Tsujin Saves Christmas

Well, that was a fun holiday season. AARPG blog is back! What have I been working on during the dead time? I made a comic called Tsujin Saves Christmas as a present to my roommate. It has similarities to the Awesome Adventure RPG.

Dragons destroying the city. It's up to us to stop them!

Baru using Ether Fist. Taste the shiny wrath!

These three panels are in no particular order. The book has 48 pages. I'll post the whole thing online some time.

Welcome to my Minigame Land

TheDave hosts a series of mini games in hidden locations. Why does he do that, you ask? Well... erm... go check out the screen shots below.

So, in the above picture, we have Baru and TheDave running around. And random animals. And some health bars. Have fun making sense of that one.

The image above looks like a puzzle. But what is it a puzzle of? It's a mystery.

The trivia randomizes questions from a huge selection of facts with various difficulty ranges. Notice the awesome Zelda dark world style. Except... dammit... the water container outside of the house is broken.

These are only a few of the many hidden games. You only get one shot to beat each, but if you win, you get some nifty prizes.

1-up

Here's a short update on something fun. 1-ups!


When you collect a 1-up, your entire party instantly gets a full recovery (hp/mp/status). There are more of these to be found in extreme mode because there are very few free healing safe spots. 1-ups are usually only in hidden locations, difficult to reach spots (like the screenshot), or only appear under certain conditions. When you collect them, they make that charming sound effect that I never get tired of hearing. Good luck hunting for them.

Merewen Bio

Merewen is a character the party encounters a few times during the game. She is a student at an academy of magic. She works as a shopkeep for magic stores for income (including the store in Celest). She has some back story with Baru and is generally friendly towards the party.

Merewen favors Earth and Fire magic. She likes spells that allow her to destroy the enemy in a pretty fashion (woot). One of her favored spells is the aforementioned Alicorn Lance. If the fight gets in close quarters, she can brandish a rapier to dispatch or incapacitate foes. She cannot easily be silenced, but is prone to confusion.

If you play the game through standard difficulty, you'll see Merewen a few times in shops and during plot expositions. If you play the game through extreme mode, the plot will be so heavily altered that she joins the party. But what witty dialog will she bring to the scene? You'd have to play to find out.

Celest

Here's easily one of my favorite locations in the game. It's the area where all those Mystic people are.


Yeah, it's totally a floating island in the sky. Think Zeal Island from Chrono Trigger. Everything in this area is over color saturated, giving it an beautiful but almost unnatural feel.


Lots of flowers, streams, foliage, greenery, etc. Much to Tsujin's dismay, Baru tells her that this place smells like lemons. It probably does. Oh, and notice the different clothing on Baru. Heheheh...


The shop here has some amazing items. And dialog.


There is a lot of plot exposition here. There are some revelations here that probably should've been closer to the start of the game. Meh. It makes this area all the more awesome.

Water Tech

First I posted about Fire. Now, it's time for its polar opposite.

Stay frosty. Water skills are good for support and conservative damage output. You'll notice a few duplicate skills being repeated here, but I'll repost them anyway for the sake of completeness. And for great Awesome.

Healing Drops: Heals an ally and cures the blind bad status. This skill is very useful early game as you can save money on healing items and spend it on equipment. It's only really useful late game if you have a good Magic attribute.
Frost Bolt: Deals great water element damage. This spell is the most useful direct damage ability in some areas.
Siphon Mana: Drain MP from a target. This skill doesn't cost any MP to use, so it's both useful for recovering your mana pool and dampening your opponents.
Hydrokinesis: Deals massive water damage to one target. It doesn't deal quite as much damage as pyrokinesis, but it has a much better mana cost. Hydrokinetic characters are more coolheaded and sometimes pause to rethink the situation.
Steam Jet (+F): Deals fire/water damage and causes blind.
Twin Rova (+F): Deals massive fire/water damage. Yay for fire and ice.
Healing Shower (+A): Heals all allies. Argueably the best heal spell.
Ice Prison (+A): Deals good water/air damage and traps the target in a block of ice. Targets trapped in ice are paralyzed.
Quicksand (+E): Lowers the agility of all non-flying enemies. Using this gives you a much higher success rate to flee from a battle.
Rebirth (+E): Fully restore one ally. Heals all HP.
Heat Cyclone (+F +A): Huge multi-element damage to one target. Very mana efficient.
Magma Pit (+F +E): Chance to kill all enemies instantly.
Revival Winds (+A +E): Stabilizes critical allies and the entire party gets a slight HP recovery.
Prismatic Missile (all): Deals fire/water/air/earth damage in a very colorful display. Targets hit by this usually become confused.

Here are a few of the unique water element skills:
Diamond Dust: Deals some serious water damage to all enemies. This is the only pure water element skill that can damage multiple enemies.
Mana Field/Mana Aura: Increases the MP regeneration of the entire party. Lasts for the rest of the battle.
Mana Nexus: Give a huge amount of your mana to an ally. If you use this on yourself, you only recover a small amount of mana.

