Planning on making a first person RPG

You might know me of games like... Uhm...
Actually, none, because the only game I've been working on is still being made.
And no, this thread isn't a "I'm stopping work on that game to start this one" because, honestly, I'd really like to finish that other game sometime.

Anyway, back to the point, I'm planning on making a First Person RPG because there aren't really many games like that.
It's still a long ways before I can actually start making it, since I'm working on the underlying engine (I'm building it on top of RPG Maker VX Ace to cut me some work so I don't have to build a battle engine from scratch, though I might switch to Game Maker if I end up seeing it might be "easier")

The few things I can say as of right now are few. Mostly that first person would only be used in dungeons, and the player would control a party of four girls.
The story is pretty much set in stone, at least a few key points along the beginning... Okay, I just have some points and I'm going to use them because I can fit anything else over that. Likewise with mechanics. Hopefully I'll have random encounters be fun yet challenging (until you can just stomp them like they're not there), and bosses be an actual challenge instead of having to grind to get to level whatever to have a tiny chance.

Also, there might be grinding.

What I really don't know how it'd be, is fitting the porn in the game. I don't really want to put it on "winning" or on "losing" because both feel tacked on with little thought, and porn on losing would reward for playing badly (where playing badly on purpose in this game would only reward you with a total party wipe)

I'm welcoming any suggestions and ideas, but I'm afraid that with nothing to show I can't start giving specific info about how the game will work because it would be, in my opinion, just putting up hopes and hype for a game that hasn't been even started.

Re: Planning on making a first person RPG

What, like Legend of Grimrock?

Go for it. Remember, .

Re: Planning on making a first person RPG

I was thinking more like the classic Wizardry/Bard's Tale games, with turn based combat, but yeah, that kind of first person.
Would make mazes actually be a maze since you wouldn't be able to see everything at once.

And thanks for the tip, I certainly hope I can fail enough times while doing it to have something good.

Re: Planning on making a first person RPG

Have you considered using Ren'Py as an engine? There's a framework to make first person RPG dungeon crawlers in it here: that can be modified as you like. (The guy who posted the framework has made at least one commercial game with it I know of, here: http://www.ulmf.org/bbs/showthread.php?t=22684

if you want an idea of how it looks when made up into a game.)

Re: Planning on making a first person RPG

Yeah, I had considered Ren'Py at some point, and while it offers a vast amount of helpful premade parts, plus the engine you showed (that I already knew the existence of), I'm not really versed in working with python, a point that would really hurt a bit any and all progress I could make in that engine.

All things considered, I've been looking around and Game Maker's limited but actually existing 3D capabilities are something I might end up taking a look at, even though that would mean having to build everything else from scratch.

To be honest, I don't even know how to put the porn in there. I'm guessing having it all be optional things, but then it's not a porn game anymore, it's a game with porn on it.
But I also don't really want to set it up as part of the battles either.

And the fact that this is all still just a bunch of ideas with nothing actually on paper yet because I'm still working on my first game that any other developer would have finished months ago.

Re: Planning on making a first person RPG

barreytor said:

I was thinking more like the classic Wizardry/Bard's Tale games, with turn based combat, but yeah, that kind of first person.
Would make mazes actually be a maze since you wouldn't be able to see everything at once.

And thanks for the tip, I certainly hope I can fail enough times while doing it to have something good.

Click to expand...

Speaking of the old Wizardry games (I remember them, I'm an old-school gamer), there was an rpgmaker h-game not too long ago that had gameplay that reminded me a lot of the Wizardry series (from the dungeons to trapped chests and events). I think it was called "Dungeon Hyaahaa" or something to that effect. I'll see if I can find a link and update this post.
The author did the h-scenes as events you ran across in your exploration of the dungeon. That was also how you got party members, saved them from being molested or whatever. Also had some comedic scenes like where the hero was spying on the girls bathing (you could choose whether to peep or not). And the scenes were animated. Wasn't too bad of a game really. The formula seemed to work, rewarded you for exploration and getting farther down the dungeon. It does have the disadvantage of being a long time between scenes though. Something to think about, anyway.

Re: Planning on making a first person RPG

Well, I guess that in that kind of game having a long time between scenes when you're not forcing them on the player would be the norm.

Hmm... I thought of having, the first thing on pressing "New game", being thrown into an unlosable fight where you're using a single overpowered major character that you only use there (to give a show of how fights are going to be) followed by an H-scene right after that (to show some porn right at the start), and then I'd start with the exposition/plot/whatever.
Probably keeping it short, hopefully managing to throw the player into the tutorial dungeon crawl before 5 minutes have passed.

