Game demo is live! Link here: https://armond-rivera.itch.io/seekers-aldric

Here is a real quick summary of the story before going over everything else:

Story summary

Since the beginning of civilization, a tale has been passed down, the origin of which has been lost to time.

“It is written, At the end of days.

The Savior will rise, With wondrous Grace.

Once he appears, Our hope will turn.

When he appears, Evil will burn…

Until that day, The Savior will stay,

Locked away, Until that day…”

Whether that saying is true or not, it gives us all hope that we will be safe if the world we call home were to ever be threatened…

…and with the world on the brink of war, we could use all the hope we can get right now.

Welcome to Lingard, a world where almost every person is born with magic abilities connecting to an element such as fire, earth, thunder, and many more. However instead of mana being the source of how they cast their powers, the real source is their stamina.

Who is Aldric?

Aldric is the savior, who you'll meet at the beginning of the game, and becomes a companion for the rest of the game. Essentially Aldric needs your help in order to find whatever may cause the end of the world so they are ready for when the end of days comes and they are set free to stop it. Over the course of the game cracks will appear in Aldric's room meaning that something that leads to the end of the world has happened.

How Battles Work

To make this game more unique I came up with a more complex system revolving around the use of stamina.

Instead of hitting enemies only once per turn, you can choose between attacking their health or their stamina, and you can hit them as many times as you want until either you decide to end your turn, or you run out of stamina.

However, you don't want your stamina to run out completely, if it does you will become winded, meaning that you will take 2x damage from everything that attacks you.

Stamina always recovers when your turn is ready, but can also be recovered by either using an item, or using breathe in the tactics menu. The amount you recover when your turn is ready and when using breathe, depends on your respire stat.

When enemies attack, a bar will appear over the targeted character and the hits will scroll across at varying speeds. Blocking successfully will lower the damage by half, but your stamina will also be used in the process. If stamina runs out you can no longer block.

Some spells will also have the same feature of attacks, allowing you to cast them multiple times, however the stamina cost is much higher for spells than attacks.

Each party member, and almost every enemy, has an element they are weak to causing 2x damage if hit by that element, this also stacks with the damage multiplier from being winded, resulting in a total of 4x damage received.

Stuff That's Done

Almost all the core things needed for the demo are finished.

The things that need to be done:

• putting levels together
• connect all levels together
• creating cutscenes
• options menu
• magic menu
• save menu (save files already finished)
• Aldric's room
• Aldric's sprites
• putting enemies together (stats, attack list, animations)
• leveling up
• add enter player name and skin tone choice to main menu when selecting new game
• player battle animations
• refining battle system

Also, one more thing needs to be finished but can't tell it here since it's a spoiler.

Hopefully I didn't forget anything for this first post, if I did I'll update as soon as I can. Leave a reply telling me what you think of the combat or if you'd want more detail on the story. 

I Finished the player battle animations, and really happy with how it turned out, I'll probably be changing the block animation though so there's more movement. BTW don't mind the missing face, I have them separate because of how I set up the skin tone choice.

Also started putting the options menu together, currently it just has controls and sound to go through. Will be adding more settings as they come up. Would've uploaded a screenshot but I guess the screen shot was too big, it won't let me upload it.

I just made this new video showing combat in-game. Hope you enjoy!

Finished putting together the magic menu, and several enemies. Also figured out a good way to do level ups, and finished Aldric's needed sprites for now. I was even able to make an animation of it for the main menu.

Started experimenting with shading for spells, and so far like the result. I just need to make sure it doesn't impact performance by much.

Looks interesting! Like some 2d top down action rpg. As for me i like a lot Diablo 1. 

Got the outlining for another area done today, it just needs the scenery now. I tried to make sure the height was consistent between all the land pieces, I think I got it down pretty well. 

For some reason first post go rid of the image but here it is now.

got one of the dungeon areas done today, I'm trying to make it look desecrated. I think I got it right. What do you think?

Another area done of the next floor, took a little long since I got carried away with the size of it. But the result is definitely worth it.

Here's the last floor of the dungeon, and the last area I can share for a bit until I finish the surprise. Posts will definitely be less frequent now until then. I'll share stuff later like cutscenes that I finished.

Got a good look for the save point so far, I'm still trying to decide if I want it to have particles come out of it while floating up and down, or just have it only float up and down. 

Got a rough draft of Aldric's room up and running, and I really like how this first version turned out. 

Alright, got the talk menu up and running. So there is going to be two types of buttons, one where they are unique and only run through once then self delete, and another type for information about the area that you are in, and what you should do now, which will always be available.

Save menu is now running properly, with a confirmation if you are trying to overwrite an existing save. With that Aldric's room is pretty much complete for now, I just need to make a new button texture as some point.

Here's a new video showing the opening of the game. I pretty much have all cutscenes set. Now I just need to do some item and dialogue placements. After that I'll just need to do some testing to make sure everything is balanced.

Currently filling the areas with items. Halfway done at the time of typing this. 

Finished putting items in the areas. I had to go back and change some stuff because I figured out a better way to track what has been picked up better than what I was doing before. Right now I'm putting spells together, here's a couple I have done so far. BTW These animations aren't by me they're made by Pimen https://pimen.itch.io/ who has a lot of amazing magic effects that perfectly capture what I wanted to go for, I just adjusted some of the coloring and added an emission layer so I could use the bloom effect on them. 

Found a new better way to do spell shading, and I think it looks better than the previous version.

I'll just need to do some readjustment to the color on some.

