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    Ville's new game

    ville 15 years ago
    Quanrian and I announced on the Cormoon forum that Cormoon, the project we have been working on will be converted to a new engine, and I will be making a new game using the existing Cormoon engine. The facts are as follows:
    -It will be similar to Notrium, but with more roleplaying elements such as character development and quests.
    -It will be based on a medieval world with a fantasy touch, much like the Ultima series of games.
    -There will be many islands and towns to visit, each with many non player characters that you can talk to.
    -The entire game will be based on visiting different islands, and there will be a map editor coming with the game allowing you to make your own islands.
    -Quests are more important than in Notrium, but it will still be open ended.
    -Release date is not known yet.

    I will be posting screenshots in the coming months, so stay tuned for more.
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    Idiota 15 years ago
    I've allways secretely wished for more RPG elements in Notrium. Guess it's gonna be a dream come true then. :p
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    Amarth 15 years ago
    Multiplayer?
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    MageKing17 15 years ago
    "Amarth" said:
    Multiplayer?
    That's a good question. Does the engine-formerly-used-for-Cormoon still have multiplayer support? And if so, will we see it used here?
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    ville 15 years ago
    No multiplayer, it will be more of a single player story based game. If multiplayer were implemented it would likely be cooperative mode, but I'm probably not going to it in. The engine doesn't really support multiplayer anymore, because I'm skipping corners to get the single player done as soon as possible.
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    MageKing17 15 years ago
    "ville" said:
    The engine doesn't really support multiplayer anymore, because I'm skipping corners to get the single player done as soon as possible.
    Ah. Well, then, I look forward to it.

    Is the engine still side-view, and if so, will you be having castleroid elements (open-ended gameplay, but throwing barriers the player can't get past in front of them, requiring them to obtain an item/power/spell that allows them to get over/under/through it before than can explore that area -- for instance, a wall too high to jump over, but once you obtain a double-jump power, you can go over and explore a new area where you get a new power to explore some other new area)?
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    Anonymous1157 15 years ago
    Hmm...

    If Cormoon's current engine is going to be retrofitted to suit a Notrium RPG, and Cormoon itself will get a completely different engine, then what will Cormoon become? :S

    *Reads Cormoon development subforum*
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    ville 15 years ago
    Did I mention it will be top-down perspective?
    As for limiting the ability to enter new areas, I'm probably going to limit it in some way to retain some story elements. I'm not really that far into level development yet, as I'm just plotting out the starting areas.

    Quanrian will tell more about Cormoon when he has something concrete, I believe he is still researching his options for the new engine.
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    Bien45 15 years ago
    Will it be shareware or such?
    And will we be able to craft items?
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    ahrenjb 15 years ago
    Sounds great! I have to say though, I'm a bit disappointed by your choice of theme, but it can't be helped. Apparently for some, midieval-fantasy themes will never grow old. Space is looking towards the future, while fantasy gnerally takes us into the past.

    Hell though, open ended game is good enough!
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    Quanrian 15 years ago
    I've seen an early build of this and I have to say it's pretty impressive. I also gave Ville some early feedback already, so that's minor involvement from me. You'll all be happy to know that the ease of use we were fighting very hard to maintain with Cormoon is transferring to this quite well. I wholly support this, but my involvement will likely be minimal. I may make some unofficial maps(these 'may' become part of the official content) since I have almost as good a grasp on the editor as Ville.

    I expect modding for this game to be fairly easy, as we spent so much time developing the engine this is using, one of those goals was the user end. Unlike so many games that seem to be happy forcing you to learn languages or even scripting languages, this should not and you should find it fairly intuitive. I'm really happy we were able to accomplish as much as we did. I cannot however say at this juncture, how broad you'll be able to mod. I am however confident that more than just Vanilla mods will be possible.

    Cormoon(still the working title) is still being reworked and at this time I'm it as far as the development team goes. While that may seem dismal, I'm also the one most capable of delivering the game as I envisioned it. I will be somewhat limited by whatever engine I ultimately go with. Though for anyone who knows me well, they know I love doing things that aren't supposed to be possible, so I intend to do what I preach and do more with less. The game's metaverse is also incredibly large, so I'm still working out how I'll be breaking it up into reasonable development cycles without sacrificing the quality of the whole.
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    ville 15 years ago
    "Bien45" said:
    Will it be shareware or such?
    And will we be able to craft items?

