DarkAuron has just figuratively 'spilled the beans' about his upcoming project planned to begin soon after Tankies is finished!

As some of you may know from reading the MC forum topic, DarkAuron is now planning a new project to be started after the completion of Tankies; It will be in z80 ASM with full greyscale and most likely will be too large to fit on a regular Ti-83+.

Initially DarkAuron planned on releasing small secrets about this upcoming project bit by bit as a whenever he didn't devote thirty minutes a day to completing Tankies, and here is where we  pick up the story-

'The suspense is killing me with bringing out the plans for this project. So sadly, I'm giving in: I'm gonna give some of the juicies!

My main plans for it involve.. oh how should I start, let's start with the movement system. It'll be in a 2.5D movement system (I think that's the correct term for it) where you can move left, right, jump up and fall down, and also move distant and far. If you've played river city ransom, mario & luigi superstar saga, or double dragon, among other games, you'd know what I'm talking about.

The stats system will be growth-based. Instead of gaining experience and leveling up with static growth or using a point building system, it'll ignore the whole level system and each stat will grow on its own depending on what you're doing. If you run amuck slashing monsters with your sword and neglect your magic, your magic abilities will drop to nothing, and vice-versa. How this would work is there'll be a change variable that will have a constantly changing value. If you use physical abilities and attacks, that'll decrease the magic change variable, and if it gets negative, it'll subtract from your magic-related stats every now and then. But to keep it balanced there'll be buffer variables so that it'd be possible to raise all stats in a balanced manner, just not nearly as fast of a growth rate if you based yourself on one side. It's a bit hard to explain how this works, some of you might understand, others might not.

Also what's different is the use of magic and regenerating life and magic. During gameplay theres 3 meters at the topleft, one for life remaining, one for magic remaining, and the third one is the regeneration bar. That bar fills up slowly, and when it's completely full, it'll add to life and restart. Magic on the other hand regenerates by itself, but it's a bit special. You can use all the magic that you have, and more because if you run out of magic, you can drain from the regeneration bar, as well as your life. This can be a bad thing however, because you can die from magic abuse. Also doing this can reduce, by a fraction, some of your physical stats. So you can get crazy with magic use but there are consequences! This brings a slightly new system I've never encountered before, and it may bring a new rpg experience.

The stats for magic and skills will also be focused on their subclasses: for physical attacks and such, special skills and built up abilities will be based on the type of weapon you use, like axes, bows, swords, spears, etc. For magic there'll be focus for different core elements such as air, earth, water , and fire, but there'll also be pure neutral magic that won't be as damaging but won't have to deal with major resistances and element types whilst fighting.

Equipment will be mostly standard, although I'm thinking on how to do a system for simple upgradeability/forging that allows you to maximize the performance of a single piece of equipment, even a simple piece of cloth could have special properties (not necessarily magic ones).

Instead of being based on a linear plot, there'll be many many quests to get if you talk with npcs. I'm going to try and make them dynamic so they'll be given to you depending on what kind of stats you've got so they're not too hard or too easy to do.. for example a quest involving getting a special magic item that magic users would need would be given if you've got high magic stats and low physical stats. Such a detection isn't that complicated to do, I would just have a very large quest database to fulfill this. Which is why I don't think I could fit this game on a standard ti-83+ Smile

Not only will the quests be more interesting and far less linear of a plot, but allow for a dynamically changing world that immerses itself on what you do in it. Not so much that the entire game changes from one thing you do, but gradual changes. I don't see why such a game isn't feasible on a calculator, just most people would think it's too much to work for. And thus, you might lose track of what quests you've got going, so I will probably implement a journal-based system allowing you to view quests you've done so far and what you need to do, and they'd be categorized as well.

The NPCs hopefully won't be spitting out the same exact line every time you talk to them either, I'll see about making some kind of text tree based on personalities and types of topics for them to talk about. It'll be more interesting if I can pull it off.

Really alot of that stuff that seems dynamic just requires lots of hand-made creation and labeling to allow for it. Now, that basically summarizes the main stuff, I won't get into details as I don't really have any yet. Still under planning stage Cool

I planned to keep this slightly under wraps for awhile because if I decided not to do it, I could just cancel the idea and no one would really be disappointed. But I think I'm going to go for it now. Which is why I decided to release all this info.

Needless to say, I think I might need a few people to help me with this project. As in for the entire duration of it. But not now. Especially since I havn't started it yet, I'm just planning things.

Some of you may think some of these things are too unreal to have on a calculator, that it isn't feasible to have them because they'd be too utterly complicated and not fast/small enough to work for the calc. But see, these are ideas in the planning stage, it doesn't mean they'll be there the entire time. I'm just hoping I can do that.

As for a name, I don't have one yet. Oh, and please don't ask if you can work on the project with me. I'm not really going to take requests like that, especially not NOW. So don't, really.. don't. Don't ask for beta testing either, that'll be decided much much much later. Also don't expect it to be finished within the next 2 years Razz

Oh, and also, the character will be a bit customizable (male only, sorry girls.. if there are any!) for hair style and eye color/type. I've already got a lot of them made Very Happy Also all the equipment that is worn will effect all the frames of the character on what he looks like. So if you equip a sword, he'll be holding a sword. If you take off all his armor and clothing, he'll be running around in his undies. Etc. Rolling Eyes


You can read more oabout it MC-
http://joepnet.com/hosted/maxcoderz/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=901&start=30

I think darkauron has server problems because his pic wont show up everytime