Something Classic Games

Welcome to the 53rd installment of our (occasionally) weekly content blog! To celebrate this special occasion, I am going to go over a couple of backer specific bonus areas!

 
The Arena

On the bottom floor of the infamous Artifactor’s Guild lies the arena, where the bravest of warriors test their luck against a variety of foes. In practical terms, there will be a series of challenges to choose from, each presenting a series of battles based on locations you visited in the game.

Each tier consists of 5 battles, which are more difficult versions of enemy encounters seen previously. You cannot access the menu in between battles while you’re in the arena. To make things even trickier, your inventory is temporarily replaced with a tier-specific inventory, and your team will experience a unique handicap.

The handicaps vary from being limited to only using skills, to all skills doing 150% damage, to enemies being much more likely to dodge physical attacks.

The tiers will be challenging, even if you’re well prepared! But should you clear through these challenges, the rewards will be immense. We have largely completed the development side of the arena and look forward to fleshing it out in the testing phase!

The Forge

Another unique area in the Artifactor’s Guild is The Forge. When you first visit this place, you will be given a unique artifact, which may appear useless at first. However, you will quickly learn the power of this artifact: it contains three slots to place existing artifacts, allowing you to craft a custom accessory with great power. You want a single artifact that raises a hero’s HP, makes them attack twice, and attack all enemies at once? The forge can get you there.

We’re still working on the development aspect of The Forge, but it will add another dimension to the gameplay for those who are so inclined! We hope to get this all wrapped up soon, and we can’t wait for Shadows of Adam to be released to the public!

It’s testing time! We’ve sent out a demo of this game to some very fortunate testers, who have been tasked with not only playing the game… but breaking it. And break they did. Our testers managed to find bugs and collision issues we never could’ve imagined:

Collision Problems

The most common variant of bug in this game is definitely collision issues. Our engine requires us to “paint” all of the collision tiles on the map, which is prone to error on some of the larger maps. Without all of the necessary collision tiles, it is easy for a persistent player to find holes and go out of bounds. Or onto tables.

Typos and Character Encoding 

The next most frequent issue is typos. Despite having watched this opening scene hundreds of times, none of caught that awkwardly phrased sentence. Meanwhile, this tester probably noticed it within a minute! This is why it’s so important to have a fresh pair of eyes.

Others pointed out character encoding issues, which are the nemesis of any who works with web programming.

Game Breakers

Game breaking bugs are relatively infrequent, but obviously the most serious. In the above figure, Curtis had just finished suplexing the dragon (cliche, I know) and moving the dragon into his hurt state. But… now what? The menu for the next turn is supposed to appear! However, it never has and the tester is setting there waiting for his next turn to this day. These sorts of bugs are generally the result of fast and loose programming, which is one of the perils of a language such as Javascript. Perhaps an unexpected value was returned somewhere and the program did not know how to handle it. The conditions to start the next turn were never met.

Oversights

The last set of issues we noticed were what I would classify as oversights by us a team. For example, a lot of testers noted that we do not have a quit button in the menu, and they are absolutely correct! We’ve been testing on the browser for so long that we totally forgot to add this basic and essential feature for desktop players. Whoops! Another oft-requested feature is the ability to skip cutscenes, since there are so many. In this case, that was a debug feature that we explicitly removed… but may have to work in if these suggestions of any indication.

Conclusion

Testing is not fun for the developer or for the tester, but it’s a necessary evil. It’s amazing how things we as a team have seen for ages now totally went unnoticed and testers managed to spot it within minutes. This shows the importance of a fresh pair of eyes and an open mind in developing the best game you can make as a team. We are grateful for our testers and are currently clearing a mountain of bugfixes. The work of a game developer never ends.

 

Hi all, this week I’m going to talk about a subject near and dear to our gaming heart: airships. No retro RPG is complete without an airship – and since we here at Something Classic Games take great pride in milking jRPG tropes for all their worth, we just had to have an airship in Shadows of Adam! And so it was done.

The airship is acquired later in the game (as airships often are) and carries some plot significance. Without giving away too much, the airship itself serves as a minor dungeon and the place of some key plot events. But since good prevails over evil, the airship changes hands and becomes the heroes’ to wield for the final part of the game. From that point on, the world and its sidequests become your oyster.

The airship isn’t just a mere vessel for travel, however. No siree! Much like the classic Final Fantasy games, you can go inside of the airship and explore it while you’re flying. How does the airship continue on its course without a pilot? How does our hero know how to fly an advanced military aircraft only used by the elites of a notoriously bloodthirsty kingdom? Who knows!

When pressing the menu button while flying the airship, you are taken to the deck. Originally, we used a stock RPG Maker 2000 sky background to remind us of the good ol’ days. But we have standards here at Something Classic, so we put some of our budget towards this sweet sky background. The clouds even scroll! Madness, I tell ya.

While walking through the airship’s interior, you’ll have a rare opportunity to talk to your party members one on one. You’ll get a brief glimpse of their thoughts and feelings of the events that have unfolded so far while building the strength to finish the final ordeal that lies ahead.

Being a military grade aircraft, the airship comes with some lovely amenities. Don’t worry, you’ve earned them if you’ve made it this far!

The airship includes a full set of shops, complete with high level weapons, armor, and some lovely healing items that’ll be needing for the upcoming dungeon. And what’s more, the shopkeepers are former comedic-relief antagonists who have joined the side of good to peddle their wares.

And last but not least, the final area of the airship features a set of beds befitting the weary band of heroes on the go. And the best part? They’re free! No more pesky innkeepers once you have the airship… a good night’s sleep and a full HP’s restoration is available absolutely free of charge. It’s almost too good to be true, I tell ya!

Well there you have it, a glimpse at the airship in Shadows of Adam. We really wanted to capture our favorite aspects of older RPGs and I feel like we knocked the airship out of the park! Now if we could only program in some Mode 7 scrolling…

We are preparing for a Kickstarter and public demo launch for January 20th, 2016. To build anticipation, we created a pretty sweet trailer!

 

More info is available at the Shadows of Adam website

December is shaping up to be a productive month here at Something Classic. We’re working hard on our demo, which is finally nearing release. Here are a few things that have happened recently.

We’re on a Podcast!

Tyler and I recently did an interview for the great folks over at Matt in the Mancave. We chatted about the game, what we hope to accomplish, possible release dates, and why modern technology allows us to revisit classic RPGs while pooping! It was fun and we hope to check in with them again sometime in the future! Be sure to check it out here.

We’re working on a web page for the game!

The design for the page you’re viewing was a bit rushed, I’ll admit. But we (okay, mostly Tim), spent a lot of time working on a dedicated promo page for Shadows of Adam. It’s designed to look like those totally rad 90’s magazine advertisements you may or may not remember. That site will be launched very soon, so stay tuned.

We’re finishing up our demo!

The demo is finally nearing completion, which is a huge milestone for us as a team. This past week we’ve been working on squashing numerous bugs, improving our title and game over screen, and implementing some cool new animations. We’re very excited to finally have something ready for release and there will be more details forthcoming.

We’re preparing for a Kickstarter!

Last, but not least: we’re planning a Kickstarter campaign. We’re aiming for sometime in January 2016. We’ll have some cool rewards planned for everyone who backs us, and a successful campaign will certainly allow us to go above and beyond in terms of content and overall quality. More details forthcoming.

2016 is shaping up to be a great year for Shadows of Adam. After over 2 years of development, we’re hoping to get something playable out to the world, along with a finished product later in the year. Thanks for everyone who has shown interest in us so far and remember to keep checking back, because some big updates will be on the way.