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RangerSheck
Pretty, Pretty Fairy Princess
Joined: 29 May 2007
Posts: 9
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 Posted: Tue May 29, 2007 2:06 am Post subject: Pioneers of Aethora - Browser-based Tactics-style RPG |
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Hey all - I'm requesting feedback on my web-based roleplaying game, Pioneers of Aethora. It's in an "early state", but very playable.
Working Features:
- Turn-based, Grid/Tactics-style combat
- The nature of the combat system makes it an ideal "coffee-break" RPG - close the window in the middle of combat - when you come back your turn will be patiently waiting for you
- Up to 8 characters total - 4 in your active party, giving you the ability to swap characters in and out
- Each character can wield two weapons, and combat actions are based on combinations of skills related to weapons - currently 50+ possible actions
- Buy/sell items from/to other players in the Market
- A couple of Missions are in the game now, plenty more to come
- Completely web-based - uses javascript and DHTML (no Flash) - use of AJAX minimizes page-loading
- Cross-browser compatibility - play from practically any computer with a recent browser! Well tested in Firefox 2, but also known to work well with IE6/7, Safari, and Opera (IE6 is not ideal, if you have to use IE, IE7 has better CSS and alpha transparency support)
Here are some screenshots:
Combat #1
Combat #2
Equipping a character
Party Management
More about the game: http://docs.aethora.com/about
Some help docs: http://docs.aethora.com/help
Registration is always free - at some point I may offer account upgrades or something else, but there will always be a free version. Check it out:
http://aethora.com
Thanks,
Ranger Sheck
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DeveloperX
202192397
Joined: 04 May 2003
Posts: 1626
Location: Decatur, IL, USA
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| Posted: Tue May 29, 2007 4:19 am Post subject: |
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sounds cool. registered. checking it out now.
I'll post more as I evaluate it :)
[edit]
okay, I created a party of four, talked to a guard, headed east to the arenas, went hunting, fought 4 enemies, lost 1 party character in battle because I didnt quite understand the concept at first. You NEED a tutorial of sorts.
Overall I am VERY impressed with this project, and I'm happy to say that I wil certainly continue playing it whn time permits. I really enjoyed the experience. There are several small changes I would make to satisfy personal pet-peeves (such as the window scrolling around before the character moves in battle using firefox 2 under xubuntu dapper drake linux) and a few things that I would like to see added, like a display of the order of turns (similar to how final fantasy x battles show whose turn is coming up) that way you can plan more strategic attacks. Also, please give the enemies #s because having it say the same name for every enemy of the same type makes it confusing to determine who hit whom.
Congrats on a very nice start to what looks to be a very promising title.
I would be interested in helping with the project with tileart if you wanted.
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DeveloperX
202192397
Joined: 04 May 2003
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Location: Decatur, IL, USA
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RangerSheck
Pretty, Pretty Fairy Princess
Joined: 29 May 2007
Posts: 9
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| Posted: Tue May 29, 2007 3:16 pm Post subject: |
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| DeveloperX wrote: | | okay, I created a party of four, talked to a guard, headed east to the arenas, went hunting, fought 4 enemies, lost 1 party character in battle because I didnt quite understand the concept at first. You NEED a tutorial of sorts. |
Agreed. I have some help pages at http://docs.aethora.com/help but I've found peopel rarely look at them. What would be ideal is if I could write some kind of in-game walk-through for the first battle. I definitely don't want to lose anyone right from the start because they don't get how combat works.
| DeveloperX wrote: | | There are several small changes I would make to satisfy personal pet-peeves (such as the window scrolling around before the character moves in battle using firefox 2 under xubuntu dapper drake linux) |
Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. Firefox's default action for the arrow keys is to scroll the screen, so when you overwrite them with javascript, it just adds your function to the default. I was thinking of making the movement keys the WASD keys instead - then you could use your mousehand to click on targets, stat links, actions, etc.
