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Street Posse Showdown (Demo Released!)


FuriousGamer87
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As it is with every city, crime is unavoidable in Oaksville, but the situation has gotten worse over the recent years. It was bad enough that most of the wealthy residents have left, fleeing for greener and safer pastures. Without the income or taxes from those people, the city cannot afford to maintain the size of the existing police force. Therefore, with great pain, they downsize the cops to less than a quarter of their previous number.

Without most of the cops, the crimes have increased and the situation on the streets has gotten more chaotic as various groups struggle for dominance. At present, whatever your past and reason is, you have decided to fight back with a group of people dissatisfied with the current situation. How will you fight? Whom will you let into your posse? And what future will you decide to pursue?

That’s up to you, leader. Welcome to Street Posse Showdown.

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This is Springwell, one of the city districts in the game.



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  • Highly Tactical Battles

The distance, positioning, class, available techniques and elements of your troops have a huge effect on how well your posse will fare in the battlefield. Be careful in how you move your people as the enemies have zero moral issues in ganging up on them. Buffs and debuffs will play a huge role as they are not simply small percentage increase or decrease, but affect stats majorly.

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A showcase of the battlefield.

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A gif of the above showcase.
  • Mission-Based Gameplay

Instead of fighting just a single battle each time, now your posse has to fight a series of battle in a mission before being allowed to rest and refresh. Your men may have start each mission with a full tank, but will they expend it all in the first battle and go on empty into future battles? Or will they be stingy and conserve their stamina for next battles? Will this cost them in surges? It’s your game so you decide.

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District controls in general.

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Going Into a mission from the district screen.

  • Large Amount of Forces

You may start off capable of only bringing 6 of your members into the battlefield, but that number may reach up to 12. So too will the number of people you can bring into each mission increased as the game goes on. Do note that this escalation of force is not only privy to the player, but also to the enemies.

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The UI is obviously inspired by the Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together PSP remake of 2011.

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  • Distinctive Elemental Attributes

Inspired by Pokemon, each character and their attacks have elements. The interaction between these elements will decide how strong will the attack be and how well will the character use the attack. Going with a diverse cast of characters with different elements will help you against most foes than going in with everyone in the same class and element. But, hey, it’s your game and it’s your call.

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  • No Permadeath But Enjoy Your Injuries

There won't be any permanent death when a character is knocked out on the battlefield. Instead the said character will get an injury which may be permanent or temporary. To get rid of a permanent injury, the character need to have quite a long visit to the St. Thomas Hospital, which charge a hefty price for their services. Will you spend money on your men health or you just ignore it and fight on with your personal army of injured cripples?

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  • Replaceable Techniques

While your members can learn new techniques by leveling, some of the best and most suitable techniques are only available outside of growth. Those are available through either training or items. Be it equipping a gun to shoot bullets or training in a dojo to learn how to deliver an uppercut, everything is available as long as you got the dosh for it.

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Most items grant technique which allow characters to use them in battle.
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  • Knowledge Is Power

When fighting someone, knowing what he is weak against, what moves does he have and how much punishment can he take before he fold is quite important. This is represented by a knowledge level of what you know about each of your enemy posse. When you reached a new level of knowledge, you gain more details about the posse and their members. At maximum level, you get even to know the enemy characters’ traits, personalities and quirks.

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The higher your knowledge level of specific groups, the more detailed the information you get about them.

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Observe how higher knowledge level help you identify foes' details. For enemies that you never met before, your knowledge of them start off at level 0.

  • Randomize Recruits

The characters that you can recruit into your posse, with the exception of special NPCs, are randomized in terms of stats, name, gender and characteristics. Who knows, you may be lucky enough to get Bubba, the very friendly ex-prisoner or Sasha, the strong independent woman who need no man.

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  • Single Player Story-Driven Campaign

This game development is focused solely on creating a fun story-based campaign based on the exploits and decisions of your character. Most of content are handcrafted and there will be no grind whatsoever just to pad the gameplay time.

  • Changeable Clothing

This game character sprites is developed using Spriter character maps. This in turn, allow player to customize the clothing of each of their posse members as much as they wanted, with exception of special NPCs. Never underestimate the joy of dressing up your posse with a theme in mind.

