Digimon: Heroic Battle Spirit

[Candescence]

 
So, this is a thing I've been working on lately, as part of an effort to build up a mutiplayer platform engine in Construct 2, as well as experimenting with new methods of conveying narrative that don't rely on non-interactivity. I've released a demo for SAGE, with a single-player demo and a multiplayer mode capable of supporting up to four players.
 
As a Construct 2 game, the demo will be playable in all HTML5/WebGL-capable browsers. But, thanks to the power of Node-Webkit, there are also Windows, Mac and Linux executables if you prefer that.
 
Screenshots:
 
Work in progress, obviously, just to note.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/919275/MultiPurposePlat/Screenshots/4PlayerMenu.png
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/919275/MultiPurposePlat/Screenshots/TestArena.png
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/919275/MultiPurposePlat/Screenshots/AutoZoom.png
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/919275/MultiPurposePlat/Screenshots/FogOfWarScreen.png

 
Overiew
 
Digimon: Heroic Battle Spirit, made in Construct 2, is a fan-made 'expansion' on the three Digimon: Battle Spirit fighting games for the Wonderswan/GBA made by Dimps, one of which, Battle Spirit 1.5, never left Japan. The idea is to include nearly every existing playable character from the first two games at least, hopefully add more fighters from more recent Digimon series (Digimon Savers/Data Squad and Digimon Xros Wars/Fusion) , enable four-player multiplayer, and include a special Metroidvania-like story mode with innovative narrative mechanics that attempt to do away with the need for cutscenes in most cases.
 
The demo is an attempt to demonstrate a basic idea of the direction being taken for both single-player and multiplayer. It's not exactly 'polished', nor 'balanced', but very much playable.
 
Playable Characters
 
In the demo, there are three playable Digimon - Agumon, Gabumon, Renamon and Kazemon, each with unique movesets.
 

 
Okay, that's not quite true - there's a fourth character, but he's not a Digimon - a special guest fighter for the demo. And since SAGE has passed, it's Sonic.
 
Story Mode Synopsis
 
The first thing you remember is waking up in a cell in a dungeon.
 

 
You manage to escape, but you find yourself in a castle filled with strange machines you've never seen before that are hostile to your presence.
 

 
And to make it worse, there's no way out... Without treading a lot of water. And you sincerely doubt you can swim that far.
 

 
An exploration of the castle finds you battling an old enemy, but even he is subservient to a greater power. Without your partner, you're left alone trying to figure out how to escape the castle, where he and your friends have gone, and who imprisoned you in the first place...

• Open-ended environments inspired by the likes of Metroid and its many imitators.
• Multiple characters with different abilities.
• Sub-weapons that augment your character's fighting abilites.
• A 'narrative button' that provides dialogue options ala Mass Effect, but in real-time, with an adjustable slow-down effect.
• A 'look' mechanic reminiscent of old-school adventure games.
• An adjustable, zoomable camera system that accommodates any number of screen resolutions.
• A 'fog of war' system that hides unexplored areas, and fogs explored but unoccupied areas.
• Beware, not all boss enemies will be content to sit around and let you walk up to their doorstep, and some may start hunting you on their own volition...
• Possible extra for later on: 4-player co-op.

Multiplayer
 

• Fully-featured classic Battle Spirit gameplay, now with 4 players! (In the future, depending on what happens with Steam Controllers and online multiplayer support in Construct 2, up to 16 players might be supported.)
• Dynamic camera system that keeps every combatant on-screen.

SAGE 2014 Act 1 Demo Download
 

Readme

(Please read!)

 

Web Player

(Web HTML5, no plugins needed, Chrome or Firefox absolutely reccomended)

 

Executable Download

Windows

Mac

Linux (32 Bit, 64 Bit)

 
What about the future?
 
Well, what happens in the future is going to be a bit interesting. Right now, with this demo, I'm pretty much limited entirely to existing game assets (and not just from Digimon games) and open-source assets, which are both neat, but they have their limitations. Long story short, if I want to really complete this game as I envision it, I'll need help. Aside from presenting a demo, I'm using SAGE as a platform to advertise for artists and other people who are interested in making this whole thing work.
 
Primarily, I'm looking for an artist(s), an optional plural, because I intend to redo as many assets from scratch as possible, from level art to character animations. The existing assets are great, but I don't really want to be restricted to what there is right now, if I want to expand the gameplay, for example (the existing sprites were designed for a rather simple fighting game, let's be honest), not to mention I want a consistent art style across the board, which is important. And I'd like to be able to have higher-quality art assets, which would be neat.
 
What I'm mainly looking at for animation work is the program Spriter, by Brashmonkey. It's tech that is similar to what is used in games like Rayman Origins/Legends, and anything Vannilaware's done (Odin Sphere, Muramasa, Dragon's Crown, etc), and when the tool is used properly, the results can look superb. As well, animations can be created and tweaked much more easily than traditional animation, scaled better, enables character customization, heavily reduces RAM usage, includes support for stuff like collision rectangles, and already has native Construct 2 support. I like traditional animation as much as anyone, but I'd like to save my time and my artist's time when it comes to creating assets, animations, and iterating on them. If nothing else, Spriter is great for easily prototyping animations.
 
Also, some of you might be wondering what happened to that Digimon World project from a while back, if you remember it (both demos were kinda crappy, to be honest, but still). Well, it's mostly been scrapped. Changes to my outlook/philosophy on game development and where games need to advance has made the idea of making a turn-based RPG a lot less appealing to me. I like playing some of those, but for the most part, the genre isn't really compatible with what I want to do with the medium. Now, making an action RPG is a whole different story, but it would be incredibly impractical in 2D with Digimon, so in order to make a 3D game, I'd need to brush up on working in something like Unity, and recruit someone who can actually model and animate stuff, and that's not an easy task. But the idea of a 3D Digimon action-RPG is certainly exciting to me, and it's something I'd love to do.

