The Shining Source

Hello all,

I have devoured many things that are here in "The Shining Source" and I must say I am very impressed.

A little about me: My stumbling upon Shining Force was a complete accident, and thankfully it happened. When I was younger, for a gift, my brother decided to buy me Final Fantasy 3 (VI for JP) on the super Nintendo on it's release date. Since he was a lazy bum and didn't get it he got me Shining Force 1. I played it to death only to get the SF 2 ASAP.

Anyway, I work for a group of home brew gamers, about 20 of us in all. I have written the storyline for a demo game, but I am the sound engineer for the larger part. It has been my dream to make a SF game, but within the rest of the members of our small studio, not one of them have ever played an SF game. I have tortured them into playing SF 1, 2, and CD, which guided me into winning their affection towards this amazing series of games.

So, while we are creating a generic turn based RPG (like Final Fantasy, Breath of Fire, Etc) we are looking into starting a tactical rpg but in the nature of Shining Force. I have been selected to compose the story, basic game play, music, as well as cast for voice acting etc... ^^

For this, I want to inquire what many of you, some of this series biggest fans, would like to see. As far as programming goes we are aiming to stay traditional. But things like unique stats and special classes that have not been introduced. Anything you would ask would be inquired.

Anyway, off that subject. I am glad to see so many fellow fans working desperately, with such great talents, to keep this game style alive. I would like to offer my talents and information as a sound engineer to answer any questions you have about music, voice audio, and sound effects.

Thanks ^^

~Maestro

Welcome Maestro.
Indeed, it's a love it or never heard of it relationship most people have with SF.

There's certainly a lot of things I'd like to see in future games, in fact I've probably posted a few ideas around in these forums in the past.  It's hard to come up with them off the top of my head.
There are threads on what makes shining games special(which can give you key points to developing a game that "feels" similar).  And others on new character abilities and types in battle arena games with shining battle engines that were never included.
For me personally, I'll eat anything up which has an SF battle engine.

If you're looking at doing voices and so on, post up species types and character ages/genders along with a sentence, and I'll be sure to send you a recording of me doing my best at each.  Other people here might get in on it too, and you could use them as auditions or stock sounds.

I've tried writing a storyline that fits with existing shining force dogma, and let me tell you it is difficult if you want to include any people/places from the existing games.  With the narrow pathing of the stories you could place a story somewhere else entirely only hinting at a connection and be safe.

Of course something I've noted on many occasions is that the main character doesn't speak!  I feel this is paramount to allow your imagination to run wild with who you are.  Of course that would be up to your core development ideas but there's a definite philosophy behind doing it, not just cutting down on programming and writing time.

One thing I don't think I've ever pointed out, because it's so obvious to me I think. . . The sense of humour in SF 1 and 2 is fairly unique.  It's light, and some is transparent to younger kids, but breaking monotony for those of us going back to play it now we're older.  Importantly, it doesn't go jaja binks overboard on us.  I'm sure with voices you could take the humour to a new level, but be careful : )

Good luck with it, and keep us up to date.

Nice to have you around, Maestro

Shining Force was the first RPG I ever played, so it has a special place in my heart. The story was enjoyable, but didn't take itself too seriously. The gameplay required some thought, and it was fun getting new team members and seeing new spells.

I'm sure once you get your team to play it they'll be hooked

Well, I talked to my team and so far half of them have played through the first one. They loved the gameplay, but felt that the music sounded like cheesy FF menu music. Also, they are all mostly Fire Emblem goons, so I had to break them of some of their premature expectations.

For the most part they liked it a little better, so I know I have snagged their interest. The  lead programmer and I are going to discuss next weekend about obtaining some source code to get an idea on how it was done, then generate some of our own ideas on it.

Things we discussed: Tri promotional system as seen in SF2 (but you do not need a special item to promote the 3rd time. Treating that 3rd promotion [possibly a secret 4th for selected characters] as a complete class change in all regards, like Slade from Thief to Ninja. i.e. Slade - Thief to Rouge to Ninja to Master Ninja; Bowie/Max Swordsman to Swordmaster to Hero [to Divine Hero])

I find the best benefit of this 3 to 4 class system is the variations of mages, priests, and warrior characters. How many of us loved the Baron class AND the Gladiator class? A concept that came to mind was a Warrior - Gladiator - Baron (axes and swords) - Warlord (axes, swords, lances and spears [or maybe just lances]). Mage - Wiz - Sorc - BattleMage. This mage leveling system is more geared towards the typical SF 2 setup BUT the BattleMage BTMG may be something that some do NOT want to have. The Sorc of course has the summons but the BTMG would have 2 Offensive spells, 1 status effect, and 1 summon spell (could have 3 offensive spells and/or 2 summon spells in place of status effect) and the BTMG physical offense and defense rise greatly per level but the mp levels slower than it did before. So that special upgrade may not be desirable.

As in all SF games you have the option to level past the first set of promotional levels and I want to continue that, to promote at your own desire after the initial promotion (i.e. Mage - Wiz) that way if you dont want to go to Sorc or Btmg you dont have to and it wont effect your gameplay dramatically. But it gives you a greater customization of your battle party. %^^ That takes care of the concern: "What if I like the wizard spells of Fire 4, Ice 4, Bolt 4 over the option of Summon spells and the BTMG?"

Again, many of these ideas are very experimental. But I figured one of the neat things about any RPG is seeing change in your characters. I find a great example outside SF is Final Fantasy 4 and 6. You see characters evolve in FF 4 (from Dark Knight to Paladin, Young Rydia to Old Rydia, Forgetful Tellah to Powerful Tellah, etc. Where you really dont see that evolution as much in FF6, though this is my own opinion.)