| DeveloperX wrote: | | and a few things that I would like to see added, like a display of the order of turns (similar to how final fantasy x battles show whose turn is coming up) that way you can plan more strategic attacks. |
Ah - an excellent suggestion!
| DeveloperX wrote: | | Also, please give the enemies #s because having it say the same name for every enemy of the same type makes it confusing to determine who hit whom. |
Hmm. I'll have to think about this one - I originally had it set to use numbers, so they looked like Gladiator 1, Gladiator 2, etc, but I thought it was ugly so the names are randomly generated now. I hoped that would make them distinct enough. Maybe I can come up with a way to change the randomness to make sure the names are more distinct? Actually - just thinking out loud - could be it's too random and to the brain they all look like Gladiator <random>.
| DeveloperX wrote: | | I would be interested in helping with the project with tileart if you wanted. |
Cool. At some point I may take you up on that. Right now the art is all done by me (and I'm a coder, so yeah - it needs work I'm sure), except for the models for the characters which were done by a friend of mine. He made them by taking photos of action figures and shriking them down. I added coloring to them and drew in weapons on some of them. So the art is pretty low-budget :)
| DeveloperX wrote: | Okay, I've fought another battle, and gained more items & weapons.
But I've got a party of hurt characters...how do you heal their wounds? |
Hmm - I was hoping this would be more clear by the message on the Party Management screen (click the Party link in the upper left menu). There should be a warning of some kind about characters needing to be inactive to heal up. Drag any injured characters out of the Active Characters box and into the Inactive box. You can create up to 8 characters, so while some characters are healing up, you can swap fresh characters into the party (I glanced at your battle logs here http://aethora.com/log/DeveloperX/battles and I think you probably figured out the character swapping).
Thanks a ton for your feedback and suggestions, DeveloperX. They are very greatly appreciated!
- Ranger Sheck
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DeveloperX
202192397
Joined: 04 May 2003
Posts: 1626
Location: Decatur, IL, USA
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| Posted: Tue May 29, 2007 6:15 pm Post subject: |
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| RangerSheck wrote: |
Agreed. I have some help pages at http://docs.aethora.com/help but I've found people rarely look at them. What would be ideal is if I could write some kind of in-game walk-through for the first battle. I definitely don't want to lose anyone right from the start because they don't get how combat works.
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I found the docs after my second battle...they are not obvious.
And an in-game tutorial battle mission would be most-helpful.
All you would need are a few popups that tell you what to do to defeat the enemy, basicly just script the whole battle, and only wait for the player to do the action that the script is waiting on, instead of running a real battle script.
I think alot of people would love the ability to have a OPTIONAL battle tutorial available.
| RangerSheck wrote: |
Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. Firefox's default action for the arrow keys is to scroll the screen, so when you overwrite them with javascript, it just adds your function to the default. I was thinking of making the movement keys the WASD keys instead - then you could use your mousehand to click on targets, stat links, actions, etc.
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WSAD keys are a nice idea for alot of people, but a better idea is to give the player a way to set their own input controls. :D
One way to do this is to map a javascript event for every key to an array, and then by changing the mapping of array indicies you could give custom key input. You would just need an intermediate input handler between your engine and the browser javascripts.
| RangerSheck wrote: |
Ah - an excellent suggestion!
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:D Thanks, I really would like to see that feature implemented.
| DeveloperX wrote: | | Also, please give the enemies #s because having it say the same name for every enemy of the same type makes it confusing to determine who hit whom. |
| RangerSheck wrote: |
Hmm. I'll have to think about this one - I originally had it set to use numbers, so they looked like Gladiator 1, Gladiator 2, etc, but I thought it was ugly so the names are randomly generated now. I hoped that would make them distinct enough. Maybe I can come up with a way to change the randomness to make sure the names are more distinct? Actually - just thinking out loud - could be it's too random and to the brain they all look like Gladiator <random>.
