I've made quite a bit of progress on my indie RPG project, and it's about time I made a topic for the game itself.

The Concept: For quite a few years I've been interested in making an RPG of some kind, but the basic concept of the game is inspired in part by this game, which I made last year. Basically, during the first phase of the game, you answer a few questions about your character, and from there the game will automatically determine your class and stats. For example, if you major in Business Management, you earn more money at the end of fights, English majors can "read" enemies' HP and description, similar to the Paper Mario "Tattle" function, and Nursing students can learn the best healing moves. Near the end of the game you might be able to promote to a more powerful, more specialized career, but I don't know if I'll really implement a promotion feature. I've made a lot of progress on fleshing out the list of fields of study and their strengths and weaknesses, and the engine is designed to support all of the planned features.

While this game is rather ambitious, I'm trying to make the game scalable enough so I can release something that's satisfying to play even if it only has a small overworld and a couple of dungeons. This way, I can add more content later if time allows.

The Title: I haven't decided on a title yet. Fireball3k and I sometimes call it Career Fantasy, but this name is a placeholder.

The Setting: The game takes place in the modern American South. It is an attractive but imperfect world, full of unique, well-rounded characters and settings. (Believe it or not, we're not all hillbillies who are married to our cousins!). I'm not sure if it'll take place in a specified time and place - I'm leaning towards making it a "20xx" setting that takes place in the modern age, but there may be occasional things that aren't terribly realistic! The game is generally lighthearted in tone. While medieval/steampunk RPGs are fun, they've been done so many times that they've become oversaturated, and it's hard to find new things to do with such an environment. That's why I'm taking this game in a new direction that (I hope) hasn't been done before.

Most of the game takes place around a modern, unspecified university, although there's lots of stores, forests, etc. in the surrounding vicinity. Some of the dungeons contain portals to worlds that are a bit zanier (this is a VinnyVideo game, after all). Among the planned dungeons are a computer data center and an underground bank vault.

The Story: I haven't settled upon a story yet. If my previous games are any indication, I think there'll be a fair amount of zaniness in the story! (One idea involves a vile creature that is plotting to place a dubstep-based curse upon the world.)

The Engine: The game's engine builds off of this. The base engine is nearly complete - healing and special attacks are the last features I need to finish. I'm not sure whether I'll end up using GM 8.0 or GM Studio - although converting to Studio will require fixing some ds_map thingies.

The Gameplay: The gameplay borrows many elements from the N64/GCN Paper Mario formula. Game environments look sort of 2-D, but you have free movement in three dimensions. I don't know whether or not there'll be jumping or climbing. I'd like to have some interactive puzzles in the mold of the Paper Mario or Golden Sun games. Battles will be turn-based, but I'd like to use an Action Command for at least some attacks (especially music attacks). Battle encounters will probably be random, although I'd like to develop a system that lets you defeat/skip weak enemies automatically.

Characters: The main character is relatively generic. It would be nice to be able to choose a gender, and if I do that, it shouldn't be too hard to give players a choice of hair color and maybe race and (depending on the level of detail in the game) eye color. While the main character is customizable, the other characters are not.

As for the other members of your party, I hope to have a wide variety of playable characters - at least 8, maybe as many as 24 (which would be one for each of the college majors on the test). Some characters are stronger than others, and some are harder than others to recruit. Many of the characters are loosely based on people I know in real life, although certain details have been changed to protect the innocent (for example, one of them is a klutzy but intelligent mermaid who is struggling to adapt to the challenges of living among humans!).

One of the bosses in this game is Frijoles the Pirate. He might be a recurring foe in the mold of FF5's Gilgamesh. Unlike the playable characters, who are all human, many of the enemies are not human, including the dreaded Killer Squirrel.

Graphics: This is the biggest hangup right now. Because the game takes place in the modern world and most of the characters wear modern clothes, it's hard to find existing graphics that fit the setting. While I can use pixel art if necessary, I was thinking of using hand-drawn animation, similar to what I did with my Affordable Care Act project. I don't need animations to be extremely polished, though - in fact, even if I had an infinite budget, I'd actually prefer that the characters look a little "rough around the edges."

