Jettatura - a first-person oldschool DRPG

[wishbonetail]

I'm sniffing an RPGmaker. Is this an RPGmaker? Please tell me it's not.

 

[mediocrepoet]

I'm sniffing an RPGmaker. Is this an RPGmaker? Please tell me it's not.

Isn't RPGmaker restricted to top down view JRPG style presentation rather than blobber first person, etc? It looks more like Sword and Sorcery Underworld to me than this.

 

[megidolaon]

Is there going to be character portraits?
Also which engine is used to develop this game?

Not before release. I do have a post-release task to spruce up the UI with more graphics (item graphics, backgrounds in various city screen etc) and that will probably include character-class graphics that show up in the lower HUD windows (kind of like what Elminage does); the ability to let the player swap custom portraits where those character-class icons would be located, wouldn't be too hard to implement.

I'm sniffing an RPGmaker. Is this an RPGmaker? Please tell me it's not.

The engine is entirely from scratch, I wrote it in Common Lisp because it's the only programming language that doesn't make me dread programming.

 

[SpoonFULL]

Thank you for your replies and good to know about your future plans for the UI and your engine.

 

[wishbonetail]

Isn't RPGmaker restricted to top down view JRPG style presentation rather than blobber first person, etc? It looks more like Sword and Sorcery Underworld to me than this.

First person is possible. Kinda.

 

[wishbonetail]

The engine is entirely from scratch, I wrote it in Common Lisp because it's the only programming language that doesn't make me dread programming.

Good. The fonts and UI triggered me. You might want to use something less generic and more stylized.

 

[Contagium]

What an awesome looking creature.

 

[Moaning_Clock]

Actually that hand made me wishlist the game lol

 

[FriendlyMerchant]

I think including the automap would negate the mechanics of certain dungeon elements that exist to misdirect the player.

Yes, and those elements can go fuck themselves are the ultimate timewasters.
Also, Note of the Outskirts did it quite beautifully: it has an automap but with every step it checks your characters' "Tracking" skill; losing this check gives a "Lost" status which stops updating the automap and showing the party's position on it.

Some people really enjoy mapping and that's part of the appeal of those types of games to them. Just like some people like shit like Legend of Grimrock for some reason. Why should every game try and appeal to every person?

because we can probably guess OP wants to sell more than 5 copies

Then he should probably make something like Skyrim or Fallout 76 so you and your peers can enjoy yourselves.

Nah. Rusty is into games that focus on pic related

Spoiler

 

[aweigh]

On the automap issue some have raised: I think including the automap would negate the mechanics of certain dungeon elements that exist to misdirect the player. The effect of confusion caused by things like illusory walls, spinners, and subtle-teleportation fields would be negated by trivially pressing a key.

one way around that is to show a rough map but withhold where the player is, i.e. no arrow or cursor showing where you are.

 

[Darkozric]

On the automap issue some have raised: I think including the automap would negate the mechanics of certain dungeon elements that exist to misdirect the player. The effect of confusion caused by things like illusory walls, spinners, and subtle-teleportation fields would be negated by trivially pressing a key.

If you think auto-map will kill the game, best 2 choices are either a map spell or a map drawing system like EO. Anything else is just pure graph autism. There's no sense in 2022 to not include any form of map.
Grimoire is honest, has auto-map, auto-walk predetermined walking routes, auto-everything, it's on steroids. But hey, if you want to make a blobber for 5 autists that's ok, I support any codex autism.

 

[Catacombs]

Actually that hand made me wishlist the game lol

Now needs the hands from Eastern Promises:

 

[nlfortier]

Am I the only one seeing a contradiction here?

I enjoy these kinds of RPGs, but by the time I started playing first person dungeon crawlers, auto-mapping was standard, so I really can't see myself playing a game like this without it. I think the dev should consider adding auto-mapping as an optional feature, as it would really broaden the appeal.

 

[Grauken]

First person is possible. Kinda.

Here are two examples

one released - https://store.steampowered.com/app/522610/Lord_of_the_Seal/

and one still in development - https://rpgmaker.net/games/11882/

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Nah. No automap to make those complaining show their ineptness at old school. It ain't that hard and you'll build mental muscle memory eventually. I'd laugh if the dungeon randomized every hour though. Speed up or get lost.

 

[megidolaon]

On the Automap question, I've compromised, having implemented a Nature-magic spell that Druid and Highlander now have. It's a simple navigational spell that prints the X,Y coordinates and cardinal direction the party is facing.

