Denial

Did you use beta-testers at this point? Not that I want to be one (I wouldn't have the time), but I'm sure an external point of view would be useful to refine the game and bring it to its final on-the-shelf version.

orion70 wrote:Did you use beta-testers at this point? Not that I want to be one (I wouldn't have the time), but I'm sure an external point of view would be useful to refine the game and bring it to its final on-the-shelf version.

Whenever I programmed something, no matter how small or insignificant the change, I always made sure to test it thoroughly.

On top of that, a friend of mine tested the combat and spell portions of the game some time ago. Ruby Golem (who designed the dungeons) has also played it quite a bit and is currently playtesting the dungeons. As well, my publisher wants to personally playtest it as well.

I also plan to play through the entire game in two iterations:

1, The first playthrough will be in "cheat" mode (where I have limitless gold and automatically win all the battles) to make sure that the game is not broken as far as quests go.

2. I will then play the game as an actual player where I build a party from the ground up to make sure that I can defeat the main boss and all of the junior bosses with a reasonable amount of grinding. The purpose of this is to sort out any game balance issues. Some parts of the game currently require the player to obtain a lot of gold and I want to make sure this is attainable.

I can say with a certain level of confidence that there are no major bugs left in the code. Now, there could be some minor bugs and I hope that the playtesting will ferret these out. Realms III and IV were fairly ambitious projects in their own right and they did not have any major "show stopping" bugs.

I'm going to dedicate about a month for my own playtesting.

Great! Ruby Golem's blog is also a precious source of information for previous iterations of this RPG.

I'm working on the manual now. Here's a sample.
The race portraits at the bottom come from screenshots of the actual game, but hopefully a talented sketch artist will be able to draw black and white line image versions of these.

I'd rather leave the on-screen portraits, to help the gamer recognize each character.

The race portraits at the bottom come from screenshots of the actual game, but hopefully a talented sketch artist will be able to draw black and white line image versions of these.

Why? I think it's looking great right now and beeing identical to the ingame pictures is not a bad thing too.

So I am continuing to work on the manual. On the current page that I'm working on, I provide descriptions of the races in the game along with a runic symbol that they are associated with.
We've seen these before in my game because the green symbols that appear in the party list of player characters also displays runes that depict ALIGNMENT-SEX-RACE-CLASS:
So with these runes, you can look up what class or race your character is by looking up what the runes mean in the manual.

orion70 wrote:I'd rather leave the on-screen portraits, to help the gamer recognize each character.

I only put 16 of the portraits and they alternate in between male and female.

I can leave the screenshots there but I think sketch art to replace these would provide atmosphere that is closer to the old Dungeons and Dragons books from the 1970s and early 1980s.

Schlowski wrote:

The race portraits at the bottom come from screenshots of the actual game, but hopefully a talented sketch artist will be able to draw black and white line image versions of these.

Why? I think it's looking great right now and beeing identical to the ingame pictures is not a bad thing too.

I agree, they do look great. If I do keep them, it will be because they look aesthetically pleasing inside the manual.

I'm a big fan of the old Dungeons and Dragons books, and I want the manual for this game to look like them as much as possible!

I just added a major feature that a few people have been asking for: the ability to swap in and swap out party members in and our of a reserve. So I re-designed the save game structure to accommodate this feature. This will make it far more flexible in terms of being able to put certain player characters on hiatus if they need a certain type of character to take their place.
I also modified the mechanic for aging in that player characters will only age if they have Hit Points or Spell Units to recover as well as levels to train when they rest at the inn.

Kilobyte Magazine has a feature-length preview of Realms V! More information here https://twitter.com/hitfan2000/status/1 ... 8962749442

Wow! Congrats on this. It adds more energy to the monkey living on my back
BTW; don't tell my wife I'm in love with the girl in the last picture.

orion70 wrote:Wow! Congrats on this. It adds more energy to the monkey living on my back
BTW; don't tell my wife I'm in love with the girl in the last picture.

Thank you!

And it's not only the graphics that will be good, Darkatx has agreed to do physical artwork as well. In the technical "How to begin" section of the manual, the VIC-Man from the user's guide makes an appearance:

Here I post some of the physical artwork for the manual by darkatx as well as some sample pages that I created for it.