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Re: Work in progress: REALMS OF QUEST V

Posted: Thu Dec 20, 2018 1:00 am
by orion70
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.

Re: Work in progress: REALMS OF QUEST V

Posted: Thu Dec 20, 2018 7:37 am
by Ghislain
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.

Re: Work in progress: REALMS OF QUEST V

Posted: Fri Dec 21, 2018 7:13 am
by orion70
Great! Ruby Golem's blog is also a precious source of information for previous iterations of this RPG.

Re: Work in progress: REALMS OF QUEST V

Posted: Fri Dec 21, 2018 10:16 pm
by Ghislain
I'm working on the manual now. Here's a sample.
realms5.jpg
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.

Re: Work in progress: REALMS OF QUEST V

Posted: Sat Dec 22, 2018 3:14 am
by orion70
I'd rather leave the on-screen portraits, to help the gamer recognize each character.

Re: Work in progress: REALMS OF QUEST V

Posted: Sat Dec 22, 2018 3:16 am
by Schlowski
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.

Re: Work in progress: REALMS OF QUEST V

Posted: Sat Dec 22, 2018 3:18 am
by Ghislain
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.
realms5.jpg
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:
realms6.jpg
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.

Re: Work in progress: REALMS OF QUEST V

Posted: Sat Dec 22, 2018 3:28 am
by Ghislain
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.

Re: Work in progress: REALMS OF QUEST V

Posted: Sat Dec 22, 2018 3:34 am
by Ghislain
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.

Re: Work in progress: REALMS OF QUEST V

Posted: Sat Dec 22, 2018 10:40 pm
by Ghislain
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!
realms5.jpg

Re: Work in progress: REALMS OF QUEST V

Posted: Fri Dec 28, 2018 5:32 am
by Ghislain
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.
realms5.jpg
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.

Re: Work in progress: REALMS OF QUEST V

Posted: Sun Dec 30, 2018 7:15 pm
by Ghislain
Kilobyte Magazine has a feature-length preview of Realms V! More information here https://twitter.com/hitfan2000/status/1 ... 8962749442
realms7.jpg
realms5.jpg
realms6.jpg

Re: Work in progress: REALMS OF QUEST V

Posted: Tue Jan 01, 2019 5:46 am
by orion70
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.

Re: Work in progress: REALMS OF QUEST V

Posted: Thu Jan 03, 2019 11:21 am
by Ghislain
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:
VicSword.JPG

Re: Work in progress: REALMS OF QUEST V

Posted: Sat Jan 26, 2019 9:56 pm
by Ghislain
Here I post some of the physical artwork for the manual by darkatx as well as some sample pages that I created for it.
2.jpg
3.jpg
4.jpg
1.jpg
5.jpg