Epikos

[Jack Dandy]

Hey, Ultima V-clone. Sweet. I'm grabbing this.

 

[Jack Dandy]

Also, there's some more info about the game here.
https://www.reddit.com/r/IndieGaming/comments/476me0/sp_game_epikos_a_turn_based_single_player_rpg/

Hi everyone, I am doing this post to self-promote my game, Epikos, which I just released two days ago. I'll try to follow rule #3 here, and give some meaningful discussion. Hopefully you will find my experiences interesting, regardless of if you decide to check out my game.

My Backstory

My day job is as a (non) indie dev. I used to work at a so-called crunch studio, for about five years. This is the typical game industry stuff you've heard about. 12 hour days minimum, including Saturday and Sunday (we "only" worked 8 hours on Sunday). I did that job for about five years.

I should say that this is an unethical and probably illegal way to treat people, and that we tragically had one dev commit suicide, and another die from the stress (stroke). Both young men, both very talented.

After that terrible introduction to the games industry, I got a job at a "good" company, one that makes very popular games and doesn't overwork their employees at all.

Free Time? Whaaaat?

When you aren't working 12+ hour days, you get this amazing thing called "free time!" But, I didn't know what to do with it!

So I started coding Epikos.

My Indie Game:

At this point you may wish to take a take a look at some screenshots, or maybe the trailer. After you check it out, I'll explain the choices I made with art style and gameplay. Screenshots/trailer here:

https://kingbee.itch.io/epikos

16 Color Graphics?

The art in my game is abstract enough so that your mind goes into the "fill in the blanks" mode, which I believe activates your imagination. Whenever I show someone my game, they see something different. They interpret the art and the characters as something else, something which is either funny, or personally meaningful to them. I really like that aspect of the art.

Gameplay, Input, and a Critique of Modern Turn Based RPGs:

I really love games with snappy input, and I find this to be a rarity in most turn based games today. In the more modern games, I find that most of my time is spent waiting for for some animation to finish playing, or for some flashy camera shot to finish up. This leads to a situation where you are waiting for the game to let you make your next move, and I find it disconnects me from the game.

In older games such as Nethack and Ultima, I don't find that problem. Even though it was a turn based game, the input was snappy and responsive. I like this style of input, so I wrote Epikos so that it proceeds as fast as you can give input from the keyboard! I hope it will provide a pleasing experience. Removing this disconnect provides a deeper connection to the game.

Plot/Story

The game is single player, and takes place in a world with unique history. Each character has a special backstory revealed through playing. Each character also has his own set of abilities that you use in the turn based battles.

If you get more interested in the world's history, you can (optionally) find secret tablets and take them to bards. These bards will translate the ancient tablets and read you a myth or legend.

You can also talk to the many NPCs you will encounter. Much of the conversation is presented in a style somewhat inspired from the dialog in the old Ultima games, though there are some Final Fantasy style cutscenes. I've tried to incorporate elements of my two favorite games, Ultima IV and Final Fantasy I.

Finally, each character can learn magic via ancient scrolls. You find or purchase the scrolls, and then collect blood crystals from your slain enemies. Using these crystals, you can cast a variety of spells.

Levels?

I'm not a huge fan of levels and grinding in RPGs. In Epikos, I tuned each battle to the characters that you will have in your party at the time of the fight. Therefore, the fights are perfectly balanced, and you don't need to get XP for it to be fun.

Of course, many players want some kind of character progress. You can get money to buy various items, such as scrolls which will unlock different spells. It's optional, but you can fight just a few extra battles to afford most things. Overall it isn't a character-progression type of game, and there aren't any skill trees. Your characters start with a functional set of skills, and you can usually get a few more through finding unique items.

There are also a few key items you can find that will help greatly in the fight.

How do I sell a game?

I created all the art, music, and of course wrote all the code, as well as did a few promotional things like make a website and a trailer.

While I am familiar with code, I am completely clueless to the process of promoting an actual finished game, so I will gladly accept any criticism or advice. I thought putting the game on itch.io was a good starting point, and then I started posting a bit on reddit.

I have gotten the Mod's approval to suggest my game on a few subreddits, but I'm still largely clueless.

Ok, I've tried to elaborate on the game decisions I made and to explain my game a bit. Thanks, and please try Epikos!

Game Page:

https://kingbee.itch.io/epikos

Trailer Only:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrrLmY1aOLQ

Edit:

If you are short of cash, I might be willing to part with a few free copies PM me.

Being the friendly fella I am , I invited him over to do some Qs! Hope he'll drop by.

