History

Long ago, when I was in my twenties or so, I used Blitz Basic to create: The Fairy Tale. Quite an achievement, but the Blitz Basic community bashed it down in a rather troll manner and they thought I was a guy not able to take criticism. Fact is, I was already back then trained as a reviewer on a website on high standards so I can easily distinguish criticism from trolls. They just didn’t understand the genre that is jRPG and then you are clearly in the wrong community. As a result the game never got truly finished. The graphics most of all were placeholders I was looking for artists for, but I could find none, well I had a few who quickly ran away even before the project was finished. This was a pity. People who did understand the genre liked the game, and even gave me great feedback. The ideas for a “Fairy Tale II” or “The Second Fairy Tale” as it was back then codenamed were there already. And the story line of “The Second Fairy Tale” was the base of a complete line of novels, now known as “The Phantasar Chronicles”. The game that was originally meant to be “The Fairy Tale II” didn’ t get finished because, my girl-friend, my graphics designer at the time, left me, and the project was cancelled. Years later “The Second Fairy Tale” got back under a different name, and yes, it’s here on Game Jolt, as it was years later revived as “The Secrets of Dyrt”.

I was not entirely happy with the engine I used for Dyrt, so I ditched it and wrote a new version of the engine for “Star Story”. And the engine I used for Star Story (which is LAURA II or the “Lua-based Advanced Utility for Role-Play and Adventuring”) shall now be used to get the one story that started the Phantasar universe back to the light. The story of the forbidden love of the human Jake and the Fairy Marrilona, will be brought back, with my current technology

To give you a little of a preview, above you can see Marrilona, one of the two main protagonists of the story. Marrilona is a Fairy 200 years of age. For Fairies that is the age you officially leave your childhood behind and that you are officially recognised as an adult. Marrilona is a girl with lust for adventure and is curious by nature. She never thinks before she acts, and therefore she’s know to get into trouble a lot. She easily cries when that happens, but she always accepts the blame when it’s rightfully hers. She doesn’t like how her father is protective over her, still she loves him with all her heart, just like her little 60 years old sister Yannee. She will eventually fall in love with Jake the “other” protagonist, and since Jake is a human and thus supposed to be her enemy. However when a Fairy girl falls in love with a man, she (without realising it) constitutes an unbreakable magic bond with him, keeping to two together forever, however legend has it an evil black dragon will awaken when a human and a Fairy get mixed up with each other like this.

“The Fairy Tale” was back then set up as a “child-friendly” story, it was only later that I decided to make the world of Phantasar a lot more mature than that (which you can easily see in “The Secrets of Dyrt”). This will mean that this game will contain a lot less “sexually orientated” humor than Dyrt and Star Story have. In order to be able to reuse the voice acting samples I still have, the story line will kept as much the same as it was in the original version.
If you believe you can do a better job they did, well you may try to prove it ;) but before that, I advice to wait for the playable demo first in order to get you a bit of an idea of the story line, because it will help you a lot to know about about the characters and their background. I’d like to keep the voices of the characters I voiced myself in my own hands, as they are characters I choice to voice myself for a reason back then. There are not much people who can do the typical accent Hando Stillor talks with, for example (which is NOT based on any existing English accent. It’s just an accent on its own, any resemblance to existing English accents is merely coincidental).

The ideas of this game will be as follows:

• The Story will be the same as in the original. The GamePlay will not be. This due to certain things in the original no longer being supported by my new engine, but also because of things that I was back then already not happy with and of which I know I can do better now.

• The inventory will be shared once more over all characters, like it was in Dyrt. It’s not that I don’t like the individual bag system Star Story works with, in fact, I think that was one of the better parts of that game, but I merely used it in Star Story to distinguish that game from Dyrt and all my other RPG games. This game will be more in line with the Phantasar series, and thus a change back here.

• Instant Random Encounters will also be back for two reasons. A) it’s easier to script and also easier to get stable. The routine I used in the Secret Phantasar Missions in Star Story (yeah, they are there, search well to find them), will be taken as a template and be more advanced. In most dungeons, each dungeon will only have a set number of encounters. When you run out, monsters will no longer turn up in that location. Leaving the dungeon or using a savespot will reset this counter though. This can make things more stable and easier to code on one side, and on the other side take away the frustration for endless encounters when you get yourself lost in a dungeon. I was never really happy with how the enemies-in-the-field-system in Star Story worked out.

• The Time-Based battle engine was nice, but it will not be reused in the current plans. In stead of that a kind of “card system” will be used. The character’s speed will decide where in the row you’ll end up and where you’ll end up after an action. Some items and spells will be able to add extra cards in order to “repeat themselves”. Using this wisely can really add more strategy into the game than the original game could.

