Yea I agree, I think 12 in a party at once would be a bit cumbersome though.

Yea, probably won't be much activity during the break, but ah well.
*edit*Joined as A0C since it wouldn't let me use underscores for some reason.....

lmao!

I confirmed it and added you as a collaborator. I think that means you won't need it confirmed anymore.

Anyone else who wants collaborator status, let me know.

I will definetley help with spriting if nothing else, so you can add me. I'd also be interested in helping out with story (perhaps in an editor type capacity to ensure everything is correct and flows smoothly). I can also help with psuedocoding the battle engine when we get there.
Basically, I just restated everything I said in my initial post.

Examples of my sprite work:
http://ourl.ca/13507

*Edit* Looks good to me epic7.

Oh ok.

This is how it works. (Let's base it on 12 members in party)

In battle, you can group members to up to 3 "cycles". So you can have 4/4/4 or 2/6/4 or 9/3 etc.

In each turn, 1 member from each cycle (could be called leader) can perform action or switch to other member in the same cycle.

Some of the spells can affect the entire cycle, all "leaders" of cycle, individual, etc. All physical attacks will attack the "leader" of the cycle.

Since it's called a "cycle," the order of members in cycle is important.

Let's say you have a cycle with guy A→B→C→D.

As A, you can't just switch to C, but rather take a turn to change to B and then C. You can only switch once per turn per cycle, requiring total of two turns to switch from A to C.

Also, in addition to this, each member could have a special attribute that enhance the cycle leaders a bit when they're in the leader position. Let's say that the leader s of cycles are A, E, and G. A's special attribute is MP+10 and E's special attribute is STR+2 and G's special attribute is INT+3. All the cycle leaders (and only the cycle leaders) will share these attributes.

EDIT: Oh. I forgot about the EXP sharing. The less cycle the battle was fought with, the more EXP will party receive. The members who weren't partcipating in the cycles won't get EXP. The current cycle leaders will receive 1.2x EXP while the other members in cycle receives a normal amount of EXP.

This suggested system seems to be too harsh on penalizing the player when they switch charcters. If you want to move from player a to player d within a cycle it takes 3 turns of you doing nothing to be able to do so leaving that slot open to be attacked. Also, having 12 active characters per battle seems like a bit overkill imo. I'd personally opt for a more simplistic battle system.

On a somewhat unrelated note, if an action rpg is chosen I'm unsure how well a multiparty system would work out unless you want to have a main character (Controlled by the player) and the secondary characters auto controlled by AI in battle (some what like kingdom hearts).

Im browsing from my phone at the moment, so ill edit this post when i get home with details. I have sugesstions for how we could organize this project so we dont just have a bunch of people working on different things with no sense of direction.

*Edit*

Project lead: This person organizes the project and makes sure that everything is progressing. Makes sure that all groups are communicating. They should also be able to map out all the tasks that each group needs to be working on.
I would seperate the main project into 3 groups:

Programming team
Scenario team
Graphics team

The programming team is responsible for deciding the best way to implement game functions and programming them. IE: battle engine, object interactions item system, text system, level up system etc. etc. etc. The lead programmer should be proficient in AXE (since that is the primary language being used) and be able to delegate tasks.

The scenario team is responsible for writing the story and designing characters. When the story is done they need to be able to present a story board that maps out the course of the game. They are also responsible for writing all in game dialogue. The head of this team should be able to organize the story into a story board when its done and communicate information to the programming team.

Lastly, is the graphics team. They are responsible for bringing character designs to life and creating all the graphics for the game. It would be a big plus if the head of this team had a background in traditional art as well.

The key factor obviously will be that all groups are able to work independently when necessary, and communicate and work with one another to bring the whole project together.

*Edit2* We should also have a topic where each person interested in contributing lists their skill set so team leads can decide where to place them. Obviously some people will overlap and likely be used on more than one team. This way as the project that progresses people may join as well. I'd also recommend keeping topics open here so that people that wish to suggest things but not necessarily be a part of the main groups can do so.

It is true that you had an 9x9 grid to play around on, but your project was on the 68k sereies. You had a larger screen to play with. We would need to do 8x8 to accomplish similar here (a 12x8 or 8x8 grid with a hud).

I think Axe with the possibility of some assembly would be the way to go.