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I see your point. Then perhaps something more like this:
| Code: |
# psudeo code pythonish ..should be easy enough to understand
# an array of strings for the names of enemies
namedb = ["Guard","Soldier","Monk","Fighter","Wizard"]
# an array of strings for the locations of enemies
locationdb = ["Plithok","Siedar","Droga"]
# an array of strings to be used to build randomized named
randnamedb = ["rock","clan","blade","waterfall","fire","stone","brook"]
# select a random string from randnamedb
A = random(randnamedb)
# select a random location
B = random(locationdb)
# select an enemy type
C = namedb[requested_enemy_type]
# count number of enemies in the field
D = field.enemycount + 1
# build a string from each component
EnemyName = D + " " + C + A + " of " + B
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well..something like that..heh, I Know thats probably not too functional, but its hopefully something to work with. If you give me the code that names the enemies, I can write a suitable replacement routine for you. the code language doesn't matter; odds are that I know it already. :)
| RangerSheck wrote: |
Cool. At some point I may take you up on that. Right now the art is all done by me (and I'm a coder, so yeah - it needs work I'm sure), except for the models for the characters which were done by a friend of mine. He made them by taking photos of action figures and shriking them down. I added coloring to them and drew in weapons on some of them. So the art is pretty low-budget :)
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I recognized some of the characters; especially luke skywalker :P
Let me know if there is anything you need. As long as things are static and unanimated I can do wonders for your artwork. I'm just poor at animation at the moment. :p
| RangerSheck wrote: |
Hmm - I was hoping this would be more clear by the message on the Party Management screen (click the Party link in the upper left menu). There should be a warning of some kind about characters needing to be inactive to heal up. Drag any injured characters out of the Active Characters box and into the Inactive box. You can create up to 8 characters, so while some characters are healing up, you can swap fresh characters into the party (I glanced at your battle logs here http://aethora.com/log/DeveloperX/battles and I think you probably figured out the character swapping).
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I figured out the character swapping; however how long does it take to recover your health as an inactive? I had hoped that my characters would have been healed up after I spent a bit of time wandering the town & battling another set of guards.
One thing that is interesting to note is that I entered my second battle with a character of 21% health and 100% defense; and he survived the battle against 4 enemies without harm. That was unexpected. I started by cornering my opponents with 3 of my 4 party characters and then holding them with one, and slugging them multiple times with the rest of my characters until they're "dead as dead" (I LOVE this status message, its great)
| RangerSheck wrote: |
Thanks a ton for your feedback and suggestions, DeveloperX. They are very greatly appreciated!
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Never a problem giving feedback on such a worthy project.
I am always eager to help others in any way possible, since I live by "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" :) Perhaps one day someone will do the same for me.
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tcaudilllg
Dragonmaster
Joined: 20 Jun 2002
Posts: 1731
Location: Cedar Bluff, VA
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| Posted: Tue May 29, 2007 7:47 pm Post subject: |
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I would recommend telling as many people as you can about this. You should be able to find lots of help with matters such as artwork and documentation, if you look in the right places.
I would look to Pixelation forums for artwork, and probably an English major for the help texts. Someone who wants to burnish their credentials.
Could someone here help him with the help?
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DeveloperX
202192397
Joined: 04 May 2003
Posts: 1626
Location: Decatur, IL, USA
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| Posted: Tue May 29, 2007 7:59 pm Post subject: |
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@ RangerSheck:
I just thought of another suggestion for making the battle system better.
Give the ability to convert 100 move points into 25 action points.
That way you can create devastating combos by storing up move points on characters and unleasing a flurry of attacks unto the opponent. Its a very useful strategic component that I think would be both very easy to implement and very well-accepted by other players.
