I, Arkeus

While it is still in its earliest stages (having only been working on it sparingly in the last couple weeks), I thought I’d post some initial information on my next big project, For Fate.

In short, the game is going to be a full length JRPG, very similar to what you’d find on the SNES (early Final Fantasies for example). The game will be using REFMAP tiles as a base, heavily modified as I see fit. Here’s an overview of some of the features I’m currently planning. Please note though, that these are all very early and still in the idea phase, so many of them will change.

* A large continuous world filled with various environments. There will be no overworld, but there will be different main points (towns, mostly) that will let you teleport between the ones you’ve found, to allow you to get around faster.
* A deep story, spanning many characters.
* Tons of side quests.
* A turn based battle system very similar in style to Final Fantasy XIII. You’ll control all 4 characters in battle, and each will have a command bar allowing multiple commands per turn. It will be active time based.
* 5 different character classes. You’ll be able to advance the characters under any class (and branching into multiple classes). You’ll find various recruitable characters throughout the game, in addition to the main characters.

A very early shot of what the world looks like so far:

Placeholder text, of course. 🙂

I have many other features I’m still working on, and I’ll talk about them in the future (and also go more in depth on these features as they become more fleshed out). So far I’ve spent a lot of time working on building the overworld from bitmap files, but I’m planning on instead building using bitmaps, converting to tile layers, and editing them using a tile editor. This will give me the speed of generating large complex maps quickly, but also give me the fine grained control that a tile editor gives me. This weekend I’ve started on the battle system, and I’m making great progress on the attack sequence system and the ability animation system.

Hopefully I’ll have more to show soon! 🙂