A command line switch may be passed to the game which opts-in this spell into a full-screen automap, which draws previously-visited squares. The catch is that the map, being a psychic phantasm conjured by crude magic, is only "mostly" reliable: within a small diameter of immediate nearby squares it's fully accurate, but the accuracy of other dungeon squares diminishes by distance from the party. A better Perception attribute, and to a lesser degree a higher Level, decreases the chance that the details of further-away squares are mis-drawn.

 

[Acrux]

Bard's Tale Trilogy - the remastered version by Inxile - had an optional automap, but also did a good job of obfuscating where the party is if you get teleported, spun, confused, etc. You still need SCSI and MACO up and need to be paying attention for antimagic fields that will drop them. And the map itself spins without the compass up. It seemed like a pretty good compromise to me.

 

[Fowyr]

On the Automap question, I've compromised, having implemented a Nature-magic spell that Druid and Highlander now have. It's a simple navigational spell that prints the X,Y coordinates and cardinal direction the party is facing.

A command line switch may be passed to the game which opts-in this spell into a full-screen automap, which draws previously-visited squares. The catch is that the map, being a psychic phantasm conjured by crude magic, is only "mostly" reliable: within a small diameter of immediate nearby squares it's fully accurate, but the accuracy of other dungeon squares diminishes by distance from the party. A better Perception attribute, and to a lesser degree a higher Level, decreases the chance that the details of further-away squares are mis-drawn.

What about spinners, no-mapping squares and so on? Make, for example, compass tremble on the spinner itself.
I like map systems that use character skills and stats. Aforementioned Note of the Outskirts, for example, checked mapping skill every time when your party changed a level, stepped into spinner and so on. So one failed dice roll - and you are lost for a dozen or two steps.

 

[Grauken]

the game has a release date now

 

[Cryomancer]

Seems good. I just hope that fights will not last 10 eternities like wiz8

 

[megidolaon]

On the Automap question, I've compromised, having implemented a Nature-magic spell that Druid and Highlander now have. It's a simple navigational spell that prints the X,Y coordinates and cardinal direction the party is facing.

A command line switch may be passed to the game which opts-in this spell into a full-screen automap, which draws previously-visited squares. The catch is that the map, being a psychic phantasm conjured by crude magic, is only "mostly" reliable: within a small diameter of immediate nearby squares it's fully accurate, but the accuracy of other dungeon squares diminishes by distance from the party. A better Perception attribute, and to a lesser degree a higher Level, decreases the chance that the details of further-away squares are mis-drawn.

What about spinners, no-mapping squares and so on? Make, for example, compass tremble on the spinner itself.
I like map systems that use character skills and stats. Aforementioned Note of the Outskirts, for example, checked mapping skill every time when your party changed a level, stepped into spinner and so on. So one failed dice roll - and you are lost for a dozen or two steps.

That's not a bad idea to implement. Additionally, it's another consequence I can probably add in a future patch for the existing "Dizzy" status effect, which currently only affects one's ability to competently land hits in battle.

the game has a release date now

October 17th, less than two weeks! Squished enough bugs and fixed enough crashes that I was comfortable finally committing to a concrete deadline.

Yesterday evening while playtesting I found the cause of a crash that kept happening seemingly randomly yet rarely for many months, and because it was so rare I had a hard time pinning it down. Finally a light bulb lit up and noticed that this crash only seemed to happen when fighting the subset of enemies who are capable of instant-kill attacks. Turns out the function that translates instant-kill actions+results into text, for the combat text verbalizer system, was not being passed any arguments at all, which is an embarrassing mistake. This mistake would've been easily caught by the compiler from any other programming language, "Hey dummy, I refuse to compile this until you pass arguments to this function that requires them". I love Lisp, but in future projects I'll probably just use it as the scripting language instead of the entire codebase.

 

[0sacred]

Races : Human, Dwarf, High Elf, Wood Elf, Gnome, Halfling, Rat-Man

manlet races only, won't buy.

Spoiler

actually lack of an automap killed it for me

 

[Acrux]

It's out now!

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Jettatura is a challenging first-person dungeon-crawler (DRPG) with round-based combat. Form a band of up to six mercenaries to scout the subterrene world to reclaim a stolen ancient artifact from the surreptitious death-cult that pilfered it!

Strange, no mention of the word "blobber" but it does say DRPG.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

My life is an action RPG... rats don't take turns. Anyway, wizardry vibes.