[VX] Dorian Hunt. The Prelude (Demo v2.0 released)

I like those type of adventure games, but if you use it frequently, it's fine for any kind of game. Will there be those kind of search cabinets for items to do stuff puzzles?

Certainly, that's the whole point. You know, look at a picture of a code lock, crack it open, look at a cupboard with an item inside,
then look at the same cupboard being empty. That might prove to be more fun than text based puzzles.
I used to absolutely love ye olde adventure games, it's just that so many people tend to frown upon them these days.

Kinda getting off topic, but the DS has some interesting adventure games.

Kinda getting off topic, but the DS has some interesting adventure games.

Now that I think of it, I don't remember ever trying out the DS at all. The PSP, however, is good at emulating all kinds of antiquities, including those old and groundbreaking games from nintendo and PS1.
Gee, I must be getting old

Another brief update on some distinguishing features in the game.

First of all, the lock picking system, written by Deity, translated by Modern Algebra and visualized by me:




Secondly, my own sweet child, the conjuration system:



It's slightly similar to the infamous FF summon system and shows off a little firework display every time you
get the chance to use it. Completely optional but hopefully will add a bit more fun to the otherwise dry battles.
If anybody's interested, I can post it under event systems once it's more polished.

I'm really liking how the visuals of this game are coming to be. That looks great.

Before I post my spam anywhere else, here's what I need to know.

In a front view battle system, when an enemy uses a skill on a player, the respective animation for that skill can't be seen (apart from some whole-screen flashes).

QUESTION:
How do you make the animation appear on screen?
So far I've been using common events to show a battle animation whenever the skill is used. But that method is generally crap, because the animation starts after the damage is done. And also, if you want each enemy to have at least one unique skill at any given time, imagine all the hassle, while it doesn't even look half good.

Are there any scripts somewhere to make the the battle animation appear on the caster, not the target? If you know of any, please do tell. I've searched a lot, but I haven't found anything so far.

Not recommending another battle system as a solution would be greatly appreciated

Thank you very much in advance.

You should get the System fixes from YERD:
http://rmrk.net/index.php/topic,42396.0.html

The system fixes themselves allow you to use DBS, but they will fix up issues like not seeing a casting animation on the player. You can also use them for neat things like adding a casting animation on the character or having different animations when a player uses a skill vs when an enemy uses it.

Wow. Thanks, Lunarea, that's amazing!

From the very first day of this project I was either too busy or too lazy to draw the character portraits.
Now that the game is stuck post-production limbo, I took my chances and did a picture of Dorian Hunt.

Fingers crossed, I think I'll do the rest in the same key.

I love the atmosphere and the style of the drawing. However, his face bothers me a bit. I think it may help to reshape his nose and put it a bit lower on his face:

I'm not sure whether he was supposed to look beautiful, but a longer nose with a slight bump seemed to fit his angular features.

You're really putting a lot of work in this. Keep at it!

@Lunarea:
The atmosphere comes from your tilesets

It looks amazing. You should have done this from the start!

So let me just say this project looks astounding. Steampunk<3 I love the genre x.x

The mapping is great, the gfx is great, it all looks great! More promising than most projects, especially vx ones.

Did I mention I love steampunk?

I'll have to give the demo a go. Great job.

I'll have to give the demo a go. Great job.

Thanks!

Not to put you off or anything, let me just say that the demo is a little obsolete. It was released way before all the graphical tweaks and is full of typos, so I'm afraid that at the moment it might give you the wrong impression
Guess it's time to make a new one.

As I've said before, all the main characters have undergone a session of plastic surgery and now look the way they look.
They can be seen in the "characters" section in the main post. I'll change all the screenshots shortly in order to keep things up-to-date.

Proofreading, editing and re-writing most of the dialog is taking me forever and it feels at times like the project is stuck in a rut. To make up for it, I will release a new demo, hopefully by the beginning of next week if all goes well. You are all witnesses to this, so now I have no other way out but keeping the promise

As I promised, the new demo is up and running, so feel free to take a spin.
The screenshot section is also heavily updated. All in all, we are now looking at a completely different game.

