Magic & Mercenaries: The Curse of Eternal Darkness

[ProphetSword]

Thanks! When you’re working in a bubble, it’s hard to tell. It never hurts to get feedback, though.

 

[JarlFrank]

Love the look and feel of this game. It essentially looks like what the later Gold Box games would have looked like in the early 90s if SSI kept updating the engine rather than reusing the same 1988 engine deep into 1992.

Gives me "Gold Box ca 1991-1993, if the engine were on par with Might and Magic 3-5 or Ultima VII" vibes.

 

[ProphetSword]

Gold-Box vibes are fully intentional. I have often heard people say that they wish Gold-Box games were still made. I feel that way too. It’s good to know I’m somewhat successful.

 

[Blowhard]

Do you want music in this game? Done a few things with chipsets/roland sound canvas and other period romplers but never anything serious, mostly far out idm stuff. But that's just a matter of reigning in the sequencing and working from a prompt. TBH I'm willing to work for fucking free as I've been working in a creative bubble as well. Very much a fan of gold box, wiz, knights of the chalice. Also could contribute some rather grandiloquent prose if you lack for a sheer excess of words. There is a creative loneliness in me yearning to collaborate with folks doing worthwhile work that relates with the things in which I find joy, as opposed to the things to which I attribute absolute disgust like most of this fucking EXPENDABLE PRODUCT going around, having been in some gamedev discords and other festering cybernetic wombs of sheerly nightmarish trendy biter shit masquerading as anything other than a slow acting thallium drip for the medium wholesale. This sort of thing invigorates me to see and I would like to contribute really anything you need.

 

[Mustawd]

Lol.

 

[JarlFrank]

Do you want music in this game? Done a few things with chipsets/roland sound canvas and other period romplers but never anything serious, mostly far out idm stuff. But that's just a matter of reigning in the sequencing and working from a prompt. TBH I'm willing to work for fucking free as I've been working in a creative bubble as well. Very much a fan of gold box, wiz, knights of the chalice. Also could contribute some rather grandiloquent prose if you lack for a sheer excess of words. There is a creative loneliness in me yearning to collaborate with folks doing worthwhile work that relates with the things in which I find joy, as opposed to the things to which I attribute absolute disgust like most of this fucking EXPENDABLE PRODUCT going around, having been in some gamedev discords and other festering cybernetic wombs of sheerly nightmarish trendy biter shit masquerading as anything other than a slow acting thallium drip for the medium wholesale. This sort of thing invigorates me to see and I would like to contribute really anything you need.

 

[Blowhard]

No I didn't mention other things in my post like being a trained classical musician or flaunt some immense prowess out of a fear of being perceived as something you are currently projecting because its not as relevant as things like being aware of period piece instruments and tools or relevant at all without appearing like an unhelpful high and mighty douchebag for an uncompleted project you also apparently lack humor to notice the obvious shift in writing style was intentionally obvious and not an individual perception of your genius analytical skills and in its obviousness would normally by non autistic human beings be considered somewhat self parodical or otherwise facetious which of course begs a typical droid like response as though a nueral network has been in the training which I'm just going to let you go ahead and shut down something like "i was only pretending to be retarded" which would just be a reiteration of what you had already posted hinting at again a cyclical and stagnant personality, again very much like a sort of droid or programmed non autonomous entity, if your post is even capable of being interpreted I have shown far more analytical or intellectual ability which now frames this post as pretentious which would be quite hilarious again if your code was not self aware enough to notice again what compounding irony is occurring here intentionally as I am having quite a time with both of our programmed response subroutines and its about here I should wonder to what degree you consider yourself thoroughly assimilated such that your in-joke goes without any set up or context, almost as if it were merely the growl of a zerg colony trained to respond en masse to noncontextual communication further I would say your individual perspective on an "art degree" would seem non-subjective (non-objective) and merely a sort of squirming pathetic ego feeler to navigate past trauma you have picked up consciously and contrivedly out of an image projection necessity fearing the absolute chaos of the non-subjective objective universe in which time is composed of non-simultaneously apprehended events and according to quantum causality insures both of our perspectives are based in the firing off of impossible to determine electronic whilings rendering both of our perspectives utterly meaningless, but yours most of all, because my ego is stronger than yours, getting so butthurt of such limited information which may not even be accurate, which much like your post seems ambiguously related and even more ironically this is exactly what you want and expect and here the snake has eaten its tail so many times you would be wise to just move on and kill yourself out of an inability to comprehend this post as it enlightens the netire nature of the cosmos because I am just that crafty and intelligent

