[Jebediah]

Hi. I have recently decided to rewrite my engine in Visual Basic instead of BlitzBasic. I managed to triple my fps and include alpha blending. Woohoo!



Look at those pretty blended tiles to show where you can move!



This battle engine is being rewritten. Same concept tho. Characters will move on world map. When they encounter monsters they can enter battle mode. In battle mode you get so many AP points to move, attack or use magic. Strategy will be key to win every battle.



My old map editor from RPGToolBox. I have already altered it to work with 40x40 tiles. Now all I need to do is rewrite the scripting engine.



Menus will also be alpha blended. Because I plan to have big foreground scenaries (ie. huge trees) I have made it so when you are behind something it alpha blends the foreground. It works but needs tweaking so it looks more natural. It looks sweet....no screenshots of it yet.

We are still heavy into designing this game. Next week we am getting together again and we should have a map and story plot. We have an intro on our website.

This game will be a typical console rpg except it will have a different battle system (similar to final fantasy tactics I think). Expect a grand story that will keep you intrigued.

We are probably not even close to being ready to recruiting more people. We will need artists, composer(s), concept artists and sound effects. I would still love to hear if anyone is interested. I have concept art that needs to be pixelized and lots of tiles I need. If I had some graphics it would make programming the engine a lot easier.
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- Jebediah
Nostalgic Studios

[Nephilim]

Looks like your engine has a lot of spiff features, and boosting your FPS is always good.

Are those placeholder graphics you ripped from elsewhere, or are those your own?

Keep up the good work.

[Jebediah]

Yeah all those graphics were ripped. Except the grass and trees in first screenshot which were done by Clay. Sadly...like most artists he seems to have faded away.

The characters are from chrono trigger (one of my favourite games!)
http://tsgk.captainn.net/sprites_snes_chronotrigger.html
The shyguy kingdom....a great place for placeholders =)

The tiles in the editor are from rpgmaker2K.
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- Jebediah
Nostalgic Studios

[ThousandKnives]

Yeah and that battle background is definately the overworld forest battle background from FF4. Only... blurry.
Makes me nostalgic for building levels having Tellah cast Ice3 on FlameDogs and lizards and such outside of Agart. Then I could beat the Mad Ogres in the basement of Eblan and the Siren up in the tower. Only all you got was that dumb Blood Spear that really sucked. It was still fun though.

BTW I like the big party size. I was outraged when FF games started having 3 person parties, so far from the glory days of the crowded 5-person FF4 party. Bring the whole gang is what I say.

On the other hand, Romancing Saga 1 had 6 person parties, and that got kind of annoying by times.
But maybe that was just because you constantly had to tell them to change lines so they could get to the front and attack. I dunno...

[js71]

Visual basic?
Bad idea, if you ask me. I made a game in vb once... None of my friends could play it, they didn't have the run-time libs installed,so we had to install vb on their comps cause we didn't know where to find the libs on line and... Argh. But it's your choice.

[Jebediah]

Well I optimized my code and it can run smoothly on a 400mhz. And with a proper installation program (ie. using install wizard that comes with VB) you can take care of that problem.

Doesn't matter....I am designing the framework of a massive rpg maker project with some C++ programmers. The whole thing will be heavily scripted and totally modular. Which means it will support tactical, simulation, action or classic rpg's depending on the modules written for it. Should take a month or two to design and then I'll start recruiting C++ programmers to do some real programming. =) I will of course program the map/script editor in VB.
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- Jebediah
Nostalgic Studios