Anyway, as far as voice overs go that will be in the later production after a scenario and script has been made and is ready to be implemented into the game, so that could be some time, but I will keep you in mind. ^^

I agree with you wholeheartedly, the development of your characters is one of the best parts of the game.  Not to forget their special message when you talk to them in headquarters changes after promotion : )

Correct me if I'm wrong but SF2 doesn't have a 3 tier system, merely a 2 tier with the promotion being a 2 path affair if you have those secret items. 
Perhaps I'm wrong, but I think we aren't able to promote from wizard to sorcerer, or sorcerer to wizard.

Not that this has any effect on what you're saying.  This does though: Although more promotions means better character development it means more sprites.

One thing I'd like to see is on promotion, a character saying something that relates to their personal story.  You normally hear nothing of other characters reasons for joining after they join(apart from peter) until the end of the game.

ps: if you get some source code, find out the dice roll on the grim reaper spell for me would you.

SF had a 2 tier system and with a secondary option for promotion upon provision of a special item. I guess I said it wrong, lol. But now that I think about it, it would be interesting to have just a 3 tier instead of a 4 tier and the 4th tier is optional. Again, something that needs more discussion amongst the artists. I know that they dont want to spend TOO much of their life making one character 4 times. So I assured them that the 4th secret promotion will not be available to ALL classes.

I really want to have characters with more INVOLVEMENT in the story. That is one thing that kind of detoured me from SF games after the first run through of the game. You have a handful of characters that are involved in the plot... the rest are, in a sense, just meat punching bags that join you for the sake of saving the world...

So, in this newly developing storyline I want to be able to introduce a more character involved storyline. HQ quotes to me would be paramount and should change as the scenario changes. I.E. Mae from SF 1 had a good reason to join, but when you confront Kain only the immediate leads really got a word in. I think that there could have been more drama if characters that had a relationship to the incidents caused by Darksol and to have this antagonist utter back to them something distasteful and, perhaps, even sinister about how he felt about his actions.

Anyway, it is a way to contribute more towards story. You see this done much better in SF3 but still, it is in spoonfuls and some characters seemed to phase out, which suprised me because they had the least amount of characters in  each scenario than SFCD/Gaidens, SF1, and SF2. So holding a character interaction should not have been as hard, I would have thought anyway. lol

As far as the Desoul spell goes... it is clear that in SF3 it was the luck stat that determined the outcome of the spell. One luck against another. I still feel that this was the case in older games, just the luck stat was not a base introduction nor did it ever grow so why put it in the basic statistics if it doesnt change. Best way to find out is to see each characters susceptibility to the Desoul spell. If you see a variance, then hit has something to do with two sources of code talking to each other to make an outcome. i.e. stat/number +/- stat/number = number
number = < or = to base stat/number will cancel out Desoul effect.
number = > to base stat/number will allow Desoul effect.

Something along those lines I would assume.

Yeah the desoul spell.  In SF1 or 2 though

Good luck with your story writing.
Devlyn and myself came up with some pretty awesome stuff and he went away and built more and more on it, it's really a very fun part of the development (compared with the pixel work later on).

Yep, built more and more... and then my laptop died .

So whatever you do: make BACKUPS

Having just had a hard drive destroy itself, I second what Devlyn said

I always wondered why Desoul and similar spells seemed to work much better for AI characters. Maybe it's just psychological, but it always seemed to be deadly for them and useless for everyone else.

I definitely agree that more story interaction with characters is a good thing. I never liked the "Hey, I'll fight with you" excuse that a few minor characters give. I thought Shining Force 2 piled in a few too many characters, which didn't help the problem.

I think the issue comes from needing players to have a certain amount of characters to survive. The linear(ish) nature of the game makes it difficult to give players a choice of whether or not to recruit someone. For example, "hardcore" players getting to the tough battle with only 6 characters could be considered a challenge. However, for an inexperienced player on their first run this would be undesirable and could even put them off playing altogether.

One solution to this is having a core set of characters in your squad, with well written stories. The rest can be more difficult to acquire, so that novice players aren't punished for not exploring every inch of the game world.

- Sorry for not getting back sooner

Great point. I do think that SF2 had a great cast regardless of size. It was how they decided to use that size to perform in the story. They could have split up Bowie and Peter, in a sense, and let you use 2 sets of parties to go off on their own etc, then combine them into a massive group for the FINAL BATTLE!. This is something I am deeply considering in the SF game produced by our studio. So that way you can have the massive character count as seen in SF2, form 2 parties with characters who are deeply involved in the scenarios. Be able to mix and match your two teams at certain points of the game to change up your parties (though some story driven characters will not me switchable) and still have about 5 characters you can have as excess baggage to fill in the 2 to 3 spaces open in the full party count (so, 10 characters in excess to standard story driven parties at the absolute MOST, I like the idea of 5 to 7).

Sounds good Maestro, keep the brainstorming at that level and you'll have a great game concept in no time : )

Maestro: Your ideas are good, but do you also have a skilled team of programmers, graphicians and musicians? All of us have ideas, but the implementation is where most of us fail.

Well, I see now you are a great musician.

Well, we do have a team, for the most part it is small.

We have 2 programmers, 2 concept artists, I do the sound and music, 1 2d pixel designer, 1 technology/web designer, as well as about 3 story designers and a 3d artist. We are training a few more people with the 3d design program Blender as well as work with game creation software, but only 2 of us (the programmer and myself) are professionals at our individual fields and have created games before. Currently we are 60% with a game project we have spent several months on, so we are plotting out another game, a SF style TRPG/SRPG which is just in the conception stage while everyone else, including myself, are slowly finishing our current project.