Spoiler

People complaining about Graphics are faggots

 

[Jimmious]

I've got to mention that in Greek the name of the game translates to "epic man". Or anything male that is epic anyway. Its the adjective of a male entity being epic.

If on the other hand you spell it "Epoikos" it translates as colonist.

I wonder if the creator had one of the two in mind

 

[Kingbee]

Hi, this is Kingbee, and I made Epikos. As you can see from the reddit post that Jack Dandy linked, I made the game in my free time.

There have been many comments so far and I will try to address everything, but if I forget, please hit me up on twitter, or just reply more on this forum, or go to my reddit post. I'd love to hear from my fellow RPG fans. Like many of you I grew up on those older games. I'm a programmer by day, and though I enjoy my day job of making cutting-edge games, I always wanted to explore some of the dusty design decisions that were lost in the 80s.

Some of you have mentioned the art. Most of the feedback I have received around the art has been positive. Before discussing further, I invite you to look at some screenshots:

http://www.epikosrpg.com/screenshots/

I always found a certain beauty in the 16-color style, and since even retro games these days use more than 16 colors, I decided to explore that option. Honest truth is that I like how that looks better, though since most gamers haven't seen anything like this, there are a lot of surprised reactions.

I should say, I'm not an artist but I'm drawing a lot and trying to learn. Being in the games industry, I have a lot of artist friends who are helping me, and I'm exposed to art a lot (I'm a graphics programmer in *real* life).

I also have a deviantart page that you may find entertaining or at least a bit funny at times, especially if you like old Mario or Zelda games:

http://chezni.deviantart.com/art/Bowser-524990202

Someone mentioned the snappy combat. That was one of the main goals. I have played a lot of (really good) turn-based games lately. I find they all have really longwinded animations, and I just never want to watch them. Even truly excellent games such as Advance Wars, on the larger maps, you spend a lot of time waiting for the AI to make their move. I don't really like this, so I made Epikos have very fast AI moves.

As far as the meaning of the name Epikos, I was more thinking about "epic man" or something which is epic rather than a colonist, but the double meaning is cool. I believe I would be sued into oblivion if I took the name "epic games" so I went with the Greek

Someone posted a screenshot of Final Fantasy 6, which is one of my all-time favorites. The storytelling style Epikos is based on the Final Fantasy IV/V/VI type games. I believe these tile based games had good stories and good storytelling interfaces, which were more immersive than the later techniques of showing us movies, etc, so I went for something like this. Also, that is easier to code, and since I did Epikos alone (though I may do my next game with some of my friends), that's a perk.

Now onto the bad stuff. To be honest, the trailer doesn't really show you what you do in the game, and it isn't that engaging overall. I need more XP on making trailers I hope I can find time to remake it after work this week. What would *you guys* like to see in a much better trailer?

Anyway, as you can see from my Reddit post and hopefully this one, I would like to have engaging discussions about Epikos and other RPGs, as they are close to my heart. And although this is probably irrelevant, I want to say I'm currently replaying Etrian Odyssey IV for the 3rd time.

Anyway, I hope you'll check out Epikos. Again, sorry the trailer needs a kick in the butt!

--Kingbee (AKA Chezni19 on reddit)

 

[vonAchdorf]

Someone mentioned the snappy combat. That was one of the main goals. I have played a lot of (really good) turn-based games lately. I find they all have really longwinded animations, and I just never want to watch them. Even truly excellent games such as Advance Wars, on the larger maps, you spend a lot of time waiting for the AI to make their move. I don't really like this, so I made Epikos have very fast AI moves.

Great decision, I hate if developers are too enamored with their animations to not at least offer a toggle for that.

 

[Lhynn]

I always found a certain beauty in the 16-color style, and since even retro games these days use more than 16 colors, I decided to explore that option. Honest truth is that I like how that looks better, though since most gamers haven't seen anything like this, there are a lot of surprised reactions.

Looks ugly as shit, rather watch a microsoft excel screen. But i guess a lot of nostalgiafags are going to overlook this.

 

[Kingbee]

Glad you like it overall so far.

As for the music, I made the music using actual NES sequencing which included two square waves, a triangle wave, and a noise channel. If you don't like it, you can just replace the music with anything you please, so rock out to your favorite stuff (replace the music in the music folder), or turn the music volume off if that is better.

Likewise with the art, you can easily replace it with your own tileset, someone in fact just sent me one today and I'm still looking at it.

