• Hey Guest! Ever feel like entering a Game Jam, but the time limit is always too much pressure? We get it... You lead a hectic life and dedicating 3 whole days to make a game just doesn't work for you! So, why not enter the GMC SLOW JAM? Take your time! Kick back and make your game over 4 months! Interested? Then just click here!

 Soul Healer - Brave Caterpillar Music! :D

Hey all! I had a thread on here last year for this game, but haven't updated since then. I've been working on it for the past year now, so I figured it's about time to start posting here again.

Soul Healer is a three player action RPG, inspired by Secret of Mana, Zelda, the Soul Blazer trilogy, and a bunch of others. I hope you enjoy the short trailer I've prepared. I'll be updating here once a week or so. Don't mind that the "3 player co-op" game's trailer doesn't show any 3 player co-op. That'll be coming soon, hahah!










Small teaser trailer:

Hope you like it! =)
 
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Game looks great. I saw the trailer earlier this week too. My only real criticism is that as great as the game looks, the color palette reminds me of RPG Maker, so while your art is custom, people may feel its from RPG Maker. To me, that's a con, but to others it could be a plus.
 
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I know you already fixed this part once, but...
shouldn't "that time is passed" be "that time has passed"? :p Don't worry, it's not super bad. You can probably leave it.

Also, looks cool. I love OP AOE spells. Also I love Secret of Mana. Can't wait to see 3-player co-op!
 
shouldn't "that time is passed" be "that time has passed"? :p Don't worry, it's not super bad. You can probably leave it.
I *think* it's grammatically correct, actually, even though it's a little unusual. And it needs to be "is passed" to lead into "but not forgotten" correctly, hahah. X'D
And thank you! Glad you like it. I'll be posting here more often now. =D

Edit: It seems to be correct, yeah. Googling it brings up a bunch of results from speeches and stuff:
But we are told, in particular with respect to the Veto, that there was a time when we might have had it; that that time is passed ; that we must concede more in ...
“There was, I admit,” said he, “a period when such a defence might have been set up; but that time is passed. If, at the commencement of the present enquiry, ...
But that time is passed. America is not now and cannot in the future be a place for unrestricted individual enterprise.8 Because many Progressives shared ...
It's old sounding English, though, heheh. =D
 
Looking at your signature, I see you like 3 in general. :)
I mean, I didn't make that jam. I just joined it. Though you gave me an interesting idea to do for that jam... Heh heh. This is gonna be good. In a month or so.

In all seriousness, SoM is my most favorite game of all time.

@RichHopelessComposer Hm, well I guess it's okay then. It sounds really weird in my head for whatever reason. Usually that means it's grammatically incorrect, (I read a lot of books, so I've helpfully developed an unconscious sense for grammar), but I'm sometimes wrong.
 
Thanks for the comments, guys. Here's a question for all of you:

In your RPGs, do you prefer your dialog boxes to show portraits, or to go without?

I can think of pros and cons for both, but I'm curious about what the majority thinks. Let me know!
 
As a programmer: without. Drawing portraits is more annoying art, and actually high detail art usually, compared to most of the art.

As a player: sometimes. I don't really mind either way per say. If it's story driven it helps a lot, but without it sort of doesn't matter. Or do it like Rune Factory and only show portraits for important conversations, like for story dialogue and skip it for day to day chat with villagers and stuff.

Biggest thing: make sure the dialogue is fast enough that I'm not waiting for it to finish. (Or even have it skip-able. I personally read all the dialogue though, unless the dialogue in a particular game is really boring, or I've played it several times before. Don't have boring dialogue though).
 

RangerX

Member
I generally prefer without or I rarely seen this well implemented. If there's a portrait it should complement the text in the box and that's where it gets heavy.
Its also a question of focus. Where you like the player to focus? Should I feel 2 portraits are talking together or feel like those 2 pixel characters are chatting down there? Maybe its cooler to actually animate the characters.
Another way to do it also can be like the Shantae series. I like what they do because while choosing the portrait's route, why not making it awesome with full sized art? At least I focus on something that's worth it.
 

wadaltmon

Member
Thanks for the comments, guys. Here's a question for all of you:

In your RPGs, do you prefer your dialog boxes to show portraits, or to go without?

I can think of pros and cons for both, but I'm curious about what the majority thinks. Let me know!
I prefer with. As long as you change the portraits to correspond with emotions, depending on what is being said.