Enemy attacks are almost done, I just need to do some more balancing. I also have a handful of battle areas to show. So the demo is almost ready, all that's left after finishing enemy attacks is to do some bug hunting to make sure everything works, and just a couple of adjustments to UI.

Discovered a small issue with missed attacks where if you press the button after it leaves the interact zone, it will instead consider the next attack as a miss. I'm gonna take some time to look through this carefully.

Okay, I spent a lot of time looking at it and I believe the bug is fixed. I still need to do more testing just to be sure, but it looks like it was fixed.

Finished the adjustments to UI. Still working on balancing enemy stamina usage (The main problem is that they keep spending it all instead of taking a break to refill it, it's just a matter of finding the right amount for attack cost and their stamina capacity). 

Other than that, I'm hunting some music for the mining area, for the credits, and music for a battle victory. Having some trouble on the last one, if anyone has any suggestions that are royalty free, I'd really appreciate it if you shared them.

Keep up the good work. Art looks great

Found a new bug in the build today. When loading a battle scene it will sometimes freeze for a brief moment and then unfreeze, problem for this is that it skips transitions once it finishes loading. I'm looking into a way to preload the scene better to prevent this.

Almost done with the demo! I just need to do some extra debugging with the build, and find a way to make a good tutorial. After that it'll be ready to be uploaded on my itch page.

Okay! So I believe I got all game breaking bugs, at least all the softlock ones that would occur in combat. So now I'm just in the middle of trying to figure out how to incorporate a tutorial into this game. Since it is a turn based rpg I was thinking that I could use Unity's Timelines in order to create a sort of mock battle, where it will wait for specific inputs from the player before continuing. If anyone can tell me if this is a good idea or not I would greatly appreciate it, and if you know a better way of doing this then I am fully open to your suggestions.

I know I've been lacking on footage for the current state of the game, I've been trying to learn how to do some editing so I can make the footage more clean, instead of just relying on only OBS recordings done in one take (So don't worry I'll have some footage out soon).

So, apparently the editing software I was planning to use only had a limited time to try it, so now I need to find a new one that doesn't have a paywall.

Anyway, I was in the middle of making the timeline based tutorial but I had a better idea, I could just make a coroutine system that waits for specific inputs to be made by the player, it would be a lot easier to manage too. So I scrapped everything done for the timeline tutorial I made and got to work on a coroutine that will handle everything in one run.

The only issue I have right now is how to have the player be limited to specific movements. I'm still working on that solution, but I'm sure I'll find one.

Hoping to get this done within the next 2 weeks so I can let all of you try out this little adventure.

Okay so I found another editing software for when I record some gameplay to post here, and i've gotten a hand of the basics in it so far.

The tutorial is almost done I'm just triple checking to make sure it's good to go. Here's looking to posting the full game next weekend, as long as no new issues come up.

Alright, I should've gotten this done a lot sooner but irl stuff has been a pain lately. Anyway here is some gameplay footage of combat for the game. BTW the demo should be up in the next few days, I'm just trying to make the page look nice. 

Game will be up a little later today! Just doing some spell checking on the game page.

Edit: Here it is incase some people clicked last page https://armond-rivera.itch.io/seekers-aldric

Now that the demo is ready, I'm gonna start working on the Chaos Labyrinth mode. The mode will essentially be just an endless mode where you will get randomized encounters, with a shop every 10 floors to buy items and new weapons.

If you wish to learn more about this mode, then you can visit the game page to see a new post that I made going into detail about it more.

https://armond-rivera.itch.io/seekers-aldric

Hey, its been a while since last post. Unfortunately work has been making my sleep schedule shift a lot. BUT, I do have some new stuffs for today.

Here is what the Chaos Labyrinth area looks like as of now, I plan on adding some more effects and stuff later. The particles you see are the encounter zone, where it will start a fight with a randomly chosen enemy group, after which you'll return here and continue on to the next floor.

I also have the new shop menu nearly ready, I just need to make an NPC to open the menu when you interact with them.

The buy and sell menus are pretty much both the same thing (visually).

The only menu that looks different is the Quantity menu after you pick an item from either menu.

Here it will just display the chosen item, the (cost/sell rate), the amount you want to (buy/sell), and then the total amount of gold shards it will (cost/sell for).

I'm also working on some balancing that needs to be done for some enemies, such as the Man-Eater Flora, and Niddhogling. I also decided that it would be a good idea to add a new mechanic to battle victory. I've noticed that players can be nearly out of stamina after a battle, so I added a stamina reward to the grading system. This will allow battles to be less tedious when entering a new battle and having to spend your first few turns restoring stamina.

These are the current rewards for each letter grade:

S+ = 50% of max stamina recovered

S = 40% of max stamina recovered

A = 30% of max stamina recovered

B = 20% of max stamina recovered

C = 10% of max stamina recovered

D = 0% of max stamina recovered

With this it should help with making grinding less of a chore, and be quicker.

I've already finished charting the values for each level up to 25 so far, all that's left is to make some new spells, and new items too.

This is all I have for now, once I finish Chaos Labyrinth I plan on beginning work on the other 3 party members, then I'll be starting work on part 1 of story mode.

I've also been thinking of making a discord server for anyone who wants to try out new builds of the game, and give feedback so I can improve things before uploading it to the download page. 

Currently working on implementing status effects, so far I've laid the ground work out for each ailment that will be in game. So far I have poison set up for the player, and now need to set it up for enemies.

I also finished the shop menu, so now I can put a shop anywhere I want in game.

Really sorry for anyone curious about this game, I've been trying to take both my cats to the vet, nothing serious they just need their vaccinations updated. But hopefully I can get back to this more.