 

[Jack Dandy]

Glad to have you, Mr. Bee. Here's my first complaints about the game!
The music is awful! Got no problem with old-school, as a matter of a fact I love it...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hF9lNDyN5Xw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OVimCHE3vk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LZMvSkqugs

But the tunes I heard so far are just bad! Try and get them better next time, aye?

And now, a request! Or two.
1. Please allow key rebinding - I like using the numpad for moving around, especially in tile-based games such as these.
2. Please allow "active character" mode, like in Ultima V. (When activated for a character, when his turn ends you skip the turn for the other party members.)

Also! Love the "snappy combat\movement" design focus. People might overlook it, but it's super important, and really helped me enjoy U4\5, despite playing it 20 years after release.

Really like what I played so far. Hope it won't end too soon.

EDIT: mindx2 , come take a look at this!

 

[mindx2]

EDIT: mindx2 , come take a look at this!

What...? Does it come in a box?

 

[Unkillable Cat]

The art in my game is abstract enough so that your mind goes into the "fill in the blanks" mode, which I believe activates your imagination. Whenever I show someone my game, they see something different. They interpret the art and the characters as something else, something which is either funny, or personally meaningful to them. I really like that aspect of the art.

This is something that got lost in video games sometime around 1990. Before that period graphics were unable to be realistic, so abstract approaches to displaying gameworlds were adopted. Some of them were too abstract, others worked quite well. These abstract approaches even allowed for devs to create humongous gameworlds because so little resources were being devoted to displaying the worlds - most of them went into building them.

Then multimedia and 3D became the rage that got everyone half-crazy, and all that abstract notion and those immense gameworlds disappeared almost overnight

I suggest you keep your own words here above in mind when doing future press talk, it's a good description of that lost magic that you're trying to claim for Epikos.

 

[Lhynn]

Then multimedia and 3D became the rage that got everyone half-crazy, and all that abstract notion and those immense gameworlds disappeared almost overnight

This is nonsense, games with great graphics can still have great complexity. Its just that developers generally percieve that they wont sell, so they make them simple.
Simplicity is generally accepted as a good thing in this toilet industry. But in the 80s/90s when the main audience were smart nerds with a lot of free time on their hands it was different.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

This is nonsense, games with great graphics can still have great complexity.

I never said they didn't, I said that the abstract approach that games had used to show their gameworlds was swiftly pushed away and forgotten.

Its just that developers generally percieve that they wont sell, so they make them simple.

Now who's (generally) speaking nonsense?

The mentality of "will it sell or not?" when deciding on how to make a game didn't settle into the gaming industry until the early 1990s, at the earliest. Before that people made games and released them with little regard to whether they were simple or not...or whether they were good or not. See Atari (US), Imagine (UK), Firebird (UK), Elite (UK) and various other publishers that released anything and everything they wanted...and made lots of money off of it. That's the home computers, of course. Console games are a different story. Nintendo heavily regulated whom could release titles on their console, and what kind of games they were.

After the early 1990s the big corporations got involved and it was then that the question of "will it sell or not?" started to settle in. The practice of making games simple became the norm, because the corporate bigwigs wanted their investment to pay back. And abstract doesn't sell as much as simple.

You're applying modern-day corporate budget mentality to a past-era market that didn't have it. That's why so many devs and publishers went under back then - they did what they wanted, and damn the odds!

Simplicity is generally accepted as a good thing in this toilet industry. But in the 80s/90s when the main audience were smart nerds with a lot of free time on their hands it was different.

See above. In the 1980s the industry was taking its baby steps and had an untamed and unclaimed market. Absolutely anything had and could get a market share as long as it got released to begin with. And being a smart nerd was a requirement just to get the game running on home computers, and game design relied first and foremost on the player's persistence, complexity was rarely the issue for a game getting bad sales. Again, the console market was different in this regard. Back then people thought of home computers as computers and consoles as toys. And console games rarely went for the abstract approach.

 

[Jack Dandy]

Glad you like it overall so far.

As for the music, I made the music using actual NES sequencing which included two square waves, a triangle wave, and a noise channel. If you don't like it, you can just replace the music with anything you please, so rock out to your favorite stuff (replace the music in the music folder), or turn the music volume off if that is better.

Neat!

https://mega.nz/#!IwQXVaaZ

I'm a man of action, so I made a pack of music replacing the tunes with comparable ones from U5: Lazarus.
Anybody who's interested: unpack into main game music folder and replace everything there!


(Will you do the numpad thing, btw?)