I have the demonstration downloaded and I'll give it a test run here shortly when I get some free time. I opened it up and ran through the introduction to start a save point and I have to say that the character portraits that you made are great! They give off a much better feel than the previous images that you were using.

Thanks a lot, Exhydra! I remember you volunteering to test the final result. This is quite far from it, as it only covers the first 60 minutes (roughly) but I would appreciate any feedback regardless.

I don't know why It took me so long to actually start playing your demo, but I finally have and here's some sequential feedback.

>I really like the images of the characters for the talking scenes since I played most of the demo when in it's original state, I'll be skipping ahead a bit- But I do think the physique of the template for the man who brings you into his house needs some work. Maybe thicken his body up a bit to match his head .
>Sir, I must say that the menu looks amazing, the background adds a great touch to it, excellent work with that. I like the new mapping and the music is really nice. But I was hoping to trade my coat for the fish. I think you should get a different Victory Fanfare song though, it doesn't really fit the Battle Music, or the game too well. I just checked out the Equip menu, after getting my weapons and I was wondering where we got our shields from. It'd be pretty strange to have had shields with us from the get-go without any weapons. The enemy encounter rate on the island is pretty high, it is quite unappetizing. I also think a different resting song should be looked into. I found a combat problem of sorts. I can't actually equip my Rusty Derringer but I can use my Quick Reload ability, but it shows the sword animation rather than a firing gun perhaps. Also, Quick Reload costs 0 mana, not spamming it would be crazy. In the underground place, where you input the code, the door doesn't actually rise when you get the correct combination, you just walk through it. Enemy Encounter Rate is annoyingly high in the dungeon as well. But I like the Battlebacks.

Rosenthal's face image looks freaking awesome!! And now I've completed the demo. It took me 50 minutes, it was a fun time, I really like the looming backstory you're throwing around. I can't wait to play a bit more and try out Matilda. I think you should make the game a bit more difficult (In combat) and have less frequent encounters and this'll turn out to be quite a great little rpg. Good Luck!

Thanks a lot for the feedback, it's very helpful. Music effects to match the soundtrack are next on my agenda. Also, I never thought of the shields that way, and you're making a good point. They really need to come from somewhere, since we "have been deprived of all our belongings".
Yeah, and of course all those little mistakes with doors and weapons. Thanks for pointing them out. That Rusty Derringer was crap, btw

To tell you the truth, part of me wants to lose random battle encounters all together, as they are dragging the game (any game) down, but since I'm using loads of custom battler graphics, that would mean producing tons and tons of monster sprites, as long as we don't want all monsters to look the same on the map (which has actually worked for some games before). At any rate, that's something to consider for future releases.

It's been a while since the last update, but things are slowly moving along.

Those of you who'd tried the demo might be familiar with Sir Willoughby M. Willoughby, otherwise known as the Mayor of Port Merrow. He now has a face, which looks like this:

Spoiler for:

Other secondary characters that never made it into the demo now also have portraits.
This, for instance, is Jude Finnegan, a dodgy entrepreneur who runs a club in Port Merrow:

Spoiler for:

Whereas this is Port Merrow's law, order and healthcare system impersonated by one educated gunslinger, Dr. Ian Huskins:

Spoiler for:

These fine gentlemen mainly appear in some optional sidequests, which are pretty much the last thing yet to be done.

Those look awesome.

I just had an absolutely horrifying experience when the "unexpected file format" error wouldn't let me open the game file in the editor. All of my backups were extremely outdated, too.
Scouted through the forums, most of which were rather pessimistic and said that all the work in this sad case is gone with the winds.
Eventually I managed to fix it by creating a new project and carefully copying the data files into it, but the moral damage is irreversible and I will never be the same person again

Now, question.
What the hell was that all about? All I'd done to the game last time was copy-paste some lines of dialog, test it, save and close. And also, what are these: libgcc_s_dw2-1.dll,  mingwm10.dll, QtCore4.dll, QtGui4.dll? My new project seems to be running fine and dandy with out them, like in that old joke about the watchmaker fixing clocks by taking unnecessary cogs out.