Alright, my first release of the game. It's now 93% engine, 60% content (better than the 10% content of the CH entry).

It's your basic old school, Final Fantasy-ish RPG. Nope, no NPCs, no items or armor or weapons (the missing 40% of content). You can fight, level-up and explore though.

Press 'M' to go to the menu when not in battle. See the readme for more help (there's a quick intro screen at the first battle). There are 30 monsters in this game (but 1 you won't see due to bug I didn't fix for this release). Good luck!

Oh, and I'll give you this little jewel:
"At the water by the long wall, walk between the rocks and you will have to fight them all."

New Screenshots
http://comp.uark.edu/~spsilve/s5.JPG
http://comp.uark.edu/~spsilve/s6.JPG
http://comp.uark.edu/~spsilve/s7.JPG

The Game! (For now, it's just a Windows binary)
The Three Magi (2.0MB)

You can use the config file to change between full screen and see the framerate.

If I'm missing any dlls or something doesn't work right, please let me know. I often forget something...

[EDIT] - HMMM...I thought they'd be small pictures...what did I do wrong? Oh, and submitting this game to the depot...

Did you start a New game or did you Load a game? Or are you talking about the little cove in the valley? There's an oasis in the desert, but the desert is the last area (currently) of the game.

Anyway, since the game is more of a mini-rpg, and very compact, travelling too fast will bring you to harder monsters pretty fast. When you have an average level of 4-5, you can walk pretty comfortably around the first half of the valley. It's about 7-10 for the latter half of the valley. That's for me at least. The experience you obtain from a battle is split amongst those still alive.

My first design had the character flip-flop directions (between vertically and horizontally) when walking diagonal. I made a change in the input section that caused the animation to freeze when walking diagonally. Yep, I'll fix that.

For CH, it was a lot easier to just give everything collision and not worry about the proper order of drawing layers/objects. I've done it before in another game, so it won't be hard to do.

I hear ya there. I was still hesitant of uploading the game without one, but I wanted to see how people reacted to the current battle system (even without the items and equipment). The story I wrote is pretty simple and definitely a Final Fantasy-ish take on the Nativity story.

[edit]

I accidentally hit some key on my keyboard that is apparently a hotkey to some function in Opera. When viewing it at work, they appear as small pictures.

I can't download it at the moment (can't access the server), but it looks like in combat you show the enemy from the front and all your guys in little screen. In my opinion, I think seeing the enemy and your guys facing each other makes you feel more like you are "in control" and can see what is happening.

I know that this would require massive changing of your graphics, but I think it would be cool to add. Maybe you are trying not to look too much like you are copying off other games, and that is all good, but personally I like the side view better.

Remember, this is from a person who can't play your game at the moment, so I don't know, maybe it's fine. I'll update this post when I can download the game.

Yay for updates . I promise to try the new version when it's out.