So, I'm someone who's been playing at getting into game dev for, most of my life at this point. It's turned out to be a long list of flights of fancy in practice, largely due to mental difficulties in various forms. But I've more or less finally birthed something I think I can really do, even though it's still going to be long, slow, and difficult.
The game is called RaccKnight. It's about a knight that's a raccoon, or a raccoon that's a knight; either or. The original inspiration was watching a speedrun of an early handheld RPG, and thinking "I could make a sprite at this kind of fidelity." And I tried, and I did. And then I thought about what I could build around it, and I landed at some degree of handheld RPG-type game, much like the original inspiration. And the idea fell together into a framework almost shockingly quickly.
One other inspiration I wanted to make sure was part of it, was the idea of a supersolid HUD. Like old PC games that had big, unchanging borders with a UI put into it, so that the drawn area was smaller and easier to render. Except how this ended up manifesting, was that the HUD became a kind of fantasy handheld itself, where all of the controls of the game were added as visible buttons that you could click or activate with keys, that would light up when available and press and depress on screen, even when they weren't available.
I also ended up making its lights and indicators look like actual mechanically activated bits and bobs, with an underlying purpose of adding accessibility in the form of making different-colored buttons look different, due to the fake LED being in a different location under the button, such that green lights would be brighter toward the top of the button, and red lights brighter toward the bottom.
The actual look of the layout of the fantasy handheld doesn't really make any sense ergonomically, and it's not meant to. On one end because it's more important that it presents information to the player, and in part to be kind of the 'charm' of this fake toy. I don't want to use any text for presenting information to the player in-game, so the iconography and use of light indicators is essential to the game's playability.
As for being a video game, RaccKnight is a simple RPG that also has a strategic layer. You don't level up or grow. You always have 16 HP, and enemies always have 8. You have 4 different types of attack (cut, poke, bonk, and zap,) and different enemies take varying damage from each. Your only healing is in potions that recover you to full, but you can only hold up to 4, and there are a limited amount of them to find. Bosses also have 8 HP, but take less damage in a manner that makes finding their weaknesses much more important.
This is only about half of the combat depth, though. The rest is, on the player side, you can use a potion, examine to do no damage but reveal the enemy's weaknesses, defend, or escape. And for enemies, they may enter different "stances" on a turn, which indicate what they're about to do next turn, or are a consequence of their previous action, which change their weaknesses and can cause different reactions based on what you do. For instance, an enemy preparing for a strong attack may be interrupted and lose their next turn if you bonk them, another less reckless strong attack might be unable to be interrupted, but could be prevented with a defend, just for a couple examples. So you'd both need to know what an enemy is weak to in a vacuum, and also be able to predict/react properly to enemy's stance actions.
As for the game's format, it's a simple 8 floor dungeon. Nothing randomly generated; it just is what it is. Each floor has a few enemies you can encounter and a boss at the exit, and at the end there's a last boss. Ideally the game will only take 3-4 hours tops, probably less. As such it'll be a single session game without saving, because I don't really know how to do it and it feels like too small of a project to warrant it.
Aesthetically, I'm going for "kind of like old console limitations, but not quite on the exact standard of them, because it's my own fantasy hardware and I don't care." Every individual object can only use 4 shades of grayscale, and 4 shades of one out of 12 hues, with black as a "bonus color" implied to be a "just don't render anything here lol" color. Color on the "video" area will never be used for anything mechanically significant, and color used on the UI will always be presented in a way that is also visibly distinct another way.
It's currently super-alpha "playable" in that it has a working movement and input engine in a black test room with basic wall tiles, but once the encounter meter fills, nothing happens because there's no battle system yet. I'm hung up somewhere in the middle of trying to transfer the game state into a combat mode, and implement the flow of turns. That'll probably be the hardest part of the project.
The tentative story (and ideally only text directly associated with or in the game) is as follows:
Once upon a time, there was RaccKnight
Brave and strong, they sought things
For no particular reason, other than the fact that things are good
Simple things, shiny things, things earned, things stolen from the rich (earned)
RaccKnight grew up listening to legends of a thing
A thing so essentially a thing, it was named The Thing
Kept in a place so very much a place that it was named The Place
Guarded by many good and friendly monsters
One day, RaccKnight decided the time had come
Where they would go to The Place and find The Thing
Most people were just confused by questions about such a place and such a thing
But RaccKnight found their leads, and followed their path
Finally, RaccKnight found The Place with The Thing
But wouldn't you know it?
The many friendly monsters all wanted a friendly fight with RaccKnight
To see if the stories of their thing-finding prowess were true
So begins the story of RaccKnight and The Place
And the quest for The Thing and the friendship of many monsters
Will you help them find The Thing?
Or help them learn that some things are better left ungotten?
Anyway, have some random graphics: a screenshot featuring the UI, and the full palette.
- Untitled.png (3.27 KiB) Viewed 17639 times
- palette3.png (443 Bytes) Viewed 17639 times