"I'll try and find the time to come up with and write down a detailed story for the tutorial. By the way, I think we need a map, with towns, forests, and of course a second map for the "underground world". I'd be glad to try and do that too."

Key words: Map, Towns, Forests. These are the things I'm looking for. General details to play around with.

I assumed the entire thing would be underground.

Go on IRC.

Maybe the whole thing underground, but with underground forests and oceans and stuff? Maybe towns as well...

Just a suggestion: I think we should make it moddable like world of goo, minecraft, etc. so users can make their own stuff. People can download mods, or create their own stuff. I'm not sure, but I think it's called a open ended game? correct me if i'm wrong.

This is just a suggestion by the way.

Yes, definitely. It will also make it easier for the team to develop.

Yep, it is already based on files, which both makes it moddable and easily built.

Well, if the whole thing's underground that's cool. I still think we need a map though.

For sure. Especially towns, an RPG without towns sucks.

But maybe the people in the towns aren't humans, they're dwarves or something.

A map would be important, especially if we make this game "open" (as in, you can make tons of choices and they all affect what happens. You could decide to go into the place full of monsters without any armor or weapons, which would be a bad choice. Or you could go explore the forest before going to the town, which could change the storyline.).

Since spells wouldn't be on the hotbar, here's my idea for using them in combat:
When you 'memorize' a spell, it appears in a list on the top left of the screen. The list can only be 10 spells long, so that's the limit of your memory. The first spell is labelled "1", the second "2", and so on. When you press a number key, you cast the spell, and it disappears from the list. Then the next spell you memorize fills that slot, and so on. To choose a target, the game freezes for a moment and you click on whatever you want the spell to target. To learn spells you need to read your spell book, so you probably won't be doing that in combat. Spell scrolls only have one use, so they can be used by selecting them in the hotbar.

That's genius. I especially like the freezing idea, like VATS in Fallout 3.

But before we do that, we have to decide exactly how battles are going to happen. Is there a transition and "battle mode" or not?

I think you should always be able to use combat stuff--attack a door with an axe to break it open, shoot an arrow at a "pressure plate", cast a light spell--but a battle mode might be interesting. What do the rest of you think?

And I just realized I haven't posted the level format yet. Just a second...

I don't know about Battle mode. I think it would be nice if it wasn't. Then, at some point in the story, a town can be attacked by enemies, and you can participate in an epic defense.

Time for my big post...

For spells, assuming we are going to use Howitz's concept with the three squares, and my control idea via moving with wasd, and switching weapons/items with left,right arrows and using by pressing up. You can press down to switch to "spells" or switch back, then scroll to the spell/item you want to use. No "memory" crap, please. That would get too frustrating.

Now, your level formatting, AP, is a little different than I would have like. Besides the fact you completely ignored the event structure, it wouldn't work as we aren't going to have resource manifests like world of goo. Instead it would be:

Image{
	path("res/levels/blah.png")
        mask(NULL)
	X(25)
	Y(25)
	static("true")
        solid("true")
        at_collisionwithplayer(1504)
}

As for battle modes, I think we should allow the player to use items/weapons in towns, but there will be a special tag for npcs that will tell whether or not they can be damaged by anything.

i think memory would be a little to much. it would get frustrating in battle when you have no spells left. think of being attacked with no spells handy, like a surprise attack. you might be stuck in the game and it be impossible to go on.

Yep, just running on plain MP is good enough. I vote for high mp-regeneration rate, just because it would make the game a lot more actiony and fun to play. Wow, this would make a GREAT single-player Maplestory.

I still think you should have to memorize spells, but you should have some that can be cast with MP/mana/whatever. That way you can always use the minor spells ("magic missile" and "inscribe spell") but need to prepare the major ones.

Nah. Your MP bar can get bigger as the game progresses, as a result, the bigger spells will use most of it, such as "do 4000 damage to 6 monsters around you" or something. Based on MP-regeneration rate, it will take some time before the player will be able to cast that again.

Okay, new idea.

How about this:
There are two forms of magic. They have cool names that we'll think up later. One of them, the simpler one, uses the MP bar like you said. You can also use scrolls if you find them in the dungeon.
HOWEVER, if in the starting town you talk to some wizard person, and complete a quest for them that is always difficult for you (the game makes it harder if you're stronger when you start), then you get a spell book and the ability to write spells in it. This can unlock new quests, etc, etc, and make the game fun for players who have gone through the whole game before.

Is that okay? That way you don't need to use "high magic" or whatever unless you want more of a challenge and new quests.

Just thought I'd throw something out here: The Chrono Trigger/Chrono Cross (As well as some other games that used the idea also) had a "New Game+" feature if you'd beaten the game before with a particular scenario (In Chrono Trigger, you had to have every character in your party available in the game). If you started a New Game+, you'd start out the game with all (or most) of the weapons you had when you finished the game the last time, and the final boss battle was made available through the entire game, so you could beat him whenever you felt like and would get a different ending depending on where you were in the game's plot. Of course, this made the game terribly easy for most of the game, so a difficulty-raising aspect like AP suggested would be important also so players don't get bored. Just a thought.

I say no trainer at all. You start out with basic ones and they build off of those as you progress, based on how much you use them.

So you use only fire? You will get new fire spells. Use fire and ice? You will get both new fire and ice spells (but not as fast as focusing on single types) and also special ones that require a lot of use between the two elements.

Just suggesting.

If we have a "wizard" like AP said, then it should at least knock off a few abilities, like speed and attack.

I say it should knock off Defense and Attack, because you will need other stats more as a mage.

Will magical attacks go against Defense, MP, or something else (magic resistance)?

EDIT: Also, elemental magic sounds cool. Maybe that could be the other form? A fire-ice spell would be amazing, and useful for puzzles, etc. in the game (what would happen if you superheated the stone slab and then froze it?).

So, you can play either as a normal-type or a mage-type, the normal type only using basic spells, and the mage type having a much wider range of spells, but with limited attack and defense.

Magic attacks from monsters will just be normal attacks. They go onto your defense value.

Elemental magic? Meh. I think we should just have spells like "Tiger Claw Slash" or "Insulate."

We can do whatever we want with it. Lets just have it all?

Okay, how I emphasized we needed as story...forget it. If we had an idea of what the world this game will be in, would be easier to come up with better ideas. A story is actually not too important. There is a difference between the game world and the story: what it actually is, and what happens.

I'll begin making some things in 9/28/11. Before that, I am learning / playing Battlefield 3 ^_^

Actually, I believe the contrary: the story shapes the game-world. It depends on how you look at it.

We should come up with a story before we think about what kind of world it's going to be.

I think that the normal magic should be basically elemental, spells are listed under one or a combination of the classical elements. For example, "Insulate" would be fire. "Tiger Claw Slash" would probably be Earth (metal?). Then you can specialize in an element or two elements, by changing certain stats. If you put all your magic skill points into Fire, your fire spells will be really strong, your air and earth ones weak, and your water spells abysmal. If you divide them between Water and Fire, you can get some interesting combination spells as well.

Hmm, alrighty then. Sounds good.

Beta-Testers should email me for the launcher! At the moment it's just a batch file. It downloads, extracts, and executes the game files. (nick@redthegreen.com)

By the way, the current version of the program uploaded is just to test out the functionality of the launcher; it just shows a banner in a window. Check out http://project-yami.redthegreen.com/announcements for notifications of new versions.

My email's broken. Could you post the link here?

Yea just post the link here

btw Red you know my email, gimme gimme gimme!!!