Still, we'll cross that bridge when we get to it. Enjoy the demo!

Edited March 15, 2014 by Candescence

[DimensionWarped]

It seems... somewhat dysfunctional.

[Candescence]

Well, the various implementations need to be ironed out heavily, especially character stuff. I'm gonna try and iron that stuff out before SAGE.
 
Anyhow! Some late stuff, but I've been a little preoccupied with other stuff *coughspelunkycough*. It's not that much, but...
 
* Basic damage stuff done for the Digimon chars, no actual HP changes or whatnot, but... Yeah. Trying to work out how to make the collisions work is a slight pain.
* Been adding onto the dialogue stuff. I've started using XML as a means of implementing the dialogue menu options and the script - easy to modify, and I don't have to hardcode every script addition into the events, since it's dynamic. The Context and General Actions menus aren't implemented yet, but that'll be easy enough.
 
 
Now, in another bit of news, I've decided that, in its current form, I don't want to work on the Digimon RPG. It was kinda neat, but now, As much as I really want to restart work on the project (especially since I decided that it would be better to use objects and XML rather than arrays to organize a lot of things, which would likely make things a lot simpler), a top-down turn-based RPG is infuriatingly incompatible with my current philosophy for video game narratives - less cutscenes (as little as possible, even), more narrative presented in gameplay. Turn-based RPGs are great, don't get me wrong (I should know, my most favorite RPG of all time is Chrono Trigger), but I can't really see a Digimon World DS-style game really working with my philosophy.

 

As a result, I want to make an action RPG, but that would likely involve going one step further and making it 3D, since it would be far easier to make a 3D Digimon real-time RPG than a 2D one, due to a ton of models already existing, it's just a matter of animating them, which is also much easier than creating 2D animations from scratch. Of course, in order to pull it off, I'd need to work with someone else, and figure out programming in a 3D game engine - Unity would be easier, I think, and Mechanim would make doing basic/prototype animations much easier, possibly.

[Candescence]

Alright, time for a status report!
 
Screenshots:
 

 
4-player multiplayer is now entirely playable, along with multiple players with the same character - turns out I was doing it wrong from the start by not condensing the player, input and character objects into a single object, so now there's just the one player object and the separate skins, which makes simplifies object picking greatly and causes a lot less problems. Not entirely perfect, and certainly not remotely balanced, but very much playable, and MUCH less janky than the silly test thing above. I should probably figure out how to make two characters push out of each other, but that's far from a priority. Also, Mega Evolution is certainly something I'd like to implement... If I had the sprites for the Mega-level forms of each character, because, unfortunately, whoever was ripping the sprites for the Battle Spirit games neglected to rip most of those.
 
Basically? I'm certain that I'm gonna make SAGE. How much content for HBS is going to be in the SAGE demo, that's not certain, but as of tomorrow, I'm gonna be focusing heavily on the 'adventure mode'. Basically, a relatively small 'Metroidvania' area with a boss fight. Hopefully I'll meet the deadline.
 
... Shit, I'll be needing sound effects and music, won't I. Crap. That's gonna eat up a bit of time...

Edited February 4, 2014 by Candescence

[Candescence]

So, a status update... I uploaded a couple of videos a few days ago, for starters, which I posted in the screenshots thread.

 

 

 

Also, Kazemon is now playable, and I've replaced the dialogue font with something more readable.

 

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/919275/MultiPurposePlat/Screenshots/Kazemon.png

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/919275/MultiPurposePlat/Screenshots/NewSpritefont.png

 

 

So, like I said in the text of the revised opening post, I will very likely need an artist to work with, not only for aesthetic reasons (establishing a consistent and higher-quality art style) but also for gameplay reasons. Hopefully SAGE will provide this project enough exposure for someone to be interested. I'm not getting my hopes up, but we'll see.

 

And I'd probably like a more original soundtrack, too. Maybe a mixture, there are amazing tracks out there I wouldn't mind slipping in here and there, though. But remixed versions of certain music from the various Digimon anime series past Tamers would be fantastic, too.

[TheJeli]

I'm not into Digimon at all, but from what I've seen the game looks like a blast to play. Keep up the good work.

[Candescence]

Alright, time for a SAGE post-mortem.

 

Well, that could've gone worse, I suppose. It WAS a non-Sonic fangame in a Sonic fangame expo, but there was some press near the end, from sites like Sonic Paradise and TSSZ - the reviews I managed to find were, in fact, rather positive, and fairly encouraging. Overbound mentioned to me that he thought that HBS was among the best in show, which is a big deal, coming from him. And in the Silly Awards, HBS got the "And Now For Something Completely Different" award, which, as a Monty Python fan, I got a slight chuckle from.

 

Also, it turns out I need some more experience with streaming. Eesh.

 

Still, I can't help but think that this game was mostly ignored, but every bit helps, I suppose. I'm gonna see if I can't go around some places and show the demo off here and there.

 

 

As for what I'm doing now, well, I'm back in university. But I've been working on 'placeholder' animation parts to use in Spriter in Inkscape, and Construct 2's latest beta release just came out, with multiplayer functionality. I'm gonna see about integrating the multiplayer functionality into the engine - I have an idea of how to pull it off, it's mostly a matter of adding functionality to the input system to accommodate the way the multiplayer plugin works. At any rate, I'll see if I can get it working.