Game is still looking nasty. However, can it be played with only one player, or two players? Is it local or online cooperative?

EDIT: ***TASTY, not nasty.
 

Nocturne

Friendly Tyrant
Forum Staff
Admin
In your RPGs, do you prefer your dialog boxes to show portraits, or to go without?
With. Definitely. Some people may not find text enough to relate to the characters and need the visual stimulus. I'd also say it looks nicer and makes it more obvious who is talking when there is dialogue between multiple characters. You could go the way of the game dev and just make it an option in the settings? "Character Portraits" on/off? :p
 

Bingdom

Googledom
In your RPGs, do you prefer your dialog boxes to show portraits, or to go without?
Is it story driven? Is it going to have a lot of characters or at least a few? Is there a lot of dialogue?
I think a lot of it depends.

Preferably, I would rather have portraits.They help express what the character is currently feeling. It's sometimes difficult to do it only on text.

I can't really give much valid advice on this, as I normally don't touch this genre.
 
F

FROGANUS

Guest
Looks great! The style def strikes that feeling of good old 'golden' 90s rpgs.

There's something magic in an adventure game, when you can have a group of people interested enough to participate and get invested in the story and/or some puzzles or whatever.. and good coop was always missing from so many of these classic adventure-rpgs, so I'm def wondering how you'll implement it.. there's a lot you could do!

about portraits- i feel like the portrait approach can save you time to show some character detail, and easily reinforce dialogue with emotion, but if your character sprites look good on screen (which they do so far) maybe you don't need close ups? (maybe there are close ups in other cutscenes, i dunno) and maybe you can use some actual character animations to help convey emotion (imagining simple dramatic pauses, characters walking to certain points, striking certain pose, etc). comes down to whatever you're comfortable using.

keep it up!
 

RujiK

Member
Good art as always and cool rock spell! That looks like a lot of animating.

...

To be honest I think your trailer (Not game) is pretty terrible.

90% (ish) of your trailer is either white text on black screen or slow-paced walking with little to no action. Are there other people in the games? Are there towns? Why not show some talking to NPC's? Why not show the cool cast of characters I can meet? Why not show that cool fire effect you had? Why not show some of your sweet spell animations? Why not show your bone fish, or that big boss you were making?

I get the impression you are really holding back the goods, but since this is a trailer, I don't think that will have a positive effect. So my advice is definitely make a new trailer before your kickstarter! This one is not doing your game justice!
 

cidwel

Member
stunning as ever :)!

> In your RPGs, do you prefer your dialog boxes to show portraits, or to go without?
Depends totally on the game. For mine i'm going to implement animated portraits like the ones in shinning force I & II. If you want to add a dark atmosphere i would just add dialog boxes without faces. If you are going to add long conversations with a more moodly relaxed and cartoonish dialogs, use them

pd: waiting for the kickstarter trailler!
 
Whoa, thanks for the advice, kind words, and likes, everyone! Woke up to a lot of notifications this morning. Really encouraging, so thank you very much! ^ ^

Responses to a few posts:
The procedural generation of cave that you've worked on(I thought I have seen it), is it also implemented in this game?
No, not yet. It's still its own separate test project. It will be in the final game though, as a kind of "cave of ordeals" thing, where you can explore an infinite dungeon for extra exp and stuff. The game isn't a roguelike at all, though - the whole game is being hand made. Any proc-gen stuff will be strictly bonus stuff, mostly as end game content. =)
Game is still looking nasty. However, can it be played with only one player, or two players? Is it local or online cooperative?
One to three players. Only couch right now, but I'll be adding online play, too. I think a lot of people would miss out on the co-op otherwise. Couch co-op is so much better, though. I hope people who can gather around for it actually do.
3-player? I don't have that many friends.
Me either! That's why I'll giving people a few options:
1.)Play with friends! (aren't you cool. >: \ )
2.)Play with AI characters in place of your friends
3.)Play solo, and absorb the AI partners powers. I'll have to balance this, but since the game is being designed around having three characters on the screen, I'm thinking about boosting your stats by 20% or something if you're playing solo. I'll have to mess around with it to get a good balance, but I don't think it'll be hard. =)
Looks great! The style def strikes that feeling of good old 'golden' 90s rpgs.

