The Rogue Prince [WIP]

[redspark]

LOL!  You and me both.  Everything is designed for the demo but the graphics take a long time to generate.  The demo will take the player from the start of the game up until Pol & Namiir leave their home town.  It will contain roughly 12 NPCs, 13 scrolling rooms, several cutscenes and a handful of simple quests.  It is mostly designed to setup the atmosphere of the story and get the player used to game play.  However, I'd also like to release it to the community for feedback as this is the first game I've ever made and I'm sure it will need some pointers.

Until then, I'll be chained to my computer rendering rooms and characters.   I'll see if I can post a YouTube video of one of the cutscenes before too long.

[m0ds]

Looks good! So how much will it cost?

[redspark]

I haven't really thought about price just yet.  If I can get Big Fish Games interested in distributing it, it will sell for what they normally price games which can be as low as 6.99.  If I have to sell it myself, I will still make it reasonable but it would be a little higher.  Less than $20 for sure.  Probably closer to $10-15 range.  But this all depends on the final product.  I want the price to be reasonable but recoupe some of my costs, if possible.  This has been an expensive project for me.

[m0ds]

Okie doke, fair. I was looking forward to playing it, but $$$ means I sadly never will.

None the less, good luck!

[redspark]

I understand.  If you're interested, the demo will be free.  It should give you an hour or so of play time.  So you can at least play that.   And if you are around when I put a call out for beta testers and you are able to test, you'd get the final version of the game for free and your name in the credits.

[redspark]

Sorry for the double post.  I'm just making some design decisions and wanted to update this thread to let you know and anyone can tell me that I'm crazy, if they like.

BASIC INTERFACE DESIGN

After reading Vince Twelve's game design articles on "Your Game is Broken" and having always felt this way myself, I have decided to solidify the game interface into a simplified approach.  There are two rules that I'd like to have for the game: 1) Keep the interaction simple to prevent calling attention to the game interface and thus breaking the atmosphere of the game; and 2) Allowing the player to use the keyboard for as much of the game play as possible.  In keeping with this, I have decided to blend Vince's suggestions from his article with a RPG Maker XP style interface for the keyboard and some of my own little tweaks.

First, let's talk about the keyboard interface.  The RPG Maker games can and do use different keys sometimes to interact with the game but they often use very few of them.  I will need to add a few extras simply because of the inventory being a HUD.  Here is what I see being used for mine:

Arrow keys - Move the character or move the selection of the focussed item within the inventory
Enter - Interacts with whatever is "in front of" the player or the focussed inventory item.
Space- Looks at whatever is "in front of" the player. (In some cases, this wont be sufficient because whatever the player may want to look at may not be directly in front of him.  So the player may have to resort to using the mouse.)
Tab - Toggles focus to and from the Inventory.  Arrow keys again to navigate the inventory and it's pages.  Certain visual cues will indicate where focus is.
Other Shortcuts for normal game play like saving, etc..
ESC - brings up game menu and cancels currently focused GUI.

Second, the mouse interface will be a simple two button approach:

Left - Walk / Interact
Right - Look

However, to give some extra visual cues for the player for the interactive action, the cursor graphic will change for the type of object it is over.  So for characters, it will change to the Talk cursor, Hotspots and objects would be Interact and everything else is Walk.  This will help speed up interaction and eliminate some of the aggravation that icon based interfaces have.

The inventory will occupy the bottom part of the screen constantly so that it will be always available and minimize the use of dialog boxes.  I find dialog boxes break the atmosphere of the game unless they are really well designed to be natural elements of the game itself.

So that's my approach.  I know it is not exactly traditional but hopefully it is fairly logical.