I just more or less finished an RPG I've been working on for a long time. I underestimated the amount of work it would take to do a 40 hour RPG, so this one is probably about 5-10 hours average at best. I was hoping I could get a few more people to test it before I put it in the Depot.

Obligatory screenshots (I didn't choose the most exciting ones, some things are best kept as secrets ) :

[updated first screenshot]
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{"name":"592627","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/9\/b\/9bbbb561a1481c80daf0c52e58d5534b.png","w":640,"h":480,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/9\/b\/9bbbb561a1481c80daf0c52e58d5534b"}

You can download it here.

Nobody said it was easy
It can be especially difficult if you steal from certain people...

Also, I uploaded a new version that fixes a bug. If you have already downloaded it, and plan to play until the end, you'll want the new version.

The font thing is strange... I'm not sure what could cause that. You can see how it's supposed to look in the screenshot in my first post. My guesses are: different version of freetype that does different things, or that there is a bug in fudgefont.

I had a reason for the delay but I forget what it was now...

Oh, I forgot to mention in the README (keys may vary):

[ lower sfx volume
] raise sfx volume
< lower music volume
> raise music volume

Well you can't just save anywhere

It is not random, though. But a hint that you have talked with his wife may be useful somewhere. You can save on the field at anytime, just like most old FF games.

Nice things:

• Filling health when leveling up

• Outdoors music

Not so nice:

• Opening doors with spacebar... that is so old

• Delay when talking with others

• House too far from exit, to level up you need to travel at least three times to your house.

• Should ask you if you want to save after sleeping.

• 10 points for level 2 is a bit too much, that means killing 10 green slimes, which means doing three travels to your home to sleep (considering you can kill 4 slimes with every single full bar, not counting the preemptive hits they may take on you).

• No running.

• Preemptive attacks only for enemies.

• Speed gauge doesn't appear to be faster after leveling up.

• No indication about how much experience left for next level (so you don't know if you need to drink a cure or go back to the town or just kill a few more to level up).

• Since you need some grinding to advance (apparently), a mode to remove the speed gauge would be nice (no waiting, just attacks and attacks).

• Menus should not have fade effects, when you press ESC you want to drive through the menus as fast as possible to return to the game.

• From the start menu, the Save configuration does not save some settings (music and sfx volume, fast battles, vsync or smooth scrolling).

The game crashed with either the Aborted (core dumped) or the Shutting down Allegro due to signal #11 Segmentation fault (core dumped) message on console after killing the first of the three floaters in the cave. To reproduce, just enter the cave, walk around until a team of three floaters appear, kill the one in the top, and as soon as the next attacks (the floater on the front), the game shuts down. If you first kill the front floater, you can afterwards kill the others two without crashing the game. If you kill the one at the bottom first, then the one at the top, once the one in the front attacks, the game crashes. I guess if the front one attacks when the one at the top is not there is enough.

In the wild something similar happens: when near the cave, you may encounter a red slime/floater team. If you kill the red slime first, when the floater attacks the game crashes. It does not happen if you kill the floater first, though.

Well, this is all I can do. After several "restarts" because of killing the wrong NPC--losing around 20-30 exp points earned during each session--I erased my saved files by mistake--I thought I had selected the Continue option and pressed the bar furiously, already used to the lag between selections, but instead it had chosen the Erase option and deleted the file. After spending a good 2 hours grinding to enter the cave, I am not going to start anew. Nice game, though!

By the way, apparently the game does not save the settings if it crashes. And as a good RPG player, I never buy from the first shop unless it is necessary to open a new area, was saving for the 350 gold weapon and armour.

Hi, your game looked quite promising, so I tried it out. There were a couple of quirks on my XP system:

• The GUI always takes a few seconds to react after pressing buttons. This makes navigating the menus quite annoying. The very same delay occurs before dialogue boxes are closed. Are all of those one-liners btw? I'm not sure if I missed anything.

• It just crashed when I tried to enter the shop (an unspecified MSVC++ runtime error). Edit: That's reproducible.

I'm sure these technicalities can be fixed, keep up the good work!

Thanks for all the constructive criticism guys!

Fixed in the new 1.4 version.

Somehow some data got left out of the archives. Fixed now.

Left out some data. Should be fixed in the new version.

I made the scroll and fade 40% faster in the new version.

Elias pointed out that you can't draw during a switch in callback, which was causing problems on X11 with dirty rectangles enabled. I fixed that, and also added a bitmap font for those who had problems with the font overlapping. You must run the program with -bitmap-font to use it.

[edit]
Apparently the truetype font looks ok now too.

The new version (1.5) is here:
http://nooskewl.com/monster/downloads.html

I like having some element of suprise in the game. It also gives the game some replay value as you can learn when you're going to level up.

There is no delay.

I downloaded it, but the .tar.gz archive seems to be corrupt, and I don't want to pay it any money ...

Thanks to everyone who tested the game and commented on it.. I just played through the game again and uploaded what I hope is the last bugfix version. I will be submitting it to the Depot now. I don't plan on adding any new features to this game, at least in the immediate future, but thanks for all the suggestions. I will keep them in mind if I ever do another RPG.

I was having connection problems, so most or all of the 1.6 archives were corrupt. 1.7 should hopefully be OK. Oh, and the game is free.

Fine, you win. I put running into version 1.8. Hopefully the archives aren't corrupt.. I did test them, and they seem OK. And if it introduces bugs, it's all your fault!

(I was almost going to make running command line configurable with a -impatient-mode option )

That could be cool. As long as they fit with everything else reasonably well. By that I don't mean they have to look terrible, like the current ones do, but they shouldn't stand out a lot. Unless of course you're going to redo the whole game . If you want, I have a couple of command line tools that compile into .anim and .anims format. There's also a rather basic "level editor", although all the logic is in the scripts.

[edit]

Or if you just want to distribute a package as an "addon", that would be OK too. I could even host it.