The first thing I might end up having to show about this game will surely be a tech demo of the first person crawling engine, though. Once I've finally decided on an engine.

Though now I'm thinking how I'm going to do the parts that won't be in first person... Should I use a bird's eye view like in RPG Maker? Or maybe just texts and menus like a visual novel? So many things to think about...

Re: Planning on making a first person RPG

Found the game I was thinking of. Took a while because it only says "Dungeon Hyahhaah!" in the pictures, a search for the title in English came up empty.

this is it :
It's a decent example of a way to set up the type of game you're talking about in RPG maker.

As far as the engine, RPG maker would likely be the easiest to work with (by far). Although if you are going to go for a real 3d engine you might look at Unreal Engine 4. You can make games without knowing any programming language from what I've seen, and their price is surprisingly low. The problem would mostly be getting resources together, you pretty much either have to pay or make them yourself. Even models from DAZ have a $500 license if you want to use them in a game, and Poser models (the 1st party ones anyway) are just flat out forbidden from use in games.

Re: Planning on making a first person RPG

I believe using any full-3D engine like Unreal or even Unity would be far too much overkill for what use I want to get out of the 3D part, which would be exclusively the first person crawling.

And while working around in RPG Maker would indeed simplify things a damn whole lot, and I say that because I honestly thought of it as my engine of choice for the game (Oh, look, I can do stuff and the battle system is already there and I don't have to do it!) it would end up being severely limiting for what I wanted to do if I didn't jump into its very core and started changing stuff heavily (What do you mean I can't have forty billion equipment slots?).

So since I'd essentially be reworking most of the combat and a few other parts, I felt that making it from scratch wouldn't be that much of a leap anyway.

All in all, with the little amount of 3D I intend to use for the game (since everything else would be 2D pics or even DAZ renders or who knows) I guess I can say that Game Maker would probably do the trick. It's meant for 2D with a few functions for 3D, and it's basically that thing what I'm going to do, so it just makes sense to give that a try. At least in my mind.

As an aside, using DAZ models directly in a game is probably not a good idea, with their insanely detailed but also insanely high polycounts.

Thanks for the link, I'll check the game once I get a chance, just to see if I can learn anything useful from it.

Re: Planning on making a first person RPG

barreytor said:

As an aside, using DAZ models directly in a game is probably not a good idea, with their insanely detailed but also insanely high polycounts.

Click to expand...

Yeah Poser models are the same way. Both programs have polygon reduction tools, but they end up making more work for you because they mess up the topology/UV maps so badly you would have to remake them in another program. All in all it sounds nice at first but it really isn't a good option yet.

And RPGmaker lets you customize a lot more than it looks like at first glance just within the menus, without even delving into scripts. I have a couple of half-assed projects laying around from a year ago and while making them I found it can do a surprising amount of things right out of the box (especially if you look through their forums). Slap in a couple of third party engines and you may not have to do much work at all. But if you end up having to gut it anyway, then yeah you might as well go with Game Maker.

Re: Planning on making a first person RPG

I would recommend you using gamemaker.

There are a lot of "Doom" examples flying around, so you could just grab one of those and then use the GUI surface to draw the sprites/menus/ everything; this way you could nearly forget about how horrible working on 3d in gamemaker is.

I have a couple gm6 source files of 3d maze games if you want to look at them, they are pretty old, and I think they use old fake 3D tricks, but might learn a thing or 2 from them.

Re: Planning on making a first person RPG

Making the 3D part in Game maker might be the easiest bit of all the game, so I'm not really worried about that.
It's more the whole everything else like battle system and all those things, that I'm kinda scared about how much will it take.

I'm still planning stuff on paper though, at least until I finish the game I already have on hand; but yeah, most probably I'll use Game Maker. Got to make use of that GM:S Pro license.

Oh, and thanks for the interest in this (unstarted) project, all of you.

Re: Planning on making a first person RPG

barreytor said:

Making the 3D part in Game maker might be the easiest bit of all the game, so I'm not really worried about that.
It's more the whole everything else like battle system and all those things, that I'm kinda scared about how much will it take.

I'm still planning stuff on paper though, at least until I finish the game I already have on hand; but yeah, most probably I'll use Game Maker. Got to make use of that GM:S Pro license.

Oh, and thanks for the interest in this (unstarted) project, all of you.

Click to expand...

might just have a bit of fun learning how to d3d in game maker