Hi
Myrthos, thanks for the mention!
Didn't notice it until just now
I can't promise I'll be very active on the forums because I'm busy making the game obviously, but I'll be happy to answer any questions.
Small correction to start out with, I haven't started a company, that's for when you're out to make money. Which is nice of course but I prefer to look at it as a craftsman doing his thing. If is becomes a necessity, sure, then I'll start a company, but I prefer staying as lean & mean as possible.
I also saw you like
Planescape Torment, I do too, mostly because of the non combat options, xp rewards for conversations. Which are some of the things I'm basing my game around as well.
Torment did still break the immersion for me though.. It's a long time ago but there was this underground church of zombies and ghouls with this one traitor guy who turned into a wererat early on. And when you confront him and he goes RAARGH! and comes after you and you then run away back to the group with him on your heels, then all the others pretend like nothing is happening. "Hey, how's it hangin'" more or less
So the limitations broke through a bit and that was a shame. But I'm just one guy, so instead of saying sure I can do better then their entire team, I'm hoping to avoid those sorts of issues a bit by making the conversation system more like the
shadowrun game on the snes. Keyword based. And I filter out superfluous keywords so you don't get all the canned "Well, I don't know anything about that" responses that you also typically get from adventure games.
Joxer & Gandalf.nho,
it's completely ok to dislike JRPG's of course. Personally the endless braindead random encounters always frustrate me. I don't like grinding and tend to finish games with relatively low character levels. Sometimes, like with FFX's endboss I just don't want to power level for that one fight and I'll go watch his demise on youtube.
So with that in mind, AnimalAlbum is part JRPG by look and feel, and by how you explore the world and such. All the things that personally irritate me I'm of course not putting in. So no mandatory random encounters for instance.
It's not easy to describe a game that doesn't really fit in existing genres. Yet it will be looked at in those terms, so I tried describing in what way the game is like those genres.
AnimalAlbum is something different and I think the best way to describe it is as a mixup of a JRPG and traditional adventure game. If you think Pokemon more focused on conversations and stuff and less with the battling, that might be getting close.
I've just updated the website with
a little snippet about the heart system for instance, which is about identifying how characters in the world are related, what connections there exist.
I'll update more on these sorts of things and show how the conversation system works in the future, it's mostly a matter time. There's an
RSS feed as well.
Joxer,
regarding Dodo's well.. they're dead. And gone. How about if I focus on animals that are on the brink of extinction right now?
Like the
Saola (Asian unicorn) or the
Andean mountain cat.
I'm working with the IUCN who manage the red list of threatened animals to make sure the data reflects how bad (or good) it's looking in the world right now.
The game isn't a happy go lucky tale of saving the world or something. It's a little bit sad, and a little bit kind, which I'm hoping comes across. But I don't want the game to be preachy about it and shove horrible facts in the player's face all the time.
But if a player wants to know why some animals probably won't be around much longer they can find out.