    It will be shareware, and well worth the small price. And there will obviously be a free version of it that will be interesting to play on itself.

    Item crafting and combinations may be included, but they will not feature such a major role as in Notrium 1 where they were essential to ever advancing in the game. I'm focusing on finding hidden rare items and obtaining them from your enemies.

    To ahrenjb, scifi is wonderful setting and I loved it in Notrium 1, but for this game I wanted to drop the horror/action themes and focus on a more peaceful setting with a hint of magic. We're not going to have elves or dwarves or anything of the sort, it'll be more like a piratey fantasy setting with humans and monsters.

    Much of the work with the engine and game features has already been done now, and I'm working on getting the first few areas into the game. Well except for the automap, which hasn't been started yet. I will be posting screenshots and more information when the game starts looking presentable.
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    Zankman 15 years ago
    Oh great, I hope it turns out good... We do have a lot of fantasy RPG's, but a cool top-down indie RPG sounds different by itself.
    Hurry with those pics.

    BTW, what do you mean when you refer to Notrium 1? Is there, like, 2?
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    Anonymous1157 15 years ago
    "Zankman" said:
    BTW, what do you mean when you refer to Notrium 1? Is there, like, 2?
    Notrium 1 is the Notrium you're accustomed to seeing. Notrium 2 is the project this thread discusses.

    So, why exactly did you decide to change the style of the game to this piratey RPG you say it will be? I thought the universe Notrium 1 was set in, and the way the game worked out and all, was pretty good. It was enough to get me to learn how to use the scripting language, at least.

    ... Oh, that brings a huge question to mind. Will the set of commands used when modding Notrium 2 surpass 60 like in the first Notrium, or will you try to condense it down to a set of commands that can be combined to do some of the more advanced things? (I'm not really sure how to describe what I'm getting at.)
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    ville 15 years ago
    The game will probably not be named Notrium 2, at the moment I don't think I will want to mess with the Notrium universe and introduce magic or something like that there. I haven't decided on a name for the new game yet. But with references to Notrium 1, I'm just keeping my options open.

    I wanted to go with a new theme mainly because it was the time to do that. If you look at my past games, every other has been a fantasy themed game, and every other a scifi themed game.

    There are certainly many fantasy themed RPG games out there. The new thing here is that it's
    A) Piratey
    B) Top Down, which means you'll see some pretty nice realtime action.
    C) My ace in the sleeve: Players will have an option to add their own content to the official content. This means there will be a lot of places to see in the game, and you'll have a chance to create your own quests and areas. There will obviously be some kind of a rating system. I'm hoping many of you who are modders will join in the making of these new maps.

    I'm not sure whether it should be categorized as RPG. Think of it more like Notrium with the addition of quests and dialogue, and more areas and things to see. One key difference will be that this will be an easier game to approach. I know many were turned away by the very steep learning curve from Notrium - most interviews would state that you'll be lucky to survive for a few minutes.

    As for modding, it will me much easier than in Notrium 1. There are still a couple of text files for defining items and new races, but mostly you'll be doing all the scripts through a visual editor that lists your options, you no longer need to remember them all. There will likely be roughly the same amount of scripting commands, but they will be more atomical, allowing for combinations and easy chaining of events.
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    Zankman 15 years ago
    "ville" said:
    But with references to Notrium 1, I'm just keeping my options open.
    This is made me smile.

    1. Are there gonna be pets?
    2. Are there gonna be party members?

    Both of course would have the point of not going alone.
    BTW, is the game gonna be like Notrium (1) or like Magebane 2, by graphics I mean? Personally, I would like it more with 2D graphics like Notrium (1).
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    ville 15 years ago
    About pets and party, I haven't decided yet. They may be in the game. But they would not be controllable characters, you'd always just control the main character.

