Revahlen - SNES Style ARPG

So my team and I released a demo of our action RPG game, Revahlen. It features the intro act, and is meant to get players to come to grips with the different systems in the game while not being too intrusive, plus give a good introduction to the two lead characters. It culminates in a mini boss battle. Give it a try, and feel free to leave some thoughts!

http://bluekeygames.com/revahlen/

Just a few notes:

*Z is the default key for Canceling out of Menus.

*You can play with keyboard, an Xbox 360 controller, or touch.

*Haven't tested it in Firefox. Works great in Node Webkit and in Chrome. Does not work in IE.

*It's being developed with desktop in mind.

*The upgrade system isn't exactly implemented in the demo. Instead of leveling up through XP, you level up pieces of equipment. These can be seen in the status menu.

I've since started a complete engine rewrite, in order to simplify and better organize the game systems. I've also included Spriter into the workflow as well, due to just how damn easy it makes animating and how much smaller the filesizes have become. I'm also making the event sheets easier to read so I can possibly get other people to help create assets, since currently it's just me doing all the graphics and programming.

The UI and controls have also gotten overhauled. I've since modeled the controls after an SNES controller. The demo does not reflect this, but I thought I might make a note that the controls and UI in the demo are far from final.

The overall feel of the gameplay should stay relatively the same, unless some folks can give some awesome suggestions for improvements. The plot and music will also remain the same. Anyway, let me know what you guys and gals think!

P.S: Please don't ask me to make the game engine available. It's about 20-someodd interlocking parts and if one breaks, everything breaks. I can give pointers on what I've learned and how I've gone about it but it really is a complex animal that you need to build yourself, otherwise you'll never make anything with it. Plus, I don't want to have to provide technical support on it. And it's not even finished. Forgive me!

Geez, amazing graphics. How did you manage that three dimensional moving sand??

The only bug I noticed was In the first cave, whenever the character shot at a spider or the dynamite exploded, the music cut out and there was no shooting or blasting sound effect. It took the music about 10 seconds to come back on.

Interesting bug. I hope it doesn't pop up again in the engine rewrite.

The "mode7" effect, found in titles like F-Zero, Super Mario Kart, and the airship sequences of Final Fantasy 3/6, was recreated via an effect add-on from R0j0hound. You can find it here:

https://www.scirra.com/forum/effect-mode7_t77858

Thanks for the props.

Wow, this is very impressive. I got stuck on the little plinth where the treasure chest was and died, but for the few minutes of playtime I did spend with it, I enjoyed it immensely.

I don't have many critiques, other than perhaps the intro wore on a little too long. I was left looking at the mountain slowly rising up as the camera approached it, not really sure if I was meant to skip ahead or if more was coming. I've seen other games speed up those sorts of sequences once the text and everything is done. Or perhaps give the player an option to speed things up at this point.

Praise-wise, there's plenty:

• The controls are very tight - they feel incredibly responsive and movement is solid.
• The humour is great, I love the sarcastic approach - that well being a save point actually made me laugh out loud.
• The way that gameplay mechanisms are introduced is spot-on - I'm not sure how that beginning bit fits into the whole game but it didn't feel like a tutorial, even though it was one.
• The music is very well suited - did you make that yourself?
• The pixel rounding initially felt a bit irritating, but I quickly got what you were trying to achieve with it. I've played a lot of RPGs on the SNES, and this looks perfect, right down to the twitchy pixels.

Do you have any plans to expand the two-character thing? Maybe it was still to come in the demo, as I didn't play very much, but I can imagine character-switching or true two-player support could have some interesting implications.

Otherwise, great work! I hope you're going to go public with this and see what the rest of the world thinks of it (and throws their money at you).

You've definitely captured that good old snes feeling. Intro was very cool, great music. Nice work guys.

This is looking really cool! I agree that it has captured the old snes feeling.

GeometriX

• You should have been able to just press a key to skip the mountain scrolling sequence. If not, color me bugged.

-The beginning is essentially a prologue to introduce the two main leads, and give an idea of the world they exist in, their jobs, etc... Basically like a cold open in an adventure film, like Indiana Jones.

-I helped compose the main theme of the game and provided direction for the rest, but the music was mostly composed and produced by my sound lead Chris.

Much of the game will be played with 3 characters at once, with a total alternating cast of 5. No plans for two player support for now, although I would love to. No plans for manual character switching, but there will be character switching during certain points of the final game.

It's too bad you didn't get past that room. Big Indiana Jones/Uncharted moment in the very next room.

Current plans are to attempt Steam Greenlighting and Windows Store. Wish us luck!

GenkiGenga

flatness

Thanks for the props!

Very cool, one of the better Construct 2 games I've seen, feels solid though.

I liked the initial controls hint where you use the arrow keys and they disappear when you use them. I wish that continued a bit longer because for whatever reason I wasn't clear on how to use the water wave item (I'm not one for reading instructions in games) so I was stuck on the pit jump trying to figure it out.

The pathing for the buddy seemed very well done, he would stay out of the way and then run up to bugs as needed and take care of them. What did you use for his pathing if you don't mind sharing?

