Some people who frequent IRC a lot might have been aware that I have been working on something for two weeks. I started planning this for a while but I was still brainstorming for ideas for the game story and magic/item system. This may be unexpected to some others, too, especially people who beaten Illusiat 12 and seen the ending stating the series was ending, but yes, there is effectively an Illusiat 13 in the works right now, more than 6 years after Illusiat 12 came out, which could make this serie the longest lasting one in calculator history if this game comes out (the first game in the series was completed on September 22th, 2001).

The game plot was planned for about two months and the text intro goes as follow:

Every 10000 years, a small planet called Illusiat, from a nearby solar system, passes through ours, close to the Earth. Scientists from Earth and illusian Mages said that each planets always passes at the same distance everytime.

1000000 of years in the future, after many wars against evil, both planets populations dropped a lot, but both races allied together to defeat the evil using a weapon made with the power of man knowledge and illusian  magic. After victory, with very few technology left, both races were cut from each others for 10000 years.

Soon, they are going to be able to meet once again, but now, it may be the last time ever...

then comes the rest of the intro, as seen in the only screenshot of the current progress I got so far:
(screenshot goes at 15 MHz speed, btw)

I don't want to spoil too much, but in other words, one of the planets orbits changed and you have to find out how it could have happened then find a way to save both civilizations, because both planets are going to collide. At the same time, you'll have to figure out about monsters appearing around. Could there be a link between monsters appearing and the orbit change(s)? For sure, that collision between both moons was not natural.

Anyway, now with the game features, I know some people wants me to make an xLIB/Celtic III RPG in the future since I didn't do any so far, but this will not be now (if it ever happens). When going through old games in the series as well as some other old calculator RPGs, which you noticed from my recent TI-83+ RPG nostalgia video series on Youtube, I got inspiration to make a new game in that style. My goal with Illusiat 13: The Lost Chapter is not to make the most eye candy game I could ever do with fancy grayscale and all. My goal is to make an RPG true to the last games in the Illusiat series and the 2004 remakes of the 4 first games. Homescreen graphics and animations, similar battle and menu layout, similar title screen, 1vs1 battles, old-skoolness. In some ways, this game, at first view, will look as if I made it back in 2002, but there will be some improvements of course, altough most will be related to coding.

First of all, unlike most of my old games, Illusiat 13 doesn't use any source code from any of my previous games. The entire game is being written from scratch. I decided so because it has been over 4 years since the last time I released a new calculator RPG and despite being far from perfect, my coding skills and habits changed a lot since then, which could make old code harder to work with, especially since a lot of optimizations would need to be done. Old Illusiat games are not good examples of BASIC coding after all.

Secondly, I am switching to strings tilemaps. I wanted pictures at first, but I felt that despite being 8 times smaller, the maps would be harder to work with when it comes to event codings and they would look too simple with 3 tiles at once. I only use small 128 char string chunks, though, to minimize RAM usage and make map making easier. With 16x8 map chunks I can create them directly in the BASIC editor in the map loader programs. So far, speed is roughly the same than the late Illusiat games.

Third, items  are no longer stacked. In old games, you could hold 99 herbs, 99 potions, etc, now it's one individual item per slot and there are 100 slots total, meaning when you run out of space you need to either sell items (selling will be a new feature) or trash them. Also, for equipments, you got rings, no sword/armor. In older games when buying equipment the weaker one would be donated to the shop. Now you still keep the old equipments and can switch it in the item menu. As said, there are only rings, though, but you can equip 4 to the character and stat bonuses are stackable. There are defense raiser, elemental protection, exp bonuses, special protections such as instant kill.

The game only uses 1 asm lib and it's Resource (to run archived programs). I'm in the process of switching to Iambian XCOPY routine, when he fixes the bug I reported, since it's much smaller.

I gtg work now, I'll try to come back with more info about the magic system soon.

This is awesome!

Anyway, now with the game features, I know some people wants me to make an xLIB/Celtic III RPG in the future since I didn't do any so far, but this will not be now (if it ever happens).

