This is my current RPG project. Sixty-Three Fires of Lung.

In this game the entire world of gaming will be parodied… mercilessly!
Cryptic references to famous games will be all over the place, and famous gaming clichés will be parodied, as well.

Yet, I wanted to give things a serious approach. Creating a good parody is harder than you think. Despite the game being a parody I wanted to give the game strong characters, in the sense of strong personalities, that you can despite them being ridiculed themselves as well, still relate to. Despite the high dose of humor I did think things through to give them a serious approach in order to make it all work.

The underlying gameplay received as much love and devotion to the jRPG genre as Dyrt, Star Story and The Fairy Tale REVAMPED received when they were in production. The current plan is to us the same combat mechanics as used in The Fairy Tale REVAMPED, which is the use of the ‘card gauge’ mechanic, yet the usage of new ways to learn abilities, Ryanna being able to transform herself into monsters, and also the planned tool system, will ensure the game has once again a new approach, and that it will not be a copy of the games I created before.

This is the first time I’m trying to set up an entire RPG game in the LÖVE engine. Don’t think that gives me any less work than the earlier RPGs written in my own engines. LÖVE is still pretty low-level, completely relying on Lua scripts, plus due to some complexity in my aim to keep things well-organised during the development and to be able to keep things documented pretty well after, I had to set up a lot of tools to make it possible to develop at all. I used the Go-language to make that happen. Go was a complete new field for me, as I never used it before, so I’ve been spending months learning it and setting things up properly. The game will also not feature a normal .love files like LÖVE games normally do. Because of this a little dependency will be required to run the game well. That dependency has also been set up in Go.

The downside of LAURA II (and those are the only reasons for ditching it), was that it was written in BlitzMax. The current maintenance of BlitzMax is… poor. In Windows I can’t get the current BlitzMax compiler to work any more, and in Linux getting anything compiled was always a disaster as far as BlitzMax was concerned. The LÖVE engine itself already has some Linux counterparts, plus compiling Go programs in Linux is as easy as on Windows and Mac. Cut short, this may be my first RPG to be able to run in Linux. The big problem is, that Linux has been designed by over millions of people with over a millions of different insights… Cut short, lack of standardisation. Just giving some executables and the scripts and assets won’t work unless you are using the same Linux as I do. There are tons of dependencies needed (as nearly everything as Linux needs, so that is not out of the ordinary) and I am still trying to break that all down. As far as I know users of Arch Linux (and its spin-off Manjaro) can easily get everything installed by a simple “pacman” call. For other Linux distros I will need to sort it more out. I will surely dive into it once the game reaches its first release.

Like before my plan is to first work things out far enough to be able to release a playable demo. That will take months from where I stand now, as all you can do when I wrote this was start a new game. The Game Jolt API is already able to log you in, and you will see the graveyard where the game starts, and that’s it. The player sprite won’t even yet appear (and that’s why there are also no screenshots yet), the only feature that works once the game has started at the current point of development is the quit feature provided by the normal OS standards. However, in my experience with earlier titles things can go fast, once the player sprite is able to move. Some scripts I did use in my earlier games can be re-used, since both LÖVE and LAURA II both use Lua as scripting language.

You may see that at the point this Devlog was written only two character portraits are finished now. Show how much I still got to do.
In the meantime the works on Cynthia Johnson will continue. The advantage there is that CJ is in a stage there is no more complex coding required to get things working and that allows me to work on that in a more relaxed manner. I will finish that game, don’t worry.

Well enough talk. There’s work to be done ;)