Elthinia, a JRPG for iOS

Hoo boy, setbacks, setbacks

I discussed this with one of the senior members and they said it was okay to, ah, necro this thread back up (rather than make a new one), which is great because it has a lot of our work leading up to where we're at now. Long story short, my programmer and I had a lot of personal and professional curve balls thrown at us over the last 8 months, some bad, some good, but it impacted our time tables and ability to make the game we wanted to make. Now we're at a crossroads where something big has come up for my friend and we *have* to finish this, submit it, and get it approved within a month or so or that'll be it; I think my friend would be able to give me the codebase so theoretically I might be able to publish it heh, but I'm far more artist than programmer.

I wanna say I'm sorry to those who were expecting this sooner, there were a lot of things that we just didn't have work arounds for and didn't want to make a game we weren't both happy with. This is a lot closer to what we were envisioning

So, some updates! ^_^

We've overhauled a lot of combat on the backend, it runs a lot smoother now than it did last August.


Added a few more backgrounds for combat, the encounters are preset to pool a specific background and then adjusts based on the game-time. This is one of our new ones:


We've eliminated random encounters and opted for roaming mobiles that, if you want, you can avoid altogether. Conversely we were concerned over how the game would handle tracking all the roaming mobiles on the map (since it keeps location info on everything, everywhere). My friend is like the Wizard of Oz and I'm a flying monkey, I don't ask how he does it, but it works. This is a shot of 400 roaming mobiles, fully animating, walking around just outside one of the earlier towns, still holding at 60fps.


One of the hard to get to areas in the game


I snagged my wife's phone and took a video of me playing, just so you can see how fluid the game runs. Until now we were doing video capture off of the simulator on my friend's computer, which caps off at about 15fps I think. We still had to implement the updated Skill screen since we transitioned to the 5/5S screen dimensions, which is why you see some of the combat screen in the background to the right.


Again, I'm really sorry for the delay, but we'll be wrapping up our final build in about a week or so, doing a little bit of final testing and a couple balance passes, and then shipping it off to Apple. Thank you very much for checkign this out

 

Thanks everyone ^_^ We're still debating on what to price it at, it seems if you're an unkown indie dev you shouldn't venture too far outside for $0.99 heh, but I dunno, we're still hoping for $1.99, $2.99 at most; price is always a tenuous thing to discuss, as a guy who plays games, cheaper is always nice heh, but as a developer you'd prefer not to leave money on the table.

@WildBastion, I'll see if my 3GS can still hold a charge, if it does I'll try to give it an install and a go. What OS are you running on yours, if you don't mind me asking?

edit:
Hope this image isn't too wide, just a few of our mobiles to dig around for ^_^

 

Small update ^_^

On random encounters vs. roaming encounters:
We had debated for many, many months over how to handle encounters, originally we had planned to make them purely random like a lot of older JRPGs. As time went on and we'd read a random article or comment on how folks really disliked that aspect of JRPGs. and started seeding the idea of roaming mobiles that you could see on the map; at first it was supposed to be just for monsters of importance, like bosses or rare spawns, but it slowly grew in scope over time. Eventually we'd completely drop random encounters in favor of these roaming ones, so if you want to avoid a certain path full of monsters you can, or conversely if you wanted to farm a certain monster encounter you could, as they respawn every hour after you kill them hehe.

It's not immediately apparent, but the roamers are color coded to represent general level and overall power. The ones shown here are between lvl16-20, compared to the ones you initially fight which are 1-5 and 6-10, dull grey and pink, respectively.


My favorite place…:
So far, at least It looks best at night, I think; I've really enjoyed making all the bits of foliage for the game, I think this one area has the most variety you'll see in one particular area. The caves in the image are not physically linked together but they tie in with one another somehow.


Those hard to reach places…:
We wanted to have a lot of places in the game that you just had to either figure out on how to get there or find something that would help you get there, places that you could walk past and think "how in the world do I get there..?"

So if you see a 'random' ledge or cave that's just completely unaccessible remember that there is a way to get there ^_^


Thanks for checking out this little update

 

Thanks again everyone It's been a long, long, road that's finally coming to a close. Well, until we release it, then it's time to make more stuff for it

I've been thinking about that, I think so long as my friend can still work on game projects, I think we'll just keep updating Elthinia until the entire story arc is done completely. The pace of that will be based more on how well it does I guess, if we can take off some time from our day jobs, but I think this is something I'd like to just work on for a while more, well now that we have the groundwork and systems done heh.