• As in the original game, you will not change party members like in Dyrt and Star Story. The four main characters will be with you the entire game, only one of them will temporarily be replaced with a guest character for story line reasons.

• Like the original game and Dyrt, this game will have a New Game+ feature adding new content in the form of four extra sidequests, plus extra EXP and Money.

• Dyrt did support mouse, but the support was poor. Star Story was mouse only. I guess it depends on who you ask which is better. I am researching if TFTREVAMP can support both keyboard/joypad and the mouse can be supported. This will (of course) mean some complicated configuration systems are needed (especially since Game Pads differ very much per brand and model and I need the game to be able to support them all). The controller I own myself is a F310 and that will also be the one used for testing, so that controller will be the default config, based on how the button config is on the PAL version PlayStation RPGs. (I need to set a standard somewhere, eh?)

• Honno came up with the idea of using a different screen resolution. Currently LAURA II has poor support for that, but it will be easy to set that out more properly, so that is not the problem. My problem is that I would have to keep the scripts in a way that they can grow and shrink with the chosen resolution, however it is not possible to put any support for that in Kthura, meaning that in lower resolutions you’ll see less of the map than in bigger resolutions, and that can bugger the map design a bit. It will be easy to put in some extra configuration in Kthura for that though, allowing me a bit of “airspace” to experiment with.

• I also want to support a 10-pixels-off system. This because, this is a game based on console style RPGs. Although you need a desktop mac or windows PC to play it, I want you to be able to experience the game as such, by plugging your computer to a normal TV. Most computers and TV support HDMI, making support for that easy. However, the TVs I tried this on, always cut a piece of the screen of. In Dyrt you can see the result of that due to the HP of the characters by outside the screen borders during combat, which was quite a setback for me, but discovered too late. The UI for Star Story already took care of that problem. In TFTR I want to make this optional so you have a full display on a normal monitor, but you can still see all stuff on a TV. This will be quite a challenge.

• The spell obtaining system will be the same as Dyrt’s, however as by Darkbloonbane’s request, in this game I shall try to show you what the requirements will be for obtaining a new spell. Marrilona and Jake in particular will have to deal with some combinations here so a proper list may indeed be in order.

• The possibility to turn-off random encounters will return, but in a little different rule set than in Dyrt.

• Like the original game, the remake will have a Multi-Prologue. Each character will be played in random order first, before the actual game begins. Allows you to get a bit of an image of each character before the actual game starts.

• Any RPG game can become too easy when you “overgrind”. This game will deal with a “dynamic level cap” system to prevent that. The chosen difficulty mode will decide how much “space” you get here. I cannot yet give exact numbers as I’m still calculating this all out ;)
  Grinding is still possible, but not eternally.

• Well like Dyrt and Star Story, there are three difficulty mode. A “TOO EASY” mode a “normal mode” and a “TOO HARD” mode. Once again, the differences between the skill levels differ too greatly to allow in-game changing, so you can only chose the skill at the start. A full list of differences may be put on later.

• “Oversoul” will return. Play Dyrt to see what it does :)

• The game will have support for both Anna and the GJ API. More internet APIs are possible to implement, as long as you tell me how they work ;)

That covers the most important stuff.
Please note. Aside from the launcher design which is used to start the game,not a single bit of Lua code has yet been written, and I will start somewhere in September. If you have any suggestions based on what you’ve seen in either Dyrt or Star Story, now is the time to come up with that.
The story line stays as it is, so no changes there, but when it comes to the GamePlay, everything is possible as long as no code exists (well, not everything, but a lot at least), as soon as the actual scripting has begun, things will become a lot harder or even impossible as the development progresses.
Basically every suggestion will be taken seriously even when I’m rejecting it for this game (okay, don’t suggest the game should make the computer should start spitting out bacon, as there is a limit to what I can take seriously) :-P

Oh yeah, lastly I shall give you a few nice things to know.

• The Fairy Tale takes place 200 years before the events of The Secrets of Dyrt.

• Marrilona’s little sister, Yannee, has become an adult woman by that time and she is Irravonia’s mother. In other words, Marrilona is Irravonia’s aunt.

• Seelah Gandra aka Scyndi is Hando Stillor’s great-great-granddaughter, which is also stated in Dyrt itself. (Hando Stillor is one of the playable characters in this game).

• The temple of Weniaria will look entirely different in this game from what it looks in Dyrt. Scyndi already explains in Dyrt why, and the events she tells about took place 7 years after the story of this game (and are covered in my novel “Loni”)