It may have ASCII graphics, but the graphics are great and the characters you're using for the tiles were chosen very well

I do have one minor little suggestion though:  Have you thought about anything similar to Final Fantasy's Fat Chocobo for storing items?

That looks great.  Keep it up.

Very nice ASCII art.

The "buildings" look great! And it seems to run smooth.

thanks a lot people, I have thought about a Fat Chocobo system in the past few days but it will probably depend of how much the inventory is used. For sure early in the game you won't have any items but at one point you'll need a lot of cure magic for long dungeons and magic is consumable like items. Those who played Final Fantasy 8 and ROL series knows what I am talking about.

Oh yeah the magic system: At first when you see the menu in this game or the battle command screen, you may notice how simple it looks like, since in the early Illusiat games using items and viewing stats was about all you could do from the main menu and in battles you could only use magic or attack (and use items). The thing is that it isn't as simple as it looks. The item menu is probably what got the most work put into in this game, because for the first time I am not using stacked items (magic and rings), so I had to implement some sort of multiple pages menu or scrolling. In the menu it's multiple pages and in battle since you only see 4 spells/rings at once it's scrolling (since it's faster). From the item menu you can equip rings by selecting one then the slot you want to equip it on (1 through 4). Selecting an empty item slot will ask you which ring you want to unequip. Selecting a Cure spell will restore your HP and selecting a spell that can only be used inside battle (Pyro, Ice, Blitz, Aura and Psy) will ask you if you want to trash it or not. Trashing items (and selling) will be essential in the game when you run out of space, altough with 100 items that won't probably happen in a while.

Also all 6 magic spells has leveling up. Everytime you use a spell it gets experience and at 100 exp it reaches a new LV. The higher the level, the better the magic animation and the stronger the magic is. It takes much longer to level it up at high level, though and in the item menu outside battle, cure gives 1 exp only no matter the level, unlike in battles, to prevent cheating your way up to level 9 early in the game by wasting cure spells incredibly fast

More work was put into the storyline. Nothing much inside the game, but more planning-wise. I am writing every chronological events in notepad (then I'll print then so it's easier to look at) so it will be easier to work on the game afterward. The story is more complex than any Illusiat game I made and by RPG/fantasy standards, this time I am trying to make it so it is less non-sense and more detailled. In older Illusiat games sometimes after finishing something like beating a boss, you would arrive in a area with 3 or 4 dungeons and a village and there would be no indications about what to do besides not being able to enter some areas due to not having the key or it being sealed by a mysterious force. Also, most of the time, during the game intro, you were given the final goal of the game but without any clue of where to start and during the game you would just wander around killing bosses that had nothing to do with the story most of the time until you suddently arrived in the final chapter. There were no indication that you were heading toward the end of the game other than advancing through chapters.

Now in Illusiat 13 most steps/dungeons/quests in the game will be linked to each others and you'll be given help by NPCs about what to do next and where a shop keeper that is gone missing could be located. I remember in Illusiat 11 a NPC located near the end of a dungeon who would dissapear at one point and the last time I played I took an hour to find him again. This will not happen in my new game unless you don't bother reading what NPCs says.

That said, with faster map loading, it will be harder to make it as long as other Illusiat games, though. I'll try my best so it is as long as Illusiat 11 for example, while trying to make it fit on a regular 83+ (since I now use strings as maps instead of limited pictures, maps are 8x larger in memory, since in a picture 8 pixels takes 1 single byte while in a string 8 characters takes . No matter what, it will remain longer than any existing 83+ RPG outside the Illusiat, Mana Force and Reign Of Legends series, by far.

About the storyline, nope I'm not giving too much details because I don't want to spoil too much. All I will say for now is that Illusiat 13 will be the awnser to every events in the entire series

Well dj really enjoys old-school rpgs. He has been talking about making a graphic one but it will probably be a while if he even thinks about doing a graphic one.

you should totally make the illusiat four in english it would get so many more downloads, also, i dont judge games on the graphics, because i am currently playing the illusiat series (im on the fifth) and am finding them quite addicting