Very cool. I like it. There is a bug (I think) where you can invoke the menu during the intro scene. Is there a cancel button on the gamepad? If so I wasn't able to figure it out before the demo ended. Again, good work.

Centra

For each Actor

+Actor.Type="Ally"
++Actor.Status="Idle"
+++ActorFamily.Type="Player"
++++Distance(Actor.XY,ActorFamily.XY)>64*Actor.ID
---->Actor find path to ActorFamily
---->Set Actor.Path=0
++++Distance(Actor,ActorFamily)<32*Actor.ID
---->Set Actor.Path=-1

+Actor.Status="Chase"
++ActorFamily.ID=Actor.TargetID
-->Actor find path to ActorFamily
-->Set Actor.Path=0
+++Actor.CombatType="Melee"
++++Distance(Actor.XY,ActorFamily.XY)<Actor.Width
---->Set Actor.Path=-1
---->Set Actor.Status="Attack"
+++Actor.CombatType="Ranged"
++++Distance(Actor.X,ActorFamily.X)<4
    OR
    Distance(Actor.Y,ActorFamily.Y)<4
---->Set Actor.Path=-1
---->Set Actor.Status="Attack"[/code:w8knb6ab]

That's kind of the rough gist of the pathing system. I use an invisible box sprite to act as each character for stat and navigation purposes, and then animated sprites are constantly set to their positions and handle the hitboxing. The whole pathing/movement system itself is a combination of the pathfinder behavior and 8 direction movement behavior and invisible waypoint sprites working together. When the Actor.Path variable is greater than -1, it kicks the pathing system into gear.

@Burvey
That is a bug. You're supposed to be able to cancel out of the intro sequence, but not supposed to be able to bring up the menu. Oops.

Looks awesome! May I ask how you made the start menu with start/options? I am looking for a good/easy solution to make a menu controllable with a gamepad. If you hit up/down the menu elements should be selected. How did you make the menu with cursor controls?

Very, very awesome. I'm gonna tweet about this. Definitely bring it to the Wii U - all the earthbound and RPG fans would eat it up.

Alrighto, I took a few minutes to check this out. Sorry, didn't have the time to finish the demo, but here's something that I wanted to mention.

• In the very beginning after choosing new game, the level flashes on screen before the black fade in comes up. Just a minor thing, but it struck out for me.
• The world map tiles look very Final Fantasy VI. Almost identical. Was this intentional?
• Characters could use diagonal sprites at least for movement animations.

Right now I can say it looks very promising. The menu is very neat, too, and it must have been quite a bitch to make

Sorry to sound kinda negative, but I'll try finishing the demo some other time and maybe give more in-deph feedback.

Bl4ckSh33p

It's not the easiest solution the way I did it, but it works for me. The cursor contains a number variable I name "ui_index". I actually have variables "ui_index0/1/2/3" on it, but that's to maintain indexes through the various sub menus. I use control triggers to add or subtract from the index, and I place the cursor's x/y position based on the index. Something like...

+ Every tick
-> Set Cursor.Position
   Cursor.X = SpriteFont.X-Cursor.Width
   Cursor.Y = SpriteFont.Y + SpriteFont.LineHeight * Cursor.ui_index

+ IF Control.Down is pressed
-> Add 1 to Cursor.ui_index
++ IF Cursor.ui_index > LastMenuOptionIndex
--> Set Cursor.ui_index = 0
+ IF Control.Up is pressed
-> Subtract 1 from Cursor.ui_index
++ IF Cursor.ui_index < 0
--> Set Cursor.ui_index = LastMenuOptionIndex[/code:i0auedg3]

That's kinda the gist of the basic principles. It's based off of a zero-index. Of course, if you have several spritefont objects you need to put in a condition to identify which one the Cursor should set its position to.

@Manley23
Thanks for the props!  

@Hasuak
-Yeah, the level flash is not really a feature. 
-Good eye. There are a lot of design choices in the game that are heavily based on Final Fantasy VI, including the world map. I'm not entirely happy with how the towns appear on the map though, so those will very likely be changing, although trying to draw towns using as few 8x8 squares as possible is pretty tough.
-While I would love to do diagonal sprites that effectively doubles all of the frames I'd need to create and I'm the only artist on my small team currently, plus I'm the only programmer on the team. Oh well.

The menu's eventing in the current posted demo is so damn messy. In the revision it's so much more streamlined, so much cleaner.

There's no attire more perfect!  The vests are actually meant to be like [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brigandine]brigandines[/url], which ties into the upgrade system. You increase your HP by upgrading your Defense stat through armor plating that gets riveted into your vest. "But what about the limbs and face?!" hypothetical you hypothetically asks. It's an old school ARPG, don't think too much on it. That said, their outfit designs are always changing slightly the more my understanding of Victorian Era fashion improves.

Thank you very much.

I came up with something similar recently with my "The Escapists Companion", but I stored the index in a global variable.

In my first attempt I created an array filled with Y positions (on start of layout set 0,0=100;0,1=150;0,2=200 and so on) and then set the position of the cursor to the value from the array.

But I think I will use something else like image points instead of a list of coordinates next time.