Something to think about :)
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RangerSheck
Pretty, Pretty Fairy Princess
Joined: 29 May 2007
Posts: 9
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| Posted: Tue May 29, 2007 8:20 pm Post subject: |
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| DeveloperX wrote: | | well..something like that..heh, I Know thats probably not too functional, but its hopefully something to work with. |
Yeah, I can see what you're getting at. I think I'll work on that a bit - getting some real words mixed into the randomness should make a difference.
| DeveloperX wrote: | | I figured out the character swapping; however how long does it take to recover your health as an inactive? I had hoped that my characters would have been healed up after I spent a bit of time wandering the town & battling another set of guards. |
You get one percent of health every 5 minutes. I plan to implement "Inns" at some point, where you can spend gold to recover faster (it's next on my TODO list - a couple people have complained that recovery is too slow, and I need another way for gold to come out of the game for balance of economy, so Inns would be a win-win).
| DeveloperX wrote: | | One thing that is interesting to note is that I entered my second battle with a character of 21% health and 100% defense; and he survived the battle against 4 enemies without harm. That was unexpected. I started by cornering my opponents with 3 of my 4 party characters and then holding them with one, and slugging them multiple times with the rest of my characters until they're "dead as dead" (I LOVE this status message, its great) |
Yeah, this is a reason I haven't been too worried about slow recovery - your characters don't have to be full 100% health to get into a fight and win. I've seen people play a couple battles in a row, get themselves all beat up, then move all their characters to inactive and then call it a day. By the next time they log in, everyone is healed up. The key is that defense stat - it's your buffer against being injured. The enemy has to whittle away your defense before they can hurt you, and you recover defense at a rate of 10% per round (of course, the enemies do as well).
Just a side comment on your cornering tactic - that works great in the beginning because all the attacks are melee based. There are a number of ranged-based actions available and once you move beyond the arenas and encounter NPCs with different weapons, you'll see those ranged attacks - as well as other special actions - I won't go into too much detail here. I'm debating on whether or not I should make the list of actions public or continue to let people figure them out by (A) trying out different combinations of weapons (at the bottom of the equipment screen it tells you what actions you'll have access to) or (B) taking note of the actions NPCs take and targeting them to see what weapons they are using.
- Ranger Sheck
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Pioneers of Aethora - Browser-Based Tactical RPG: http://aethora.com
Ranger Sheck Blogs about Gaming and Development: http://rangersheck.com
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RangerSheck
Pretty, Pretty Fairy Princess
Joined: 29 May 2007
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| Posted: Tue May 29, 2007 8:23 pm Post subject: |
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| LordGalbalan wrote: | I would recommend telling as many people as you can about this. You should be able to find lots of help with matters such as artwork and documentation, if you look in the right places.
I would look to Pixelation forums for artwork, and probably an English major for the help texts. Someone who wants to burnish their credentials.
Could someone here help him with the help? |
Thanks for the tips. I've written a fair amount at http://docs.aethora.com but there could be more. The docs are in a blog/content-management-system type thing, but I was thinking recently that maybe I should convert them to a community-supported wiki. I could use what I have now as a base and let players contribute as they see fit. I'd have to moderate it and verify accuracy, of course. Any thoughts on that?
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Pioneers of Aethora - Browser-Based Tactical RPG: http://aethora.com
Ranger Sheck Blogs about Gaming and Development: http://rangersheck.com
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RangerSheck
Pretty, Pretty Fairy Princess
Joined: 29 May 2007
Posts: 9
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| Posted: Tue May 29, 2007 8:47 pm Post subject: |
[quote] |
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| DeveloperX wrote: | Give the ability to convert 100 move points into 25 action points.
That way you can create devastating combos by storing up move points on characters and unleasing a flurry of attacks unto the opponent. Its a very useful strategic component that I think would be both very easy to implement and very well-accepted by other players.
Something to think about :) |
Interesting - I like it. It'd be very easy to implement. I think I'll try it out. Maybe another option would be 100 action points into 25 defense points, for those times when one character is on the run and trying to stay alive (and not getting any use out of their action points).
BTW, there is a Suggestions topic in the in-game forums. I don't mind discussing any suggestions here, but specific ideas about game-play might interest some of the other players and I'd love to get some discussions generated :)
Glad to see you're really getting into this, DevX - thanks for pumping out some great suggestions!