Playable characters might need 12-16 frames of animation. NPCs can make do with just one or two frames. Fortunately, many characters may be able to reuse parts of other characters. Likewise, many game backgrounds and tilesets can be used throughout the game - things like doors, windows, and parked vehicles. I have more confidence in my ability to draw static backgrounds and buildings than to do a good job of animating human characters. If I really want to make this game happen, though, I may have to pay someone to do the art, even though the final release may be freeware.

Music: A lot of the music is already in place. KPP provided a lot of creepy, atmospheric dungeon music, I've composed a few songs myself, and some other MFGGers have provided material. I still need some music for the outside world, though.

And last but not least, if you think this concept is thoroughly awesome, you might just be able to help out!

I was pleasantly surprised to see that Career Fantasy got a few votes at MFGG Awards. In fact, it came one vote away from tying for Most Anticipated. Now I need to get off my bottom and get some work done!

It's been a while since I've posted an update about this project, but Career Fantasy is alive and kicking! Neweegee has been extremely helpful in providing a full set of animations for the two main characters. Once I graduate from college next month, I'm hoping I'll have a little more free time for fun, creative projects. In the meantime, I've been working on mapping out the story and the game setting.

I have an important question for y'all. At this point, I haven't written much about Career Fantasy except on here and MFGG, and maybe a Twitter/Tumblr post or two. FB3k and I have been calling it "Career Fantasy" because that name is far catchier than the "Bibby Team Indie RPG Project" name I'd been using previously.

Before too long, I need to settle on a more permanent name for the project. Career Fantasy isn't bad, but there are a lot of Google hits for the phrase. None of them seem to be trademarked or copyrighted, in case I ever sell the game on Steam or one of the app stores. However, the game might be a lot easier to find in searches if I give it a name that doesn't overlap as much. Career Saga is another name idea I had that has a lot fewer Google hits associated with it. What do you folks think?

And yes, this project is still alive. Over the past couple of days, I've drawn a quick sketch of the world map and started sprite designs for the playable characters.

I think I like the name Career Saga.

A preliminary Career Saga logo recently happened. The logo probably deserves further polish, though.

Yesterday I made a lot of progress on the character creation screen. I'm keeping it simple for now - the only attributes you can set are name, gender, and maybe birthday. There's a chance I'll add more ways to customize the physical appearance of characters, although GM's capabilities for adjusting character palettes are rather lacking.

Since this has been a controversial matter in certain games, your stats are not affected by your choice of gender (or race or hair color, if I add those). There'll be plenty of other ways you can customize your player's stats, though.

Believe it or not, Career Fantasy (a.k.a. Career Saga and other aliases) is still a thing! I don't have anything flashy to show yet, but I've made quite a bit of progress on my Super-Southern Postmodern JRPG. I've finalized the "timeline" for my game, which means I now know what dungeons and bosses need to appear in the game. Now that that's out of the way, I can start drilling down to the plans for individual buildings and rooms.

I'm thinking about changing the resolution from 640x360 to 480x270. The characters look smallish in the 640x360 window, since most character sprites are about 48x32. What do y'all think? Since most of the rooms are still test areas, it's not hard for me to make this change.

480x270:


640x360:

Yeah, the latter is definitely a touch too much space for this, I feel. Former all the way.

Do either of these resolutions result in a noticeable amount of stretched pixels?

Replying to Dustin's old message: I think there's no pixel-stretching in either one. I hope.

It's quite a rare thing that I discuss my game-making pursuits in the mythical realm of real life, but today was one of those rare days! Today I talked to a group of about 80 "financially disadvantaged" teenagers (and a few other people) about the code I used to make Career Fantasy's engine. I didn't have time to discuss the game in great detail, but I hope someone found it to be awesome enough.

I also have a real-life acquaintance who's asked me a few times about my progress on CF, so that's that.

I stated that I plan to release the game "next year", so be sure to keep nagging me if this project takes longer than forecasted.