Okay, so I probably could've posted Prismatic Missile on the fire update (as well as every other update). Oh well.

Secondary Characters

There are a lot of nameless NPCs running around, even more rag-tag than the main party. Check out these three clowns.



These guys are mostly here for comic relief. For now, let's call them Fighter Guy, Burley Guy, and Shifty Guy. None of them have any aptitude in magic but that doesn't stop them from parading around like they're the world's only hope. It's as if they're in a story completely of their own. They do have some awesome voicing though.

Fighter Guy voice sample: "Alright. More fighting. Wow..." (Link)
Burley Guy voice sample: "Augh, I'm needin' a healer." (Link)
Shifty Guy voice sample: "Just ah... don't stand between me and the exit." (Link)

Dark Forest

A forest! This area has a forest ambiance sound that plays parallel to the music. It's made of win. And yes, I'm aware at how disgustingly generic the name of this location is; it's made of nerf and lose.

TheDave is probably wandering around here somewhere. This area has a lot of forest canopies that obscure vision. You can move under the canopy and find hidden areas. Watch out for hostiles.

In the image above, you'll notice a sparkley thing. It's a save point! You can save your progress and use Hero Meals from these. There are a few areas you don't have to find one of these to save (e.g. safe areas).

Kracka-boom! Dark clouds roll in and the forest slowly gets deformed in to a swamp. A bunch of new hostiles spawn as the area changes. What's with this messed up weather? Plot hook!

Warp Circles

Here's a short update on something you'll encounter. Warp circles are simply teleporters that link two fixed locations. Only Baru and TheDave can activate these (either one needs to be in the party).

The destination is unknown, so jumping in one could throw you somewhere you didn't expect. Their main functionality in the game is to allow the party to quickly jump areas without having to do some serious back tracking. There are also quite a few secret warp circles. I'm thinking of making a system for creating these circles via rune chalk or something. I'll throw up an update if I come up with something brilliant.

Prologue Characters

Here is some insight on the three characters you can play in the prologue. This will be really brief, because my drunken roommate isn't likely going to give me much time. So:

Auril is a psionic adept who is the leader of the prologue party. She has the ability to shift in to a form comprised entirely of ethereal matter. In this form, she can slip past walls and obstacles. She can change forms in the middle of battle much like Skully. Her ether form has enormous potential for magic damage, but is very fragile. She uses the Bow.

Elyas is a mystic (he can conjure wings much like Tsujin). He can skip his turn to embrace in a divine light, giving him new tech skills for the battle. This move is very much like Baru's charge. Elyas is the only character from the prologue that the characters know exist today. He eventually advanced to Seraph (the highest rank) in Celest (a city on a floating island in the sky).

Exolix used to be a mercenary until Kressalack's attacks began. He has an unusual ability to resist magic, so when faced with Kressalack's demon magic, he was instead infested by the dark energy. He has managed to control the dark energy within him, releasing it in a terrifying spurt of energy. He can embrace the dark energy in battle enabling a huge selection of dark magic, but it drains MP each turn. This skill is much like Tsujin's wing conjuration.

Auril, Elyas, and Exolix have skills similar to Baru, Tsujin, and Skully. What are their personalities like? Well, you'd have to play the prologue to find out. Kahahah.

Prologue

When you start the Awesome Adventure, you jump right in to the game with absolutely no sense of back story or story arc. The plot develops as the game progresses, but you start with little more than a title screen. This allows you to get to the game play faster, but makes for worse story telling. The solution? I added a Prologue entry to the Extras.

When you start a new game, you've got the option to check out the prologue. In the prologue, you play as a different group of characters in the era before the main plot happens (obviously, where else would the prologue be). It's almost like a completely separate game within a game.

If you've ever played the Lufia games for SNES, the prologue is something in the same idea; a group of characters defeat a major villain to save the world in a generation before the main story arc. Obviously something went horrendously wrong and it's up to the characters in the present to set things right. Of course, you could skip the prologue entirely and discover everything for yourself. Either way, it's a good play through to get a sense at what the world is like. Oh, and did I mention that the major villain was Kressalack? More awesome voicing of unmentionable badassitude ensues.

Combat

I've been updating for about a month now and I haven't mentioned the battle system at all. Battles are more or less what you'd expect from a retro rpg: a turn based battle system. Every round of combat, you get three options: Fight, GTFO, or I'm Lazy. Fight lets you give orders to your characters, GTFO gets you the fuck out of a bad situation, and I'm Lazy automatically chooses commands for the characters. If you engage the enemy in battle, you'll get 4 commands: Attack, use special techniques (the name for this command is unique for every character), Defend, and Item. Things are self explanatory.

The four attributes of characters determine how good they are in battle. In case you haven't figured it out yet, the four attributes are Attack, Defense, Agility, and Magic. Attack increases the damage done by your Attack command and gives you better damage with weapon techniques or skills that do more damage with a high attack (like Ether Fist). Defense is damage reduction; the more you have, the less damage you take from physical attacks. Agility improves your initiative in battle (the order in which actions are made), gives you more accuracy, and lets you evade attacks. Magic makes your special attacks more potent and gives you resistance against other magic attacks. Every turn, characters recover 1 hp and 1 mp. This entire paragraph is crap you probably could've guessed.