    Graphically it will look a lot like Notrium, though the walls and terrain will have a 3D effect. Compared to Notrium we also have a full blown animation system which allows all sorts of funky effects for all objects.
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    MageKing17 15 years ago
    "ville" said:
    full blown animation system which allows all sorts of funky effects for all objects.
    Sounds interesting. Care to elaborate?
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    Zankman 15 years ago
    Will there be any "instances", like in WoW? Areas with notably harder creeps and bosses, but with way better drops?
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    ville 15 years ago
    This may interest many modders, so I'll elaborate a little on the new graphics system. It is still based on sprites like in Notrium, but we make creatures out of body parts. One sprite would be a leg or a head or anything, not the whole creature. And we have a keyframe based system to animate those body parts. You'll be able to control the animations from scripts, and yes, you can have multiple animations running simultaneously. This can of course be used to animate anything, say I wanted to make a beehive. I'd only add a lot of bee sprites, and then make an animation where the bees buzz around.

    I'm not sure what you mean by instances. There will be many areas to explore, some more difficult than others obviously. The focus is more on exploration and finding new interesting items than boss fights or hours worth of fighting similar baddies.
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    MageKing17 15 years ago
    "ville" said:
    And we have a keyframe based system to animate those body parts. You'll be able to control the animations from scripts, and yes, you can have multiple animations running simultaneously.
    That sounds cool.
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    Amarth 15 years ago
    Did you ever play Aquaria, Ville? They also use a system like this, combined with a freeform map editor. If you haven't played it, you must, it's one of the more important indie games and I think you could gather some ideas from it.

    Of course, Derek Yu is pretty much a genius, both code-wise and artist-wise, but so are you.
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    ville 15 years ago
    Strangely I must have missed Aquaria up until now. The graphics system seemed very similar to what the new one will be like, though there will be the addition of actual 3D modeled walls and trees.

    Visually Aquaria was very impressive. As a game Aquaria was way too difficult to begin, I didn't understand the first thing about using the magic system because it gave no feedback on what you did.
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    DRL 15 years ago
    Hi everyone.
    Well, GREAT TO HEAR IT!, this new game sounds much like a combination of RPG with user-friendly gameplay.
    I will, of course, appreciate one thing: modding. Will the game be easily modded?, anyway, if the answer is "yes", please Ville, please (And I hope I don`t offend you) please make modding EASIER if it is possible. I mean, in Notrium you had
    Parameter 1, Parameter 2, Parameter 2613563135....
    You know, it will be a lot more fun to mod something with code, not only mathematics...

    But still, it sounds GREAT! , I look foward to see the first release ( )
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    ville 15 years ago
    Modding will be extremely easy compared to Notrium, and compared to many other games as well. The ingame map editor allows you to make most things such as maps and scripting. Scripting is no longer done via mystical numbers, there is a graphical editor for writing the scripts. The scripts are also much simpler, meaning there won't be too many parameters. These parameters will also be documented in the editor, so you'll know what they do without reading a manual.

    Progress with the game looks good. I have mostly finished with the tutorial level now, along with the most basic gameplay elements of using items and objects such as doors, attacking enemies. Right now I'm starting work on some of the more difficult elements such as what the player will do in the wilderness. There may for example be animals that you can hunt, and hidden treasure that you can find under a rock.
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    ville 15 years ago
    Now I have the main parts of the game engine ready, since I was just continuing from where we left it with Cormoon. The tutorial level is fully complete, and the first island is basically dotted out. Next I'm going to focus on combat, and getting interesting enemy types into the game.

    What kinds of enemies do you find fun/infuriating in action RPG's? I am talking about their attack tactics, such as some enemy type might try to revive other fallen enemies, or some enemy type might have barbs that prevent you from attacking it from the front.
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    Dorten 15 years ago
    The ones that can disable you somehow: spiders leaving or shooting entangling webs, poisonous snakes etc.
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    ville 15 years ago
    Do you like or dislike them?
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    MageKing17 15 years ago
    I hate being frozen (whether in a block of ice or affected by a petrification status effect) in combat. It's annoying as hell. I prefer slow-down effects, because you can still control yourself to get out of the way of something, or hit back with a well-timed strike. A close-second is being made unable to attack (thinking of Curse from Symphony of the Night or Curse of Darkness, in the Castlevania series (but not Curse from Aria of Sorrow or Dawn of Sorrow, which drains your MP)), because action/RPGs are all about being able to attack.

