Dreams from Another World

This Chrysalis has evolved quite a bit over the past year. My group should prepare for nostalgia, because this may be as funny as looking back to your embarrassing elementary school pictures



The game first began as Final Fantasy LBP--I still think the battle system was cool. It used a Tag system in which party members could do tag moves on enemies and utilize advantages in turns. Of course, noone really liked my Main Character Designs...


First time I started using numbers for HP, and my terrible costume designs lol

Then we said...lets do Time Traveling, and we re-did the project and called it Chrono Break. A spiritual successor to Chrono Trigger. The story really was different, it followed a Sand Pirate named Jayz( whom team members got confused with Jay-Z lol) who died in a brutal ship wreck, but somehow was warped to the past. It was a absurd storyline, but the battle system got even cooler with Assist moves and better visuals



Sadly though, Chrono Break died on my old PS3 that called YLOD. This happened over the summer, which sucked big time and we had to start all over. I lost a brilliant leveling system called the Skill Flow, which I think rivaled the Sphere Grid from FF X and was really cool--but took an awfully long time to construct all the branching trees and variables.


The game came back and with a new title: Chrono Chrysalis. At this stage, I figured out a way to implement a job system and plug in random encounters.

I had even made several new hud designs, each progressively better:






All these took a while, with each hud changed. The battle system also changed drastically five times;Thats right, five times. Now when people offer to help with logic, often times I tell them its too complicated. Well when you consider this is less the one percent of the logic that goes into the game, then maybe they might understand better:



Each chip is intertwined, but not connected. And not even half of the chips are opened here. You have to first understand whats inside the chips and why they function to even understand what its there in the first place. One misplaced switch, and the entire game fails.

Imagine rebuilding the games computer five times.

RPGs are rather simple games to play, but designing them is a totally different story( maybe not for computer wiz's but I am no such guy). The main thing about them though, is figuring out how they will fit. And it literally took this long to get those technical skills and knowledge. It was all a huge learning experience for me, because it is the first level I will publish.

Recent levels like Sealed Fate by Felkroth ( my personal favorite level currently), has trouble with loading times. Now if you thought that was bad, Chrono Chrysalis was worse. The simple test level utilized 5000 KB and took roughly 20-30 minutes just to publish a simple dungeon test and would freeze when I the publisher tried to edit it occasionally; In short, was a pretty unsafe level, but was fun to play.


People often overlook the logic I am doing when they play or even build RPGs, and think things like subquest or events( like a treasure box and equipment for example) are hard to program lol no. Those things only take minutes in comparison to doing the main logic.

To make this work, it took major reformatting, but yea, I think the worse parts are over, because it is a joy designing. I cant show anything new, but the new pictures will make all these look like concepts in comparison, because really they were. It was all about figuring out how to make the game. Turnbased games dont exactly have a model to run off of in LBP2 yet, in fact, I think CC just touches the "tip of the ice burg" in terms of how creative projects can get.

Gonna be showcasing what the team did the next thread, so guys be patient( and get to work! hehe kidding). Thanks for reading,

This wasnt to have people give me more credit for my logic mind you; I honestly dont care about stuff like that lol just perhaps to give a better understanding on why this game took longer than it should and what I have been up to. Its all about learning how to design an entire game and fit that game within the limitations of LBP2--but maybe, that was the funnest part.