Hero of Allacrost -- FOSS 2D RPG

[Eleazar]

Hence why we are pushing this demo out early (despite missing a lot of artwork and features), as one of our primary motivations is to grab the interest of new potential artists to help out.

Don't forget an Os X binary. I'd estimate that about half of the artists that have made significant art contributions here are Mac users. A lot of these will have little or no experience with CVS, IRC and compiling, and may not know what GPL stands for. So that semi-playable demo is the best way to get their attention.

[Roots]

Hence why we are pushing this demo out early (despite missing a lot of artwork and features), as one of our primary motivations is to grab the interest of new potential artists to help out.

Don't forget an Os X binary. I'd estimate that about half of the artists that have made significant art contributions here are Mac users. A lot of these will have little or no experience with CVS, IRC and compiling, and may not know what GPL stands for. So that semi-playable demo is the best way to get their attention.

Of course not. We're committed to OS X, its just harder to package for which is why there was a delay in the beta version being available on the forums.


Thanks for your comments about the importance of tools and an editor fmunoz. I didn't realize that artists felt so strongly about that. We do have our own map editor and it does all the basics. We've been unfortunately neglecting the editor in light of the demo and until recently we've only had one person working on it, but after reading your post I'm going to try and encourage our team to focus more on the tools side after the demo gets released.

[Jetrel]

Don't forget an Os X binary. I'd estimate that about half of the artists that have made significant art contributions here are Mac users. A lot of these will have little or no experience with CVS, IRC and compiling, and may not know what GPL stands for. So that semi-playable demo is the best way to get their attention.

Of course not. We're committed to OS X, its just harder to package for which is why there was a delay in the beta version being available on the forums.


Thanks for your comments about the importance of tools and an editor fmunoz. I didn't realize that artists felt so strongly about that. We do have our own map editor and it does all the basics. We've been unfortunately neglecting the editor in light of the demo and until recently we've only had one person working on it, but after reading your post I'm going to try and encourage our team to focus more on the tools side after the demo gets released.

Tools define the community. Let's look at two bungie games - Marathon, and Oni.

Marathon had some sweet tools, for editing both graphics, level files, and some of the world definitions. This resulted in the game being subject to hundreds of new storylines, thousands upon thousands of maps, and several extremely polished total conversions.

Oni didn't have any tools. People made some sweet wallpaper images. This, IMO, really sucked, because Oni was a much cooler game than marathon.




So, it's either tools, AND/OR a very open and well-documented data format. Wesnoth did not originally have a map editor, but if you cracked open a map, and they were just plain text files, it looked something like:

ggggffffgggg
gggfffffggffg
gggfffgggffg
wwwggwggg
ffgwwgwwgg

Each letter was one tile, and it wasn't too hard to figure out. Units were equally simple:

[unit]
name=Elvish Fighter
hitpoints=34
moves=5
movetype=forestwalk
image=units/elvish-fighter.png
(etc...)
[/unit]

If someone wanted to make additional animations for a unit, they didn't need to ask any permission, they just made it, and plugged it right in themselves. We've never needed our own picture editor, because the format is PNG and you just drop the images in; they're not wrapped into some custom .WAD format or anything. Thus, people could easily edit the wesnoth map files, from the beginning, and this made the game very moddable from day 1.

• The game being very moddable allows artists to play around with making new units and tiles, and see the results immediately. This attracts modders (who in OSS, often get turned towards mainline development). But it also placates core people, because they can see their work in action, right now! It's immediate gratification, and even terminally patient guys like me can use a fix of that now and then.

• Furthemore, it does more than merely placating the core people - it helps them do the ultimate "bug test" of their images, because they're seeing them as they actually do appear in game. Many animations can look good on the graphics sheet, but might look funny in-game because they're misaligned, or whatnot. This provides true "this is *DONE*" peace-of-mind for artists.

[K3az]

mm fancy, wish I could help, I once had an idea like this.. oh well, very good art, cant wait to try it.

[Roots]

Now you don't have to wait any longer. We made our first demo release public tonight (if you were a member of our forums, you could have spent the last two weeks testing it ). The demo itself is pretty simplistic and honestly isn't much fun, but we all have to start somewhere! Head over to our website for instructions on how to download and play it.

http://www.allacrost.org/

[Sangel]

Awesome! I look forward to seeing how the game "feels" at this stage in development.

Edit: Alas, it doesn't work! The Mac OS X version gets to the title screen, but you have no mouse, and while you can switch between the various choices using the arrow keys, you can't actually select one to activate using any key.

[Roots]

There is no mouse input in Allacrost, so the cursor is hidden in the window. The 'f' key is the confirm command, and the 'd' key is the cancel command. Yes, I know its not very intuitive, but that's how it is.

[freim]

There is no mouse input in Allacrost, so the cursor is hidden in the window. The 'f' key is the confirm command, and the 'd' key is the cancel command. Yes, I know its not very intuitive, but that's how it is.

Since everyone I've talked to agree that this is completely unintuitive, why not change it to something sensible like "enter" for confirm?

[torangan]

I think you can take this as a request for a better documentation on how it's done (so far).

[new]

Yeah this is a very interesting game
I had it downloaded.

[Tomsik]

There is no mouse input in Allacrost

You didn't do that yet or you just don't want it?

[Roots]

There is no mouse input in Allacrost, so the cursor is hidden in the window. The 'f' key is the confirm command, and the 'd' key is the cancel command. Yes, I know its not very intuitive, but that's how it is.

Since everyone I've talked to agree that this is completely unintuitive, why not change it to something sensible like "enter" for confirm?

Because then where would cancel, menu, swap, left trigger, and right trigger go? The asdf and arrow key configuration is familiar to people since its used in FPS games almost exclusively, and its easy for the player to access all command keys with this configuration. What we're going to do in the future is pop up a menu with the default controls when the game is started for the first time so that the player knows right away what everything is. You can change your key mappings on the boot screen if you go to options->key settings (although right now they get reset if you leave the game ).

There is no mouse input in Allacrost

You didn't do that yet or you just don't want it?

Well Allacrost is really meant to play like SNES era RPGs like Chrono Trigger, which didn't have a mouse. I have a gamepad on my machine which works with Allacrost so I don't have to use the keyboard. But I realize that not everyone has a gamepad or joystick, so maybe we'll add mouse input at some point, who knows.

[zookeeper]

Because then where would cancel, menu, swap, left trigger, and right trigger go?

Exactly where they go now, as well.

So at least having something like the usual esc and enter as additional confirm and cancel keys would make some sense to me.

[Temuchin Khan]

This release demonstrates the basic components of map exploration, dialogue, battles, and character management, but not much more.

All I could figure out how to do was walk around. As far as I could tell, there was no way to talk to anyone or to fight battles, and no documentation of how to do those things even if it was possible.

[Woodwizzle]

Ooooh this is nifty! The music is excellent and very RPGish. The graphics that are done are impressive. Clearly there is a lot more to do but I love what I see, a lot of stuff stands out. I love how both the sprites and the portraits reflect damage done.