If your characters encounter an enemy much weaker than your average party level, the enemy is automatically defeated before the battle even begins (like in Earthbound). You just walk up to the weak monster and zap it. You get xp and cash for zapping an enemy, but the enemy won't respawn (though a stronger kind of monster may take it's place later). This makes back tracking less tedious and dampens the effectiveness of level grinding. That, and it makes a snazzy thwack sound.

Kressalak Bio

About 100 or so years before the main plot happens, Orcs and Humans waged an infinite war. Old grudges and xenophobism fueled the senseless conflict. Kressalak was a sorcerer who discovered a method of channeling the death in the air. He was able to draw on the terror, hatred, suffering, chaos, and death of the war. Kressalak was able to manifest these five nether elements in to beings that came to be known as demons.

With his army of darkness, he was able to simultaneously crush both orc and human armies, ending their conflict (against each other, at least). He built a kingdom upon the corpses of his enemies and revelled in the glories of war. That's about when a group of rag-tag adventurers set aside their differences and got all up in his business. Kressalak was slain (spoiler alert!), though his spirit refused to pass on. Every time he died, he would just reincarnate in a more powerful form. After about 3 transformations, the party of heroes managed to seal his power in a series of gemstones. His spirit manifested in a suit of armor in the very castle he was slain in.

Kressalak has serious magic ability. He has mastered all four basic elements and can throw some mean attacks. Or at least he used to before he was stripped of his power and sealed in a castle. Since he is bound to the mortal plane, he is sure to antagonize the party at some point with sheer badassitude.

Voice sample: "I have been observing your progress since you first stepped foot in to my realm." (Link)
Voice sample: "Yes... so I did." (Link)
Voice sample: "If it is evil that you seek, then you need look no further." (Link)

Dynamic Dialog

Dynamic dialog is the fancy term I coined that basically means that the dialog changes depending on factors. Fancy, huh. It makes playing through the game more than once rewarding, as there are new punchlines and witty banter to be heard.


Most of the dialog doesn't actually effect game play, but it makes the dialog bits more enjoyable. The characters seem more developed. Stuff that effects dialog:

• Element skill
• How long it takes you to complete an area
• If you help someone or ignore them
• If you fail or succeed at certain encounters
• Your character level
• Items held
• If certain people are in your party or not
  

There are probably a couple more I'm forgetting, but these are the major factors. How about some dialog for example? I'll grab a piece of text from the flooded caverns. After some swimming, Baru and Tsujin have a chat.

If both Baru and Tsujin have water skill- B: "Well, that was fun. Yay for water." T:"Isn't it awesome?"
If Baru has water skill but Tsujin doesn't- B: "Well, that was fun. Yay for water." T:"Swimming is for noobs. Like you! Oh burn!" B: "Hey. Don't make me throw water at you."
If Baru has no water skill but Tsujin does- B: "Blah. That was crap. I need to put more points in to water." T: "You noob. I've got some water skill... although I don't swim anyway."
If neither Baru nor Tsujin have water skill- B: "Blah. That was crap. I need to put more points in to water." T:"It's kind of a crappy element. We're better off with what we have."

A lot of the dialog is written like this. I think it makes things more interesting.

Fire Tech

I'll cover the four basic elements and what they're capable of. Let's start with what seems to be ridiculously popular: FIRE!

Roasty toasty! Fire gives you a bonus to your attack attribute. It also lets you light torches longer. Here are some fire spells:

Melt Armor: Deals damage and lowers physical defense. Great opening move.
Fireball: A fan favorite. It really deals the damage.
Flame Void: Deals massive damage, costs massive MP.
Pyrokinesis: The highest single damage spell in the game. A character with this can control fire. Characters that become pyrokinetic have a more aggressive attitude (yes, it changes the in-game dialog).
Steam Jet (+W): Deals fire/water damage and causes blind.
Twin Rova (+W): Deals massive fire/water damage. Kills most things in one hit.
Flamethrower (+A): Deals damage and lowers fire resistance.
Lightning Bolt (+A): Zaps things good. Massive fire/air damage.
Meteor (+E): Deals fire/earth damage. Impact from this spell stuns the target.
Fissure (+E): Opens a gap that swallows an enemy, killing it instantly. Even if they manage to avoid getting pulled it, they are still dealt fire/earth damage.
Heat Cyclone (+W +A): Huge multi-element damage to one target. Very mana efficient.
Magma Pit (+W +E): Chance to kill all enemies instantly.
Ash Wind (+A +E): Deals multi-element damage to all enemies, causing mass blind and stunning them all.

Below are some special fire spells that are unique:
Sunscortch: Deals more damage when used in direct sunlight.
Rage Flare: Extremely damaging spell that uses up a lot of mana.
Alicorn Lance (+E): Shoots forth a shimmering lance. Enemies struck by it take fire/earth damage and are covered in glittery dust. The dust reduces the target's armor.