NOTE: The game is now officially complete!

83+ / 84+: http://ceme.tech/DL2236
84+ CE: http://ceme.tech/DL2237

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Hot_Dog is back!  I just couldn't get into my old account.

I have an RPG that's 75% done. It's pure ASM in app-form for TI-83+ and TI-84+ calculators. It's a 100% original RPG, but Earthbound inspired the art style, and Pokemon inspired the battle style.

I'll let the screenshots speak for themselves, but I've tried to anticipate a few questions.

Cutscenes:

   

Gameplay:

          

Some enemies and stills


What have you finished? 10 of the 11 levels, all but 6 of about 50 regular enemies, 6 out of 7 bosses, the main game engine, 75% of the cutscenes
What's left? Apart from lots of spit-and-polish and bug fixes: Main menu, ability to save games, last level, climactic ending
What about newer calculators? Why only the 83+/84+? I would have been frustrated trying to learn the ropes.  This was a hobby project, meant to relax me with a development environment I felt comfortable with.
How big will the game be? Less than 10 app pages
No grayscale? Too much ROM required, problems making it flickerless, and grayscale would, imo, ruin the art-style.
This was formally a FPS? I couldn't do it justice.
What about music or attack animations? Too much time and space required.
About resuming your other projects (S.A.D. for example)? Too much coding involved.  With this project I was able to reuse tools from another game I had made called "Slova."

Heya, nice to see you around again! I think I recall seeing a game Elimination from you before* but I do not remember if it was a similar project. This looks pretty cool, by the way


*EDIT: Oh right, it was the Gemini 3D hack.

That's pretty cool. Writing a project that large in asm must be really time consuming. Less than 10 app pages? That seems kinda large. My biggest project comes out to almost 16 pages but that is because it was compiled in Axe and is in greyscale. Do text and sprites eat most of that?

All the levels and all the enemies are basically done.  Of course, lots of spit-and-polish is needed.  (For example, in the screenshots below, the character "Ryan" is on your team, but when you want to heal a player, you see the name "Hope" instead.  And the "gibberish" text in the second screenshot is probably the result of corrupted data.)  But now comes the next big step: Throwing everything together and allowing people to save games.  After that's done, it's two complete playthroughs for the purpose of balance testing, plus designing the final boss and the game's ending cutscene.

Most of my work over the next few weeks will be menu coding and re-organizing everything, so if I display any screenshots, they will be from my "old build." What kinds of additional screenshots would you like to see over the next few weeks?  What would you like to see in action?

More screenshots:

 

Damn, you got a lot of work done already and the scrolling looks very smooth. I also like the battle layout.

I was initially against showing players how much HP the enemy had left for various reasons (making the game challenging, screen clutter, etc.)

But about halfway through my first complete playthrough of the game, I found myself quite annoyed at not knowing which enemies have impenetrable proton shields and then having to guess how much shield health (not HP) the enemy has.

So, you can now see how much HP and shield health (if any) an enemy has left.  Purposefully simple to avoid screen clutter.

Did you try out having just some simple health/shield bars so that users just have a general idea of how much is left instead of specifics? That might be a nice balance between difficulty and knowing that you are actually making a dent in the enemy's health.

This darker battle screen took a lot more work than I had wanted, but I think the result was worth it.  Most battle screens will not be this dark, but some enemies need a darker, more-menacing atmosphere.

I like the idea actually. It should give you much more freedom when designing monsters.