Ye Olde Blah

Find it here:

http://ccs.chem.ucl.ac.uk/~derek/SSTDD-beta-2014-04-22.zip

It comes with 0 documentation, but it is essentially a compiled Java application. If you have the latest Java Runtime Environment (version 7) installed, then you should/might be able to run it by double-clicking Shiny_Sword.

All comments, feedback, contributions and hatchet jobs are welcome in this thread!


Basic list of features:
* 6 characters
* 7 battle scenes
* several shops
* three quests
* A partially working overland map
* Various spells, including fireball, blaze, tornado, heal and bolt
* Support for ranged attacks (animation needs some work though), backstabs, land effect and movement constraints.
* Support for saving and loading games.
* A pretty sophisticated system for dialogues, personalities and affiliations.
* A graphical map editors
* And almost all of this trivially editable.

Screenshots are here: http://www.shiningsource.net/forum/index.php?topic=1125.0

Known issues (a non-exhaustive list that will grow as I get more comments):

* Attack/shopping menus etc. are unreadable in the new resolution and need to be revamped.
* Plot is unfinished.
* The context menu for status, giving items etc. is largely unfinished (players can press the right arrow key for the give item interface, which does already work).
* Ranged attack animation is still rather weird, and should be revamped or tagged with an epilepsy warning.

I keep meaning to comment on this for a while but moving house & a broken PC got in the way. Anyways, here's some (delayed) feedback:

Obviously congrats on another release :) It's definitely come a long way, and I'm still surprised by how much is in this one. It definitely feels like a good engine be working with, even with a few quirks here and there.

From a purely personal point of view, it might be worth adding a training battle (or at least a really, really easy one) to get new players started. My first game saw me getting completely destroyed by rats. Not my finest hour :) My second battle went pretty much the same way, but eventually I got the hang of it. I guess I could have edited the files and cheated ;)

Apart from losing a lot I had good fun though, and I enjoyed walking around and trying out the various dialogue trees and quests.

I haven't had a chance to edit things yet, but I'd like to have a go when I get chance. Really impressed with the amount of features crammed in, so I'd like to play around with them. Reading through the source and event/entity files has given me a lot of ideas too.

Congrats again on getting something out the door, and I'll be playing more so expect more feedback (but hopefully not another wall of text :))

Hey Ty,

Brilliant! Thanks a lot for all the nice words and comments, and please do feel free to leave any additional comments here and even to commit changes to the game's source code. The current version also still packs a sprite editor which can be used for other games (click the strawman symbol in SMEE), but unfortunately I've been too time constrained the last few weeks to add any major features.

But the game is on my radar, and I definitely do expect to boost it further in the coming months, and make the early battles a little easier and more numerous :).