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The gif demonstrate one part of the character creation process and the ease of clothing customization.

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I started developing SRPG after I get tired of whining and complaining about the absence of good SRPG in the market. The western SRPG I found the gameplay element is too lacking and simple while most Japanese SRPG, with the exception of Fire Emblem series, is too grindy for my taste. Even so, I enjoyed them but believed that I could do better given a chance. By making a SRPG that have robust gameplay elements while ensuring all battles are handcrafted, without any grind. A game that I and my friends would enjoy playing. And so began my hard journey into the world of gamedev around 3 years back.

I have created many prototypes and many systems before. Some are as simple as the ones I complained about before. Some are simply too hard and require the players to read a 200 page manual before being able to understand the mechanics due to my effort of translating tabletop rules into video game. Despite all that setbacks, I like to believed that I learned, improved and absorbed all that is good in those system.

And so, 3 years have passed and here I am, bringing you a game with a ruleset that is hopefully, simple to understand and yet have a depth for those who want to master it.

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Usually it's just me. But I have an audiobro helping me in this project. To ensure my ability to keep him focus on the project, I will go for crowdfunding sometime in the future. My previous project died after I wait for months for audio from an audiobro who is too busy with upfront paying jobs and too embarrassed to tell me that fact until I confront him about the months of delay. I do not wish to repeat the same experience.

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The demo is completed. You can download it on the by clicking on the link below. Any feedback is appreciated.

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Edited by FuriousGamer87
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PLEASE put your screenshots in spoiler tags!

Also, what are the system requirements to run the demo?

Done and done.

The system requirements shouldn't be much. In the end, this is just pixel art. Most of the heavy usage would be in CPU, not GPU.

If you can run Directx 9.0c and your PC is from around 2010 and above, you shouldn't have any issues.

This looks amazing! I like all of the different concepts that you have like customization and the concepts of battle. I'll definitely keep an eye on this project.

Thanks!.

Edited by FuriousGamer87
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This is really cool, the amount of work put in definitely shows.

Since there's a huge amount of text in the game, I'd strongly advise finding a proofreader to go over it. There are a handful of grammatical errors in there (especially in the status effects page), and in general it's possible to say some of the stuff you're saying in about half the space- and taking less time to explain the rules has the same effect on playability as having simpler rules. For starters, avoid saying things like "basically" and "in short" since they're usually indicators that you're being redundant. You might also benefit from making sprites for various controller buttons that you can use instead of saying "_ button".

[spoiler=Revision example]Current Basic Knowledge -> Incapacitation text: "Characters cannot die in the battlefield. Instead, when a character's HP have reached 0 or below that during battle, he is knocked out. Knocked out characters can no longer participate in the battle unless you have certain items to force the poor sods back into the fight."

The first sentence is focused on correcting a misconception players may initially have if they assume this game to parallel Fire Emblem or similar, but since the details of incapacitation are explained later (and since it's called incapacitation and not death), this isn't necessary.

In the next line, "character" is a bit of a long word, and unit would work better (unless you specifically need character for thematic purposes, but I'm not getting that impression). "Have" is a typo and should be has, but "has reached" is more concise as "reaches". "0" should be zero, as it's easier to read- typically type out all numbers less than 10, and up to 20 if it feels right. "He" should be "they", unless the cast is all-male. Since you're listing this condition as Incapacitation in the menu, it's best to refer to it consistently that way, so "knocked out" should be "incapacitated".

The next line is really about two ideas- the effects of incapacitation, and how to cure it, so it should be split into two lines. The first line is just a case of shortening things as before- "Knocked out" to Incapacitated and "characters" to units. "Can no longer participate in the battle" can be simplified to "cannot fight", which also removes the unnecessary implication that they could fight before. This is also a good place to mention being injured, as otherwise a player trying to look up side effects of incapacitation wouldn't know about that unless they read the entire rest of the rulebook.

For the second, splitting the sentence requires a bit of rearranging: "You can force the poor sods back into the fight if you have certain items." Forcing sods is just a really long way of saying "You can cure incapacitation", but directly referencing the player in game text is usually an immersion breaker so it should be changed to "Incapacitation can be cured". "Certain items" is pretty vague as well, since it doesn't give an idea of what said items are- it's best to just list the name of the most common revival item instead (derivatives of that item should have obvious effects and/or relation to it by their name, ex Max Revive or Revival Herb).