 

[JarlFrank]

No I didn't mention other things in my post like being a trained classical musician or flaunt some immense prowess out of a fear of being perceived as something you are currently projecting because its not as relevant as things like being aware of period piece instruments and tools or relevant at all without appearing like an unhelpful high and mighty douchebag for an uncompleted project you also apparently lack humor to notice the obvious shift in writing style was intentionally obvious and not an individual perception of your genius analytical skills and in its obviousness would normally by non autistic human beings be considered somewhat self parodical or otherwise facetious which of course begs a typical droid like response as though a nueral network has been in the training which I'm just going to let you go ahead and shut down something like "i was only pretending to be retarded" which would just be a reiteration of what you had already posted hinting at again a cyclical and stagnant personality, again very much like a sort of droid or programmed non autonomous entity, if your post is even capable of being interpreted I have shown far more analytical or intellectual ability which now frames this post as pretentious which would be quite hilarious again if your code was not self aware enough to notice again what compounding irony is occurring here intentionally as I am having quite a time with both of our programmed response subroutines and its about here I should wonder to what degree you consider yourself thoroughly assimilated such that your in-joke goes without any set up or context, almost as if it were merely the growl of a zerg colony trained to respond en masse to noncontextual communication further I would say your individual perspective on an "art degree" would seem non-subjective (non-objective) and merely a sort of squirming pathetic ego feeler to navigate past trauma you have picked up consciously and contrivedly out of an image projection necessity fearing the absolute chaos of the non-subjective objective universe in which time is composed of non-simultaneously apprehended events and according to quantum causality insures both of our perspectives are based in the firing off of impossible to determine electronic whilings rendering both of our perspectives utterly meaningless, but yours most of all, because my ego is stronger than yours, getting so butthurt of such limited information which may not even be accurate, which much like your post seems ambiguously related and even more ironically this is exactly what you want and expect and here the snake has eaten its tail so many times you would be wise to just move on and kill yourself out of an inability to comprehend this post as it enlightens the netire nature of the cosmos because I am just that crafty and intelligent

Dude I was good-naturedly making fun of your "everything is shit so I appreciate something being made that is not shit" attitude because it reminded me of that particular thought in Disco Elysium, and then you take it as some sort of personal attack (which it wasn't) and dump a wall of text on me?

I'm not even going to read that.

 

[Blowhard]

oh shit my bad dude

 

[Skdursh]

REEEEEEEEEEE

Dude, please learn how to properly indent and format your posts so that they are actually readable. Pretty much no one is going to strain their eyes sorting through a spastic text dump like that.

 

[ProphetSword]

I guess I'll break up whatever is happening here with a screenshot of some recent progress...

 

[Farewell into the night]

I'm intrigued. Looking nice so far!

 

[Fulko Aktienindex]

Hey ProphetSword, really nice work so far. I used to play all the SSI gold box titles and would like to play your game when it is finished. Keep on the excellent work, please!

 

[Mastermind]

REEEEEEEEEEE

Dude, please learn how to properly indent and format your posts so that they are actually readable. Pretty much no one is going to strain their eyes sorting through a spastic text dump like that.

Even better, don't post massive butthurt rants nobody is gonna read.

 

[ProphetSword]

Work continues on the game. Just realized the last few months have been spent fleshing out areas that are optional and that a player may not even ever see, depending on the choices they make and whether or not they choose to explore them.

Here's an in-progress screenshot...