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Pioneers of Aethora - Browser-Based Tactical RPG: http://aethora.com
Ranger Sheck Blogs about Gaming and Development: http://rangersheck.com
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DeveloperX
202192397
Joined: 04 May 2003
Posts: 1626
Location: Decatur, IL, USA
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| Posted: Tue May 29, 2007 9:07 pm Post subject: |
[quote] |
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| RangerSheck wrote: |
Interesting - I like it. It'd be very easy to implement. I think I'll try it out. Maybe another option would be 100 action points into 25 defense points, for those times when one character is on the run and trying to stay alive (and not getting any use out of their action points).
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Great! I do hope to see that feature soon. :)
| RangerSheck wrote: |
BTW, there is a Suggestions topic in the in-game forums. I don't mind discussing any suggestions here, but specific ideas about game-play might interest some of the other players and I'd love to get some discussions generated :)
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Posted to your forum. I will supply any further suggestions to that location as requested.
| RangerSheck wrote: |
Glad to see you're really getting into this, DevX - thanks for pumping out some great suggestions! |
You are most welcome. Thank you for supplying me with yet another worthwhile reason to come online everyday. :)
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tcaudilllg
Dragonmaster
Joined: 20 Jun 2002
Posts: 1731
Location: Cedar Bluff, VA
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| Posted: Wed May 30, 2007 12:27 am Post subject: |
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| RangerSheck wrote: | | LordGalbalan wrote: | I would recommend telling as many people as you can about this. You should be able to find lots of help with matters such as artwork and documentation, if you look in the right places.
I would look to Pixelation forums for artwork, and probably an English major for the help texts. Someone who wants to burnish their credentials.
Could someone here help him with the help? |
Thanks for the tips. I've written a fair amount at http://docs.aethora.com but there could be more. The docs are in a blog/content-management-system type thing, but I was thinking recently that maybe I should convert them to a community-supported wiki. I could use what I have now as a base and let players contribute as they see fit. I'd have to moderate it and verify accuracy, of course. Any thoughts on that? |
Well, that is complicated. Yeah, a wiki is definitely the way to go. That way talent can find its own way to the matter. A blog is definitely not the way to approach an issue as important as your game's instruction manual, primarily due to its informality. Ideally, you'd want something along the lines of a video game instruction manual; simple, but easily understood and explanatory.
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tcaudilllg
Dragonmaster
Joined: 20 Jun 2002
Posts: 1731
Location: Cedar Bluff, VA
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| Posted: Fri Aug 31, 2007 7:52 pm Post subject: |
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I think I'm going to sign up for this game. Seems like the best browser RPG out there.
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RangerSheck
Pretty, Pretty Fairy Princess
Joined: 29 May 2007
Posts: 9
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| Posted: Mon Sep 03, 2007 6:01 pm Post subject: |
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Have you had a chance to try it LordGalbalan? I'm very interested in feedback.
Also, I've made a couple of updates in the last few months - just did a major update yesterday:
* Changes to the way Defeat is handled (should be less harsh and frustrating for players now)
* Added NPCs shops
* lots of interface enhancements
More details of the changes can be found here: (in-game forums - registered players only) http://aethora.com/forums/thread/5257
New screens of the game: http://docs.aethora.com/about/screenshots-september-2007
Particularly, check out the battle screens and the "Arranging Equipment" screen toward the bottom.
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Ranger Sheck Blogs about Gaming and Development: http://rangersheck.com
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Captain Vimes
Grumble Teddy
Joined: 12 May 2006
Posts: 225
Location: The City Streets
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| Posted: Wed Sep 05, 2007 12:10 am Post subject: |
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I looked at the screenshots and visited the site, and it looks awesome. I would play it, but the school has decided to stop using computer labs for IRP, so I can't do anything except look - if you post in the library they block the site.
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