There's something magic in an adventure game, when you can have a group of people interested enough to participate and get invested in the story and/or some puzzles or whatever.. and good coop was always missing from so many of these classic adventure-rpgs, so I'm def wondering how you'll implement it.. there's a lot you could do!

about portraits- i feel like the portrait approach can save you time to show some character detail, and easily reinforce dialogue with emotion, but if your character sprites look good on screen (which they do so far) maybe you don't need close ups? (maybe there are close ups in other cutscenes, i dunno) and maybe you can use some actual character animations to help convey emotion (imagining simple dramatic pauses, characters walking to certain points, striking certain pose, etc). comes down to whatever you're comfortable using.

keep it up!
Thanks, Froganus! I have the same feelings on portraits, kind of. I think they do help to convey emotions in the scenes, and can definitely make some scenes better. On the other hand, I think they're kind of distracting, and can make games worse....I want to have characters walk around and emote and stuff during cutscenes....it feels like it's kind of distracting looking at the character's portrait while looking at their sprite. Splits the attention a little, I think. ):
That said, it seems every RPG nowadays has portraits, and it seems like a lot of people like them, so I guess I'll be adding them. No harm in seeing how I like them, I guess, besides maybe wasting some time, hahah.
Good art as always and cool rock spell! That looks like a lot of animating.

...

To be honest I think your trailer (Not game) is pretty terrible.

90% (ish) of your trailer is either white text on black screen or slow-paced walking with little to no action. Are there other people in the games? Are there towns? Why not show some talking to NPC's? Why not show the cool cast of characters I can meet? Why not show that cool fire effect you had? Why not show some of your sweet spell animations? Why not show your bone fish, or that big boss you were making?

I get the impression you are really holding back the goods, but since this is a trailer, I don't think that will have a positive effect. So my advice is definitely make a new trailer before your kickstarter! This one is not doing your game justice!
Heheh, thanks for the honest advice, RujiK. I'll be honest, too - I made this trailer for a very small group of people. For me and my team, a trailer like this where the focus is on the scenery and beautiful music is fantastic. Fish under the ice on a gloomy Winter day? To Debussy in the background? *chef kiss* instant buy! :'D

That said, I told my team that people like us were probably pretty rare and that I wouldn't be surprised if most people didn't respond to it. Of course, if people like it, I'll be happy, but if people don't respond to this particular trailer, then that's fine. Like you said, I've showed more exciting stuff before - I'll be showing more action again soon, and the KS trailer itself is 80% fighting, magic, bosses, and explosions. (still 20% white text on black screens though, heheh. X'D ) My trailers from now onward will have something for everybody, instead of just for art nerds like me, hahah.
I'll be posting more here soon, so stay tuned! Thanks again for the advice, RujiK! =)

stunning as ever :)!

> In your RPGs, do you prefer your dialog boxes to show portraits, or to go without?
Depends totally on the game. For mine i'm going to implement animated portraits like the ones in shinning force I & II. If you want to add a dark atmosphere i would just add dialog boxes without faces. If you are going to add long conversations with a more moodly relaxed and cartoonish dialogs, use them

pd: waiting for the kickstarter trailler!
Yeah, that's what I'm worried about. People like portraits for fun dialog, and I think they work well there. My game is going to have a lot of serious scenes though, and I'm worried that pure writing would carry those scenes much better than cycling through Player_SadFace1.gif, Player_SadFace2.gif, Player_Concerned1.gif would. I was thinking about just having still portraits like some of the Castlevania games do, but basically everyone in this thread has said that's the absolute worst option, so I dunno what I want to do now. :'D

Thanks again for the comments and support, everybody. Really appreciate ya! I'll be back with more stuff soon! =D
 
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cidwel

Member
I'm worried that pure writing would carry those scenes much better than cycling through Player_SadFace1.gif, Player_SadFace2.gif, Player_Concerned1.gif would
well, I'm a big fan of the Shin Megami Tensei Series and, for what is a really dark game, the portraits in SMT IV have seriously cut down some of the dark atmosphere the game has. Specially in some cruel scenes.

There's a middle path for getting the best of the both systems. You can create specific cut scenes when there is a tense moment. These doesn't have to really be in a video. You can just create live scenes and panting the dialogs in a proper way for a live scene, like just a subtitle line (per example)
 
well, I'm a big fan of the Shin Megami Tensei Series and, for what is a really dark game, the portraits in SMT IV have seriously cut down some of the dark atmosphere the game has. Specially in some cruel scenes.