    On the flip side, I love action/RPGs where you get to choose your character growth (as opposed to stats increasing in a predetermined distribution). In any game, I like having as much customization as possible. I've long felt that the reason Symphony of the Night is so popular in spite of glaring balance issues was the gigantic equipment list (and the fact that most weapons had special moves that did interesting things... like the Jewel Sword, which made enemies drop salable gemstones instead of their regular drop items, and if you did "weapon special move 1" with it (quarter-circle-forward + attack), a random number of coins (1- would appear out of the attack animation. It was in no way useful enough to make enough money to pay for high-level equipment (it even drained your MP so you couldn't do it constantly), but way less than half of all weapons went without a special ability of some kind.

    Symphony of the Night also had the ability to equip items in each hand, be it a pair of one-handed weapons, a weapon and a shield, a big two-handed weapon, or a pair of one-shot items (even healing items were used by equipping them to a hand and then using the action button for that hand). I can't remember a single other Castlevania game with as many equipment slots as Symphony of the Night (although to be fair, after how unbelievably overpowered certain equipment was in SotN, can you really blame them for taking it safe for years later?).

    While SotN had lots of equipment, it did suffer from the disadvantage that all its equipment was made by hand. There are plenty of other action/RPGs with dynamic equipment. The Diablo games are probably what leap to mind for most people... I think of Champions of Norrath, a PS2 game, or Mount&Blade. Mount&Blade used only the prefix system, in that weapons came with semi-random prefixes which altered their stats in some way. For example, a watered-steel bastard sword was more powerful (and expensive) than a rusty one. Champions of Norrath also had the tacking-on-prefixes-to-change-stats thing going on, but had slots to insert gemstones into your weapons, and going a step further, reflected changes to your equipments' stats by changes to your character model. If you're wielding a regular sword, you see a regular sword. If you insert a gem that gives it fire damage, you're now wielding a flaming sword. The weapon I last remember using was a triple-elemental blade with an animation that was extremely cool to watch.

    So, in summary, customization = good, helplessness = bad.

    EDIT: How did I misspell "customization"?
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    ville 15 years ago
    Thanks for that Mageking! This game will probably not a full out action RPG, in a sense that combat will play a less important role than in many of them. But I am planning on including several interesting enemy types, along with many weapon types, so the combat will not be a meaningless part either. I believe mostly our weapons will be premade, so that there might be useful differences between the weapons, instead of minimal percentage differences. But that is undecided yet.

    Oh, and I fully agree that freezing you is bad. Freezing an enemy might be interesting though.
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    Dorten 15 years ago
    "ville" said:
    Do you like or dislike them?
    depends on their quantity and probability of nasty attacks. Mostly like

    And an idea for the engine itself. It's good to be able to use anything in different perverted ways. I.E. - you've got a pail. You can store liquid in it, you can bash enemies with it, you can fill it with rocks and THEN bash enemies with it, you can wear it on the head to prevent enemies bashing it, you can put your light source in it to make light somehow directional, etc, etc...
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    MageKing17 15 years ago
    I also love multiple-use items. And I don't just mean "you can combine it with this or this" multiple use, I mean it has multiple practical applications.

    Also, being able to swing a bucket at people sounds like the best weapon ever.
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    Pete 15 years ago
    "Dorten" said:
    "ville" said:
    Do you like or dislike them?
    depends on their quantity and probability of nasty attacks. Mostly like

    And an idea for the engine itself. It's good to be able to use anything in different perverted ways. I.E. - you've got a pail. You can store liquid in it, you can bash enemies with it, you can fill it with rocks and THEN bash enemies with it, you can wear it on the head to prevent enemies bashing it, you can put your light source in it to make light somehow directional, etc, etc...
    How about a headbutting helmet filled with glowing liquid rocks?




    Ill go back in my corner now.
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    E_net4 15 years ago
    Stuff like that reminds me of StrandedII, Pete. And StrandedII has several funny concepts. As I assume Ville will make this game similar to Notrium when it comes to the "funniness" factor, I'd say no.
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    Grim Reaper 15 years ago
    "MageKing17" said:
    I also love multiple-use items. And I don't just mean "you can combine it with this or this" multiple use, I mean it has multiple practical applications.

    Also, being able to swing a bucket at people sounds like the best weapon ever.
    I still think beating people together with your own severed limbs sounds more awesome.

    Of course, before attempting a feat like that, one should make sure there's an Igor ready to patch you up and the parts are tattooed with the owner's name to avoid confusion.
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