Denial

R'zo wrote:I don't think anybody has ever thought that an rpg of this calibur could be done on the vic.
I hope this will inspire others to further push the vics potential.

Thank you. I referred to a CRPG project done by a former Denial member earlier in this thread. It's supposed to be something like Pool of Radiance. It's really exciting to see a lot of advanced games coming out for the VIC-20. I really love the appearance and sound of the VIC-I chip.

I'm currently working on the townspeople portraits and conversation menus. The following depicts the player approaching a beggar and starting a conversation with him.

The way that converations work in the game is that you choose an option, and then the appropriate text appears. For example
There won't be any typing, so you just choose from this list of keywords to have conversations. In total, there's going to be close to 190 people that you can talk to while exploring the cities (10 townspeople for city, more or less).

Most cities will have guards and you can converse with them.
"Pay your taxes!"

During your travels into the cities, you will meet the nobility and monarchs who govern them. They expect to be well paid when they give you the pleasure of their company!
Each person you encounter during the game can be conversed with. While I wouldn't say the conversations can be as elaborate as a later Ultima game, the NPCs have their own conversation trees that they follow based on the conversation options that you choose.

Can't wait to meet Her Highness the Baroness Jakayla, and to satisfy her deepest desires - as a sidequest of course

orion70 wrote:Can't wait to meet Her Highness the Baroness Jakayla, and to satisfy her deepest desires - as a sidequest of course

I've been working on the portion of the game that keeps track of the progress that the player makes. Basically, the main quest involves assembling 121 pieces of a sacred tablet before facing off against the final boss. You have to talk to the townspeople for clues where the various pieces are located, bribe some officials, beat some minor bosses, etc.
121 seems like a lot, but a lot of them don't require too much time to find them.

Wow, it's getting huge

Wowzers! I would have thought 1 piece per dungeon or such. Why 121? Seems like allot of pieces and could get tedious for the players. Even the answer to life the universe and everything is only 42.

I decided to change the artifact from an amulet to a tablet -- makes more sense since the assembled image of 121 pieces (11*11 characters of the graphic view screen) is square shaped.
Like I said before, 121 might seem like a lot, but many of them can be found by gleaning the clues from the townspeople. IE: "Yes, I've heard that the young boy was playing with a piece of a broken tablet. You can find him playing about by the trees" etc.

Anyway, like text adventures of old, the tablet is simply a scoring system to measure the in-game progress.

To further demonstrate the example, the player searches at the spot that he was directed to by the townspeople, and finds a piece of the tablet.
Of course pieces of the tablet will be obtained by other means throughout the game (like defeating bosses, solving dungeon puzzles, etc).

I continue programming the city module, and I'm almost done this. After all the features for it have been programmed, I should be able to design the remaining cities (18 after the current one is finished) in fairly quick order as all I will need to do is create the data files that contain all the information for each city (map data, townspeople conversations, hidden tablet pieces, etc).

I also programmed the 'Map' feature for the city module -- which shows a greater view of your surroundings. I intend to program this for the land module which will be very similar and for the dungeon module, it will work like a limited form of automap -- you'll be able to see how much of the current floor that you're exploring (but unexplored areas remain blank). While the save game file doesn't remember your current automap, if you solved the floor in question (ie: defeated the boss), it will show the entire maze. Otherwise, the automap information is reset every time you travel to a different floor if you haven't solved the floor in question.

Omg so beautiful. You've got me drooling now.

I'm no fan of adventure games (just never had the patience), but this looks amazing.

If you'd have been able to pull this off back in the hey-days of the Vic, you'd have been a millionaire!

Keep up the great work.

Cheers,

Mike.

Thank you for the kind comments. I recently started a new job, and hopefully I can still put in the time to complete the game--and I think I'm closer to finishing it than I think I actually am (in terms of actual content, it might be about 1/3 finished, but the game's engine is pretty close to being 75% complete). I only started working on Realms V because I had been unemployed and underemployed for the past 3 years (the cratering of oil prices while I happen to live in the heart of Canada's oil country probably had a lot to do with these circumstances more than anything). Now with a new job and family responsibilities, it's probably a bit more difficult to keep working on it. But really, I can choose to either play computer games or make my own, so I choose the latter.

And I actually enjoy working on Realms V a lot more than I did on Realms III and IV which by this time in the dev cycle, I began to grow rather contemptuous of them.

Anyway, I basically finished creating another city (#2 out of 19, and it took me about 3 days to do that one--spending about 1 hour each day) and I started to program the boat that the player can travel on water with.

I created a pirate ship graphic for those combat encounters that occur at sea.