to me. The gradients over whatever fonts you've put them over look strange (gradients always look strange).

Also, green and purple do not go together.

I have no idea about the gameplay of your game since I haven't played it. If you've spent four years working on this game I'm sure it's got to have something special for it. However, for me, the game lacks polish when it comes to the graphics.

Maybe I'm being too critical, though.

Yeah, the victory logo is a bit too much.

Sure, some maps are big, but why is this relevant? The game's not a 2 hours game. It takes minimum 20 hours to beat it. If I had less than 800 maps, the game would start lagging pretty badly since I had to increase the map sizes. I'm sorry, but I just don't see the point why you're complaining about the game having 800 maps.

As for mapping/lighting. I have seen maps that had a lot of effort put into them. They had lighting, they had animated stuff, etc. You know what they looked like? Horrible. Lots of them were either too dark, too artifical, too crowded, etc. Sure, they were colorful, lots of effort put into them, but the maps were unusable. Lighting in a 2D game is such waste of time. It looks like trying too hard. Also, lots of people wouldn't download the game if it was 240 MB rather than 80 MB.

If you haven't played the game, then maybe you shouldn't complain about it (since you mentioned a screenshot as reference).

As for general graphics, yes, the game isn't perfect. I'm not primarily a graphic designer and I didn't try too hard on the graphics in the game but I concentrated on gameplay. The graphics are alright and not amazing, I am aware of that. But I was trying to make a game, not a nice looking picture that moves.

I wouldn't say you're too critical. You're pretty much right about most stuff after all.

Also, purple and green do go together (contrasting colors).

Also, purple and green do go together (contrasting colors).

They're complimentary colors, they're used to make eachother stand out from one another. Usually when used for something you see a lot it creates a strain on the eye simply because they stand out too much. Colors from different segments of the color wheel are contrasting colors but they become complimentary if they're opposite of each other

My bad. I meant complementary. >.<

Actually complementary colors do quite the opposite. They relax the eyes due to the fact that they cancel each other's effects on the eyes out which creates a similar relaxing effect on the eyes as natural grey does because of the electrical polarization of the eye nerves (can't remember the exact name).

I don't find it very relaxing