Based on comments from the recap thread, now seems a good time to let everyone take a look at what myself and RI have been working on for the last month or so.
WARNING!!! This is nowhere near a finished piece of work - far from it. As of now, all you can do is wander around the town and surrounding areas, with a non-animated Roger sprite. Rough edges abound, such as missing walk-behinds, misplaced regions, and so on, all things that will be sorted in subsequent builds. However, what is assembled so far is rapidly approaching the most definitive and coherant iteration of the town to date, with almost every location from the existing games put together in a way that makes sense. Future builds will see dialogue for the background and characters, the characters themselves, and ultimatly some means of depicting a recap of the main events from the 'canon games'. Once we're sufficiently happy that a 'version 1.0' has been reached (all basic features implemented, sufficiently playable, no gamestoppers and accessible for RON noobs), then this will make its way to the 'In production' and ultimatly 'Completed games' threads.
BACKGROUNDFor those who haven't been following the recap ideas thread,
Virtual Reality is one of several ideas to come out of the need to provide potential RON developers with some help in bringing them up to speed on RON's locations/characters/story without having to play through all of the games in meticulous detail to find a background to printscreen, or a particular character's traits, or the order of key events. Ultimately, VR has the potential to act as an interactive map, a collection of character bios, and a recap of the current ongoing story all in one, as well as being constantly updated with new and updated artwork as the town continues to grow and evolve, along with changes to the dialogue to mirror events in future games.
HELP WANTED!Although Renegade Implementor and myself have made a start, this isn't something we can do on our own. VR needs dialogue for each location detailing its backstory and key events. It also needs characters (preferably based on the newer sprites) and similar accompanying dialogue - who they are, their personality, key events from their lives, significant relationships with others, etc. Finally, we need a way to distill the important elements of the current RON story down into what any new developer would need to know and which respective game it comes from. An idea of a slideshow was bought up - if this is an idea that's followed through, it will also need animation and dialogue. In short, the chance of this project being a success will be hugely increased by community submissions.
This is the main reason why I'm posting what has been done so far now - rather than just having a select few decide what form this should take, this is something that, like RON itself, should grow and evolve based on input from the community as a whole. Plus I think this is a project that will really benefit from being something that we all can get involved with. If all goes to plan, I think this has the potential for solving many of the problems that caused the pipeline of new games to dry up following 2004.
DOWNLOADVirtual Reality v 0.3 (uploaded 28/6/09).
(NOTE - you start the game with two maps in your inventory, a 'town' one and a 'world' one. Use these to get to areas not otherwise joined to an adjacent background.)
