I have been a musician and composer for over 20 years, and i have to say that your music is amazing <img src="smileys/smiley32.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

Thank you very much! I've been a really big passion of mine for quite some time!

And thank you so much for all the support! I thought there had been a couple smaller RPG's on C2 before now. Either way, its an underrepresented genre (no doubt due to the complexity). I'm judiciously using groups and includes to make this all as clean as humanly possible because I know it will balloon. I'm also trying to have as much reusable code (ie, calling stuff in an included event sheet) to reduce the overhead on each individual map's event sheet. This is a life-savor for NPC's and their dialogue/choices/quest-giving, though my system isn't as elegant as I'd prefer.

And I think people will be pleasantly surprised at how well that character works in-game. You play a postman, for goodness' sake, so don't expect big swords and such. The game can get plenty serious, but there needs to be a good balance. IE, socks with sandals, etc. But that particular shading style looks really nice in-game, though you'll have to wait a little bit longer to see it. I want to have the NPC's for this area done and the next update of Spriter out (so I can get fancier with my animations :-P ) before I really show off that aspect.

And yes, RPG's are prone to failure and non-completion, though that tends to be the case with a lot of genres. My release model of segments added onto the whole is there precisely to combat that. If I had to complete this from start to finish with all quests without it ever seeing the light of day, it would fall into the abyss like many others. I really respect Arima for keeping at it so long. But incremental growth updates are a really fantastic way to combat this that browser-based games allow (which was extremely difficult or annoying even a few years ago). Nobody wants to download and install patches (and many won't), but on a browser, you essentially have to be up-to-date. The first town, dungeon area, and the associated story elements and a small portion of the overworld will be what makes up the first release. A bridge will be out for repairs in-game, and when I've built the next area, that bridge will open up (and I'll likely have changed things in the current area :-P). I think it's a very nice, sensible release plan for a browser RPG.

Thank you all very much for your comments so far! I really appreciate it!

Oh man, you just killed my productivity. And my wife's.

It sounds like you may just want to give indiegogo a shot--it does all this and has no minimum limit for a payout (if you choose). And for crowd funding, bigger is often better.

Yeah, Mortar Melon looks fantastic. In addition to what's been posted, I'll shamelessly mention my own games:

CC: Blight

<img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v625/CubedOCR/Blight/trees.png" border="0" />

C2: Courier

<img src="http://www.adamprack.com/materials/screen002.png" border="0" />

Haha though someone may notice I recycled the pine trees :-P

Great looking! I see your style improved a lot! Blight is your previous project, am I right? Really digging visuals, water looks great too! And that badass warrior - neat work on textures!

Thank you very much, yes, I was working on Blight. That warrior is not mine--that was Rory suggesting I draw my concept art more like that.

But here are two night-time screenshots:

<img src="http://adamprack.com/materials/night01.png" border="0" />

<img src="http://adamprack.com/materials/night02.png" border="0" />

I'm using Spriter and it's still so hard to make anything good. Walk cycles are useless because you have to remove the background with Paint.net, then you put them on Construct 2 and every time I turn left the player teleports like two metres.

I believe all of those walk cycles on the Internet are for you to use as a model or template. There shouldn't be any backgrounds to remove if you are making your own art. Spriter works fine for me in C2... are your animations centered in Spriter? Like where the horizontal and vertical lines meet? Each of those frames in the walk cycle should overlap--not be spread out side-to-side.

But animation takes practice.

Here's some concept art of the main character (male version, there will be a female version, too)

Hopefully we'll be adding better Z order controls for both the editor and runtime in future.

C-7 - families work great AFAIK and don't have any issues with for-each. You might want to make a post to the bugs forum if you think there is a problem.

Ashley Do they allow more than one object type? They work fine if you build your entire level out of one object type. I never said there was a bug, just that it is severely limiting. I can only z-order based on y by either hackishly using an array (which it seems I may have to resort to), or using Rex's plugin that does it by layer. But with the plugin, I can't exclude anything.

If I'm using a spriter object, for instance, it will shuffle the objects in with everything else as opposed to keeping them relative to the scml object. So I can't use a family and include the objects I want because I use both tiled backgrounds AND sprites (and scml, but that's beside the point). And I can't simply use the plugin because the spriter body parts are z-ordered with everything else.

It could at least be gotten around with "move forward"/"move backward", but there is no really usable solution to this, to my knowledge, unless I essentially load all y values into an array every tick or so, sort it, and z-order based on that.

"For each with families" does NOT work with more than one object type, so until families become more robust, it's not a very useful argument.

Please don't take this as negative, but I want to give you some counter-arguments for things to be aware of. These are just problems you're likely going to run across in your development, and things that will need to be thought about early.

First) You stand to alienate some players by taking away the choice of who they can play as (until you beat the game). If people replay it, they'll likely feel like that's how it should have been all along. I'd say keep the lottery-style stuff, but have it pertain to something else. Maybe a powerup you get to bring with you, etc.

Second) Level-based progression is fine, just remember that you're multiplying the amount of work you'll need to do. Particularly since you have 3 full characters to fully animate. That crap adds up.

Third) You say that completing the game unlocks the player you beat it with... but you don't get to choose that player to start with. What if the player is forced to complete the game with the one character they DON'T like. Then their only option on subsequent plays is to randomize or pick their least-favorite choice. I would try to find some way around this to make it more inviting to the player Things like that will increase the number of players you get, especially return players. And if someone dislikes choice being taken from them at the start, it will influence how they view the rest of the game.

Please don't take this as a deterrent, but as constructive feedback for you to build on. Also, ideas are important, but execution is the real winner.

They would be immensely helpful and it's been asked. I have no idea why it hasn't been added yet, unless for some reason Ashley thinks the current commands are enough or it would be difficult to add the new ones. It would make things a TON easier for a lot of normal tasks.

That DOES look really impressive, Rockwall! Great stuff so far!