 

[Kingbee]

Cool I'll try the music pack, I can't link to it from epikosrpg.com since the music is not mine to give out. But if any of you guys want to make a music pack of stuff in the public domain I can probably add a link on my website, or even an in-game option to change over. Same goes for tilesets. I've seen a few fun ones already, and it is really very easy to mod, just plop new graphics in the png folder and that's it.

As for numpad, that's a good idea, if I get enough features to warrant a patch that'd be something to go in. So far I haven't had to patch the game, luckily.

I can probably send you an unofficial build with numpad to test if you want later, maybe PM me with where you want me to send it (giving me your gmail account would be easiest).

 

[Jack Dandy]

Gotcha. Thank you.

 

[CryptRat]

I completed the game (in fact I reached the ending but still have to uncover some mysteries) ; I enjoyed it overall, it's a fun little game in my opinion.

For the bad points, the game is short, the mechanisms are very simple, there's no character developpement per see and no equipement. There are not many things to do except walking, talking and fighting. The beginning of the game is also very railroaded. But :
- Combat is fun. It's not hard but you can't do anything and still win. Besides, you don't have to grind since there's no experience, you get additional party members and some new spells, that's all.
- The world, lore, plot are serviceable, the game is atmospheric and immersive and the characters you play are mysterious and likeable enough.
- I like the world map music.
- Around halfway the exploration becomes more open, you may easily follow a wrong path and meet overly strong monsters.
- The storyline eventually becomes open too ; it's the best part of the game and it's done via research and exploration, not via dialog choices. I've probably missed some secrets, which could possibly change the story, since there are a some "hidden" locations where I've found nothing.

 

[Grauken]

So, it's an adventure with combat, what a perfect waste of old-school graphics, I think I pass

 

[Leitz]

Half assed post about video game graphics coming in......Graphics are not subjective, they're either good or bad. Just look at those splendid graphics on the top picture and compare them to some low life clone. Deal with it!

 

[worldsmith]

But the tunes I heard so far are just bad! Try and get them better next time, aye?

It's probably more helpful if you can be more specific about what you didn't like about it (though if you don't have a music background it might be difficult to enumerate the specifics).

Kingbee,

For myself, just from the trailer in post #1, I'd point out:
1. The "vibrato" is painful to listen to - it's over done and sounds more like frequency instability than vibrato.
2. A lot of the note envelopes are messed up - individual notes are coming in quieter and building, then dropping back down at the start of the next note. There's nothing musical about that. (Building into the next note can be musical, but just repeatedly doing the same unorthodox volume-shaping on each note is not, at least not in any conventional context, though crappy oboe players who can't get a note out can sound like that - don't emulate them!) Contrast this with the Ultima stuff Jack Dandy linked - those are using the classical envelope which mainly consists of a strong attack followed by exponential decay.
3. There's something broken in your synth - it's causing a "pop" (a discontinuity in the output waveform) at the beginning of each note.
4. There's some really horrible dissonance at places - e.g. at the end of the phrase that ends around 0:24. (It sounds like it's from two unison voices having out-of-sync UltraMegaVibrato.)
5. It's too repetitive. The theme is repeating about every 12.5 seconds "verbatim" with no relief. The piece does include variations (harmony, arpeggios, FX), but those "don't count" in the sense that the listener is still being hammered over and over again with the same theme with the same leading voice notes with the same rhythm and in the same key. With that level of sameness, repeating more than twice in a row when the given theme is too short is just problematic - it quickly becomes Chinese water-drop torture. (It also probably doesn't help that this theme is pretty simplistic.) My rule of thumb is 30+ second themes if using back-to-back repetition, 20+ seconds if the repeated theme is a chorus and is being regularly interspersed with other material, or use "significant transformative variation" if you want to go shorter than that. Listening to Jack Dandy's 2nd link, you can hear how they carefully avoid violating this kind of condition -- they're using a motif that's only about 6 seconds long and they repeat it immediately, but it's an A A' pattern (where A leaves the listener hanging and A' provides the resolution) forming a 12 second theme. They then repeat that... with harmony added, but that's not enough of a variation to "save it" from being considered "the same exact thing" by a listener. So that's two repetitions of a 12 second theme - one more and they are violating the "more than twice in a row" rule, so they don't do that. Instead they shift keys and do some modulation, then switch into a fugue-like mode - both of these still using the original theme but providing more than enough variation to avoid torturing the listener. (The piece then ends with the theme as it was at the beginning - a common way to "wrap things up".)

 

[CryptRat]

It seems that while waiting for Grimoire just like we do, Kingbee is also working on his own new game.

Pitch for my new side project game, "Dungeon Crunker": Build a dungeon, then fight in it!