Praise and a couple development questions

[Khoram]

Just heard about the game recently and downloaded the demo last night. Looks very nice, just my cup of tea. I've been a CRPG player for 25 years now, and I concur with many of your sentiments on your RPG Shrine page. I grew up on the abstract style (Bard's Tale 1 and Phantasie), have played most of the newer pause-real-time (BG 1 & 2, NWN 1 & 2, etc), but my absolute favorite style is turn based tactical, like your game. My favorites have all used this - Wizard's Crown, the Gold Box series, even some games that aren't strictly RPGs - like XCom (UFO Defense for you Brits I guess).

I've been mulling over making my own game for some time now, I have notebooks full of design snippets. I started coding up an engine in Java3D early this year, but have recently switched to XNA because of community and support issues (it's easier to get help when there's millions of other users, vs. 3). Anyway, was just curious what programming language you used, and if you coded the engine by hand or used any sort of "game-maker"/pre-made engine (I'm guessing you did everything yourself). Also, can you give a ballpark for how expensive it is to hire freelance musicians and artists to do the game media assets? I mean, I assume you paid these guys out of your own pocket (as I would have to), was it super expensive?

Thanks and I look forward to playing the full game soon! Just bought a couple of other games so will need to wait a bit

[BlueSalamander]

Hello Khoram, thank you for your post. The programming language is C++. There is no pre-made engine. Some code comes from Jim Adams' Programming Role Playing Games with DirectX. Art is not too expensive if you make a low resolution game. I couldn't be more precise than that since no two games are the same in requirements, the people who work on it, etc.

[getter77]

Hmm, just as an aside but SHOULD you have any leftover notions or skills at Java and fancy checking into it now and then...

http://jcrpg.blogspot.com/

[Paul.Illes]

Hmm, just as an aside but SHOULD you have any leftover notions or skills at Java and fancy checking into it now and then...

http://jcrpg.blogspot.com/

Oh, gee, that's my project! (I knew you're that same getter77 active around at scourgeweb, to which project I produced the music recently.)
Honestly jClassicRPG is in the vein of first person, turn and party based RPGs like Wizardry7/M&M so not the isometric/third person. Still in Prealpha stage, open source.

[getter77]

Heh, he mentioned he started with playing abstracts/first person! Plus him mucking about with a Java3D engine!

At some point I do plan to help you out with Jcrpg though...but for now I lack and am in pursuit of the requisite skillset.

[Paul.Illes]

well, any help is much appreciated, jClassicRPG is a community effort.

[Khoram]

Well, I couldn't resist the lure of yummy fantasy turn based combat, and I found a way to fit in buying the full game into my budget. Really having fun so far. Completed the intro keep stuff, then headed to the cave to get the ring the dwarf asked for. Wow, tough place. I played a couple battles multiple times (like, 10) until I was victorious. I love how rules like grappling that I don't think I've ever seen even implemented, let alone used fairly, are great here. In the battle with the vampire, I just could not get through a battle without one of my knights getting dominated. I thought for sure putting him to sleep and killing the vampire would be sufficient, but was pleasantly surprised that it wasn't. I had to defeat the vampire, then have my other knight grapple and pin the dominated guy until the spell wore off. Was very, very nicely implemented and quite interesting. I definitely think this will finally be a D20/OGL game where it will be useful to take feats like Iron Will and Blindfighting, whereas in past D&D CRPGS those were usually a waste compared to just min/maxing your attack bonus, etc. Good job!

[Khoram]

One more question: If we only have 10 downloads, what happens if you release more than 10 patches?

[getter77]

No worries, Blue resets download limits and such as necessary.