 

[Dorateen]

I think the one of the metrics of quality that a role-playing game can be measured by is the amount of optional content, which is left up to the player to explore. Good work!

 

[ProphetSword]

Even though I said I wasn't going to do this, I did some experimental work today. The real issue is that the game I currently have works great on a 4:3 aspect ratio. In 16:9 or 16:10, though, it'll be a box in the middle of the screen. While that doesn't bother me, it might bother some people. So, I revisited an earlier layout I had for 16:9 screens (which, let's face it, are the most common screen type today).

I'm worried it could betray the initial idea, though, which is that the window is meant to be used in abstract. I've certainly seen games with worse graphics pull this off, though, so I don't know if it bothers me that much...I'm just not sure. So, feedback is key.

Take a look, but ignore the bottom bar, which has not been optimized or rearranged in any way (eventually, I'd like it to have a working compass in the center if I explore this idea further):

I'm going to keep this as a separate branch of the project so that I can push on without enabling it fully unless I decide I want to go this direction.

EDIT:
Also want feedback about whether I should use icons or character portraits on the main screen. So, thoughts on that if you like this layout. If you don't like this layout, it won't matter.

 

[Ysaye]

Even though I said I wasn't going to do this, I did some experimental work today. The real issue is that the game I currently have works great on a 4:3 aspect ratio. In 16:9 or 16:10, though, it'll be a box in the middle of the screen. While that doesn't bother me, it might bother some people. So, I revisited an earlier layout I had for 16:9 screens (which, let's face it, are the most common screen type today).

I'm worried it could betray the initial idea, though, which is that the window is meant to be used in abstract. I've certainly seen games with worse graphics pull this off, though, so I don't know if it bothers me that much...I'm just not sure. So, feedback is key.

Take a look, but ignore the bottom bar, which has not been optimized or rearranged in any way (eventually, I'd like it to have a working compass in the center if I explore this idea further):

I'm going to keep this as a separate fork of the project so that I can push on without enabling it fully unless I decide I want to go this direction.

EDIT:
Also want feedback about whether I should use icons or character portraits on the main screen. So, thoughts on that if you like this layout. If you don't like this layout, it won't matter.

Based only on those two pictures, the placement of first person viewer in the middle works pretty well and is well balanced with the character boxes.

If you stick with this, I would prefer the use of Character Portraits rather than the icons. Also, I suspect people will say that you should additionally change the stats to bars/color-coding (probably because it will then look like another favourite game on the codex) but personally I like this information as you have now.

 

[ProphetSword]

Also, I suspect people will say that you should additionally change the stats to bars/color-coding (probably because it will then look like another favourite game on the codex) but personally I like this information as you have now.

While I haven't finished working with the colors of the character information, there's already some color coding in the game even in the original form. The character name will change color when they are ready to train. Health and Mana are green when full, yellow when less than full and red if really low or at 0. Conditions are green when okay, but will be red if any other condition is present (Poison, Disease, Death, etc).

That being said, I want to make the layout a bit more colorful. I just didn't feel like changing the code tonight.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

If you stick with this, I would prefer the use of Character Portraits rather than the icons

This. We'll see the icons plenty during combat, anyway.

 

[anvi]

Wow that is starting to look like something I might actually play. Would need decent combat though.

 

[ProphetSword]

Here is a screenshot of what it could look like with character portraits instead of icons.

I'm still not 100% sold on this layout, as it forces me to make changes that go counter to my original design. Last thing I want is for someone to see this and think this game is a blobber; because it isn't. It's a love letter to the Gold-Box games, which is something entirely different.

 

[Bad Sector]

Looks ok, but TBH personally i prefer the previous look and layout with the character list at the bottomm, the larger text and all the commands clustered at a single place (though i guess with keyboard shortcuts it wont really matter). Though, as you wrote, this new style works better at 16:9.

Since you already have a map button, how about clustering all commands at one side and then putting the minimap in a window at the other side? E.g.

 

[anvi]

Totally looks like a blobber.

 

[ProphetSword]

I can see I'm going to regret this decision...