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Illusiat 13: The Final Chapter

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DJ Omnimaga:
Some people who frequent IRC a lot might have been aware that I have been working on something for two weeks. I started planning this for a while but I was still brainstorming for ideas for the game story and magic/item system. This may be unexpected to some others, too, especially people who beaten Illusiat 12 and seen the ending stating the series was ending, but yes, there is effectively an Illusiat 13 in the works right now, more than 6 years after Illusiat 12 came out, which could make this serie the longest lasting one in calculator history if this game comes out (the first game in the series was completed on September 22th, 2001).

The game plot was planned for about two months and the text intro goes as follow:

Every 10000 years, a small planet called Illusiat, from a nearby solar system, passes through ours, close to the Earth. Scientists from Earth and illusian Mages said that each planets always passes at the same distance everytime.

1000000 of years in the future, after many wars against evil, both planets populations dropped a lot, but both races allied together to defeat the evil using a weapon made with the power of man knowledge and illusian  magic. After victory, with very few technology left, both races were cut from each others for 10000 years.

Soon, they are going to be able to meet once again, but now, it may be the last time ever...

then comes the rest of the intro, as seen in the only screenshot of the current progress I got so far:
(screenshot goes at 15 MHz speed, btw)

I don't want to spoil too much, but in other words, one of the planets orbits changed and you have to find out how it could have happened then find a way to save both civilizations, because both planets are going to collide. At the same time, you'll have to figure out about monsters appearing around. Could there be a link between monsters appearing and the orbit change(s)? For sure, that collision between both moons was not natural.

Anyway, now with the game features, I know some people wants me to make an xLIB/Celtic III RPG in the future since I didn't do any so far, but this will not be now (if it ever happens). When going through old games in the series as well as some other old calculator RPGs, which you noticed from my recent TI-83+ RPG nostalgia video series on Youtube, I got inspiration to make a new game in that style. My goal with Illusiat 13: The Lost Chapter is not to make the most eye candy game I could ever do with fancy grayscale and all. My goal is to make an RPG true to the last games in the Illusiat series and the 2004 remakes of the 4 first games. Homescreen graphics and animations, similar battle and menu layout, similar title screen, 1vs1 battles, old-skoolness. In some ways, this game, at first view, will look as if I made it back in 2002, but there will be some improvements of course, altough most will be related to coding.

First of all, unlike most of my old games, Illusiat 13 doesn't use any source code from any of my previous games. The entire game is being written from scratch. I decided so because it has been over 4 years since the last time I released a new calculator RPG and despite being far from perfect, my coding skills and habits changed a lot since then, which could make old code harder to work with, especially since a lot of optimizations would need to be done. Old Illusiat games are not good examples of BASIC coding after all.

Secondly, I am switching to strings tilemaps. I wanted pictures at first, but I felt that despite being 8 times smaller, the maps would be harder to work with when it comes to event codings and they would look too simple with 3 tiles at once. I only use small 128 char string chunks, though, to minimize RAM usage and make map making easier. With 16x8 map chunks I can create them directly in the BASIC editor in the map loader programs. So far, speed is roughly the same than the late Illusiat games.

Third, items  are no longer stacked. In old games, you could hold 99 herbs, 99 potions, etc, now it's one individual item per slot and there are 100 slots total, meaning when you run out of space you need to either sell items (selling will be a new feature) or trash them. Also, for equipments, you got rings, no sword/armor. In older games when buying equipment the weaker one would be donated to the shop. Now you still keep the old equipments and can switch it in the item menu. As said, there are only rings, though, but you can equip 4 to the character and stat bonuses are stackable. There are defense raiser, elemental protection, exp bonuses, special protections such as instant kill.

The game only uses 1 asm lib and it's Resource (to run archived programs). I'm in the process of switching to Iambian XCOPY routine, when he fixes the bug I reported, since it's much smaller.

I gtg work now, I'll try to come back with more info about the magic system soon.

noahbaby94:
Looks awesome been hearing about it for while gad you decided to announce it.

simplethinker:
This is awesome!


--- Quote ---Anyway, now with the game features, I know some people wants me to make an xLIB/Celtic III RPG in the future since I didn't do any so far, but this will not be now (if it ever happens).
--- End quote ---
It may have ASCII graphics, but the graphics are great and the characters you're using for the tiles were chosen very well :)

I do have one minor little suggestion though:  Have you thought about anything similar to Final Fantasy's Fat Chocobo for storing items?

kalan_vod:

--- Quote from: simplethinker on March 31, 2009, 03:17:17 pm ---
--- Quote ---Anyway, now with the game features, I know some people wants me to make an xLIB/Celtic III RPG in the future since I didn't do any so far, but this will not be now (if it ever happens).
--- End quote ---
It may have ASCII graphics, but the graphics are great and the characters you're using for the tiles were chosen very well :)
--- End quote ---
I agree! This would be awesome, it looks like a great engine being used. I hope that you do finish this one, and also later down the road work on more! I like the dialogue so far.

Speler:
That looks great.  Keep it up.

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