Hey all! It’s been a while so I wanted to give an update. I was playing around with various game engines and came across these visual novels. Now I don’t want to do a straight visual novel but I really liked the potential for story telling. For a long time I had been thinking about the idea of interactive comics, and that’s possible if done right with a visual novel. Then I found out that RPG Maker VX can actually be used to do visual novels to some extent. And that led me to think about the possibility of doing a classic RPG with visual novel and comic book elements to tell the story. I’ve added a gallery of some test screens so you get the idea. They’re just test characters but it shows what it might look like. Now a lot of people have asked about TFR. If you’d like to see a TFR game let me know. If enough people would like to see it than I’d really consider redoing the story and making it into an RPG with visual novel and interactive comic elements. It might be pretty cool. So let me know what you think.
A TFR game/visual-novel could be great fun, and I’d certainly be eager to give it a try! I think the high-octane action sequences wouldn’t really lend themselves to any sort of interactivity – unless there are a very few decision points about how to evade pursuers.
The dialogue-rich sequences would seem more suited to interactive possibilities.
Incidentally, the webcomic ‘City of Reality’ (http://cityofreality.com) has some wonderfully realised interactive sections, if you’re looking for ideas
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Characters’ faces are great, but all of them have something wrong with their shoulders
Looks good, this has a lot of potential to be a really story based game, a true RPG. A lot of games (even ones with good stories) fall into the trap of getting too obsessed with stats, fighting and leveling up, (and omg grinding for hours), that the story and RPG aspect gets dulled. Like using a piece of armor or other item, just because it has higher stats. Older RPGs (like Ultima 7: The Serpent Isle) kept the stats fairly hidden, so you just used whatever you liked and didn’t have to worry about leveling up. Players spent their time exploring and interacting with characters. To me that’s the best way to create a fun and interesting RPG.
I agree. I don’t like it when RPGs focus too much on stats and random battles. I’m actually looking at a couple different engines for this. There’s RPG Maker VX which the above screen shots are from. It plays like a traditional console RPG with little sprite graphics but has the ability to do visual novel style scenes for story telling purposes which I like.
Another is called Ren’Py and it is a straight visual novel engine with the ability to program in other more complicated things like RPGs or sim games. It’s also pretty cool but is all scripting so I’m not as up on it. Personally I’m not sure which to do. I like the old console style RPGs to an extent as long as the random battles and stats are kept to a minimum and the exploration and story and adventure elements are put first.
As for the Ren’Py game, I think it would be capable of doing much more of an interactive comic with RPG elements, but I’m not really sure I can program it all. But that’s why I’m doing so many experiments with so many systems. Ideally what I’d like to do is simulate more of a pen and paper style RPG experience with shorter game scenarios.
The makers of RPG Maker also just came out with a game maker for doing Zelda style action RPGs and platform games and such. I haven’t played with it yet but it might be fun to try it out.