There's a middle path for getting the best of the both systems. You can create specific cut scenes when there is a tense moment. These doesn't have to really be in a video. You can just create live scenes and panting the dialogs in a proper way for a live scene, like just a subtitle line (per example)
So you're saying I could just use portraits where they're appropriate, and drop them when they're not? That's an option too, I guess...
 

CMAllen

Member
As another person pointed out, the answer is really going to depend on how comfortable you are creating all the necessary character portraits to use portraits in your dialogue system. And, of course, by having portraits only for certain characters, you establish which characters are 'relevant' and which ones are not (since irrelevant/generic characters won't have portraits, obviously). FF3/6 had limited portraits, and I wouldn't say the game was better for it. They were static, so they rarely matched up with the overall tone of any dialogue being displayed. They also gave away which characters were important once they engaged in dialogue (less important, but still, it removed certain nuance from the story). On the other hand, the 'character portraits' were just reused images from the menu ui, so it's not like they created assets specifically for the dialogue system either.

Done right, I'd say sure, have at it. But that's going to be a lot of artwork. Otherwise, I'd say they're probably not going to be worth the time investment.
 
As an example for static portraits I really liked, and think helped the mood of the game, here's Circle of the Moon's intro:

That said, there's not much dialogue in the game, and all of it is pretty stoic "evil will never win!" type stuff, so the static portraits might fit much better there than they would in my game, where there's going to be a lot more talking and a lot more subject matter. I'm gonna have to sleep on this, I guess. I'll probably do a test video with static portraits (because it's the least amount of work) in a few days, and you guys can tell me what you think. =)

Also, unrelated to portraits, but I always thought the intro music to CotM was 💩💩💩💩ing badass, hahah. X'D
 
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Doing great, dude!
Thanks man! =D

Concept sketch for new player character:

The leader of the little foxes you encounter in the first area of the game. He lures you into a cunning ambush, but after you rough him and his underlings up a little, he's inspired to join you. He's quick on his feet and specializes in illusory magic and debuffs. A helpful party member to have onboard!

Working on his sprites now. Will post them up tomorrow. =)
 
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wadaltmon

Member
So you're saying I could just use portraits where they're appropriate, and drop them when they're not? That's an option too, I guess...
I personally disagree with this, on most occasions. It might even be better to put a single, static portrait whenever a major character speaks, rather than just deeming when they're "appropriate". Take Pillars of Eternity for example: no matter the emotion of the character, a single portrait is always displayed when they're talking. Adding portraits for different emotions is just gravy.

Check 13:58 in this video:
 

kupo15

Member
Looking really great hopeless! I too really enjoyed the fish under the ice as well! :) I don't have much to comment on right now except these two things in regards to your future kickstarter:

I would like to see the main player have a bit more fluid animations. Unless this is the style you are going for I think it will have a huge impact if the player looks even better! I just can't get excited about staring that those player movement animations for the whole game!
If you haven't already, I hope you have someone working on music for you. Nothing against the arrangement of Debussy but having music like that doesn't tell us a whole lot about your game. If you want to hype us even more, having us hear that original score for the trailer that pulls us into your world is going to be crucial!

Nice to see some great progress, keep it up!
 
A letter ala Ocarina of time!? ;):D
That's on the right track, but if it were something so simple, I wouldn't be so proud of it, haha! ;)

I think this is going to be one of the most talked about things in my game. =D

I guess the question was more rhetorical than anything...there's no way to actually guess what it's for without looking into my notebooks, heheh. Another update hopefully by tomorrow. =)
 
Oh man, can't believe I missed this topic, assumed you'd just bump the old one :p

Re: Portraits. I really like the Fire Emblem approach, but that's not so much portrait as it is a mid-shot of characters above the dialogue box.
 
Small update today. Just some WIP music for one of the game's coastal towns: https://m.soundcloud.com/james1012yahoo/ttbs26cdlju8/s-hEauR

Hopefully it's nice and relaxing. The full one will use newer instruments, and will be a bit longer. =)

Edit: Wow, thanks for the likes, guys. I was really unsure whether or not the song was any good. I'm feeling much more motivated now. Thanks again. Composing scares the 💩💩💩💩 out of me, hahah. I know I have to jump into it sooner or later, though.
 
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