A Stolen Love and the Forgotten Promise

Our best game yet!

It’s been a while but Indrah and I have released a new game – A Stolen Love and the Forgotten Promise. It was made for the IGMC which wrapped up a few days ago.

So for this game I made a simple skill tree system where the active tree gives a passive effect e.g. raises your chance to get a critical hit. I paired it with my publically available passive skill plugin, I think they complemented each other well.

My favourite skill.

“After much preparation and negotiation, you have finally been allowed to marry your lover, Ezra.

However the ceremony is rudely interrupted by Lilith, the archdemon of rebirth – who your grandmother defeated 50 years ago. Now in human form, Lilith kidnaps Ezra, claiming they made a promise to be together in a past life.

Of course, you are having absolutely none of it, so you (a berserker), your best friend Alex (a court mage) and sister-in-law Eva (a paladin) set out to chase down Lilith and rescue you spouse-to-be.

A breezy and lighthearted romp through 4 short areas (gameplay around 2 hours).

Both the main character and their marriage partner’s gender are decided by you. Enjoy the love story you want to play.”

Links:
Vote for us on itch
Itch Game Page
RPG Maker Net Game Page
RPG Maker Web Thread

The Cast of Abyssal Shine: Nevermelt

There are four playable characters in Abyssal Shine: Nevermelt, the fourth joins a bit into the adventure so I’ll limit myself to talking about the initial three for now.

First let me introduce Evander who initially is a Fire Mage but being as a good chunk of the game happens underwater he has to branch out and learn some thunder magic, the first time you experience underwater content he is next to useless but shortly afterwards he can buy the first of his skill tomes. After that he is very strong underwater but at the cost of MP.

Second we have Riya who is a Shark Hunter she has the ability to Jump (like the dragoons from Final Fantasy) or Dive (when underwater). She is the main physical attacker and learns skills from defeating the main bosses (and the first optional boss) until she has learnt them all.

Finally we have Anwar who is by and large a support character. He is a Geomancer who specialises in Ley Lines and their energy. He learns his skills when he finds points of ley line energy, at the same time one of his allies will also learn a skill when he does. Some of Anwar’s skills produce small ley lines and ley energy which can be used by any member of the party to use powerful skills.

Download link

Abyssal Shine: Nevermelt

It’s done.

Indrah is just distributing item finds and then it’s going off to more testers. It marks our first completed MV game which is nice and definitely the way forward once In Search of Dragons and In Search of Freedom are finished. It is also our eigth arum game so it’s probably time for some sort of timeline.

I’m sure I will write more about the development of Abyssal Shine in the future but for now I am just glad I can have a lie in tomorrow before more rounds of testing.

IGMC 2017 Game Dev Blog #2

Progress lots of progress. I’ve just finished the final dungeon’s puzzle element so it seemed like a good time to post an update. Above you’ll see a screenshot of the second dungeon, it actually looks amazingly better now that Indrah is through with it but for my purposes this is probably clearer, in this dungeon you can only progress when you have the matching coloured orbs. if you do then as you approach the blockers they go down and you can walk over them.

This is the final dungeon, if you read this in the hour after posting then you’ve technically seen it before Indrah as she isn’t back from work yet. The final dungeon involves a lot of ice, so naturally slippy floors but also you have to direct magical flames to clear obstacles from your path. It sounds so simple when I say it like that. Of the three dungeons this was the hardest to implement but I also think it’s the most fun.

The battle system and quicks are all implemented though it needs at the minimum a hud edit if not a custom hud. The playable characters have varying amounts of skills finished but I don’t anticipate that taking too long at which point all I need to do are the enemies and test, test, test. At the present time I’m in a good position to finish on time (and possibly a first not have to cut content to meet the deadline), so hopefully you’ll be able to play the finished product in a couple of week’s time.

P.S. I remade one of my favourite little code snippets from Ace as a plugin for the second dungeon, it allows you to have events respond when players are close to them, we’ve used it in the past for making hidden items have arrows appear when you’re close to them. I’ll write some documentation and release it when I have some spare time.

IGMC 2017 Game Dev Blog #1

Having only started on it today I don’t really have much to talk about, we’re using RPG Maker MV for the engine, roughly the game will have three dungeons which I’m going to do puzzles for. The first dungeon is set at a beach and you have to deal with currents.

It’ll look much better later, this is just the gameplay, I’ve worked it that the currents are revealed when you travel through them, should hopefully allow for a feeling of exploration and also I like to strive for the, “I can see where I need to go but how do I get there?” feeling; hopefully I’ll manage to achieve just that with this.

Feels good to be making dungeon puzzles again, it’s something I’ve missed over the years as the routine tends to be I make a lot of custom systems and the characters and enemies and then times up, test, test, test. This time I’m largely using yanfly’s plugins as I don’t have a backlog of stuff pre-made for MV also for various reasons I’ve never got into coding for MV, maybe that will change, I’ve already had to edit one of yanfly’s plugins.

P.S. In Search of Sharks is only a in-dev name, we’ll name the game later.