I updated the first post in this thread to reflect more accurately where we are right now, I completely forgot to update that and I don't want folks to get mislead as to how much we'll have ready on launch

Oh, a quick screenshot for one of the more interesting places later in the game:


Thanks again for checking this out! ^_^

 

I talked with my friend, he's not 100% sure it'll run on a 3GS but it *might* because aside from our graphics interfacing, which is handled by Cocos2D, everything else is custom built so it might work okay. One thing though is it'll be a sizable game, right now we're sitting at about 130MB before adding the last bits of audio and art assets; my friend said apps blow up a bit when Apple approves them and thinks we might hit, like, 500MB which I think is crazy but.. possible? Just something to consider I guess.

One thing he wants to add in later, maybe 1.1 or even 1.05, is to have a throttle down option to lower FPS for older devices, just to save some battery life. I don't think we'll get to it for 1.00, we're already really tight on schedule but if an extra hour or two pops up then we'll give it a go.

Oh and yeah, I really like the roaming encounters a lot more than straight random stuff like the original Final Fantasys and Phantasy Stars It has an interesting feel to them, seeing them bouncing around and trying to figure if you can sneak past them without triggering combat lol. Hopefully it'll all work out well ^_^

Gems! .. and socketing ^_^ :
I was going to cover this on our website when I get it up and running, but figured I'd cover it here, too. We're going to have socket-able items, weapons and gear that have slots to add enhancing gems to. The gems will be uncommon to very rare, but will add stats or straight up damage, possibly armor, HP, MP, etc. You'll be able to freely bind and unbind a gem to a socketable piece of equipment, no fuss, no muss; our UI for it is still clunky, it'll be cleaned up tonight, but it's fully functional and working We want to have another level of customization for players and give them another thing they can hunt down in the world, and make it easy to use so you can play how you want.



Want a brawler Knight-Paladin with ultra-high INT for spellcasting and self-heals? If you got the sockets and gems, sure thing! Going for a Rogue-Archer glass cannon with straight AGI and Damage? Go for it But be wary, the boss AI will figure it out and work hard to destroy you hehe Hopefully it'll be fun, I'm enjoying it right now and it feels pretty good.

Not sure how much more updating I'll be able to do this weekend (final stretch for assets and beginning of final balance checks), but I'll check in to answer any questions anyone has. Thanks again for checking this out!

 

@WildBastion : We hit a snag in wrapping things up so it'll be a few days late, but during some of the downtime this weekend while we were in between builds my friend implemented the FPS throttle system It's pretty interesting, you just go into the Main Menu up top and toggle which FPS you wanna run at (15, 30, or 60) and the game throttles up or down accordingly. Hopefully it helps with your transit, a 2 hour bus ride is a lot of Elthinia lol.

Oh and that Star Ocean is on my list of things to play once I'm finished with 1.00 of this project When I saw the first preview I was totally sold on it, it just looked really fun. Glad to hear it is ^_^

@jgainsbrugh : Thank you very much! I've done a bit of illustration in my time but this was the first time I've gone only digital, so I'm glad it's coming off okay hehe.


So… yeah… we hit a slight build problem this weekend, we're not exactly sure why but the game doesn't want to install right now lol. For myself, it's not too bad of a thing since it gives me more time to refine some of the art assets that have been bugging me and I can work on more audio files, too

Here's me being massively under-leveled fighting 4 things which I should not be fighting. 5HP is a bad place to be against these guys.


I kept thinking that I posted this here, but it was to my Twitter account hehe. This is one of our more interesting rare spawns, not tameable but definitely fight-table Inbetween wailing on you for much damage she'll spawn eggs randomly (some are plain, some have claws, some can cast spells) which if you don't kill hatch into little minions. She comes with her own party ^_^


Well that's about it for now, thanks for checking this out! Time to check in with my friend to see the status of our near-final build..

 

Triply so! Although I fear we shall bring down the ship…. lol

I foresee my iPhone becoming my primary source of entertainment this year, definitely a lot of awesome things to play ^_^


edit:
Forgot to add this, mainly for WildBastion heh, but for the longest time this screen was just black with cyan and magenta boxes lol. We finally put some shiny veneer and glossy bits on it ^_^

 

It seems to work well, doesn't drain my battery quite as much. I really hope it works on your 3GS, please let me know how it handles once it comes out.

I think this will be one of my last posts i this thread until release, unless anyone has any questions, which I'll be more than happy to answer It's been a long, long, long road, much longer than we initially anticipated (I believe today marks 25 months of development lol), and while it's great to be near the end of this first step, the journey itself was incredibly rewarding.

A couple more screenshots, though! Finished up our cemetery level, just have to add in the encounter table for the mobiles and we're all set. Oh and Ulonth, he's a fun baddy to have in any combat background (which we finally changed our default for heh). Finally finished up all of our player core abilities, too, Hered is casting his Mirandiss Shield for good measure

Thanks for checking this out!