Finally, since you're putting a lot of information in one place for the player's reference, it's a good idea to use a wiki style and make names of items, conditions etc link to their respective pages when clicked on (and change color to emphasize it). Here, that would be Injury and whatever the Revival item is.

Revised version: "When a unit's HP reaches zero, they will be incapacitated. Incapacitated units cannot fight and have a high chance to receive an injury. Incapacitation can be cured using a (most common revival item)."

Edited by Czar_Yoshi
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This is really cool, the amount of work put in definitely shows.

Since there's a huge amount of text in the game, I'd strongly advise finding a proofreader to go over it. There are a handful of grammatical errors in there (especially in the status effects page), and in general it's possible to say some of the stuff you're saying in about half the space- and taking less time to explain the rules has the same effect on playability as having simpler rules. For starters, avoid saying things like "basically" and "in short" since they're usually indicators that you're being redundant. You might also benefit from making sprites for various controller buttons that you can use instead of saying "_ button".

[spoiler=Revision example]Current Basic Knowledge -> Incapacitation text: "Characters cannot die in the battlefield. Instead, when a character's HP have reached 0 or below that during battle, he is knocked out. Knocked out characters can no longer participate in the battle unless you have certain items to force the poor sods back into the fight."

The first sentence is focused on correcting a misconception players may initially have if they assume this game to parallel Fire Emblem or similar, but since the details of incapacitation are explained later (and since it's called incapacitation and not death), this isn't necessary.

In the next line, "character" is a bit of a long word, and unit would work better (unless you specifically need character for thematic purposes, but I'm not getting that impression). "Have" is a typo and should be has, but "has reached" is more concise as "reaches". "0" should be zero, as it's easier to read- typically type out all numbers less than 10, and up to 20 if it feels right. "He" should be "they", unless the cast is all-male. Since you're listing this condition as Incapacitation in the menu, it's best to refer to it consistently that way, so "knocked out" should be "incapacitated".

The next line is really about two ideas- the effects of incapacitation, and how to cure it, so it should be split into two lines. The first line is just a case of shortening things as before- "Knocked out" to Incapacitated and "characters" to units. "Can no longer participate in the battle" can be simplified to "cannot fight", which also removes the unnecessary implication that they could fight before. This is also a good place to mention being injured, as otherwise a player trying to look up side effects of incapacitation wouldn't know about that unless they read the entire rest of the rulebook.

For the second, splitting the sentence requires a bit of rearranging: "You can force the poor sods back into the fight if you have certain items." Forcing sods is just a really long way of saying "You can cure incapacitation", but directly referencing the player in game text is usually an immersion breaker so it should be changed to "Incapacitation can be cured". "Certain items" is pretty vague as well, since it doesn't give an idea of what said items are- it's best to just list the name of the most common revival item instead (derivatives of that item should have obvious effects and/or relation to it by their name, ex Max Revive or Revival Herb).

Finally, since you're putting a lot of information in one place for the player's reference, it's a good idea to use a wiki style and make names of items, conditions etc link to their respective pages when clicked on (and change color to emphasize it). Here, that would be Injury and whatever the Revival item is.

Revised version: "When a unit's HP reaches zero, they will be incapacitated. Incapacitated units cannot fight and have a high chance to receive an injury. Incapacitation can be cured using a (most common revival item)."

Thank you for taking the time to give thoughts on how I could improve it further.

I really appreciate the effort.

I have to admit though that I use the word "character" for the thematic reason to emphasis that the people in the posse are well, characters with their own personalities and quirks.

And I use the male pronouns in singular terms because I thought that they and them should only be used in plural terms. Correct me if I am wrong in this.

You are right in that I should revise some of the text and avoid redundancy since brevity is the soul of wit and games should be games, not long-winded books.

Parsing the text to create icons is within my capability but not creating links since the game controls are based on gamepad/keyboard. Basically, mouse and touch control aren't supported.

Thanks again.

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And I use the male pronouns in singular terms because I thought that they and them should only be used in plural terms. Correct me if I am wrong in this.

Parsing the text to create icons is within my capability but not creating links since the game controls are based on gamepad/keyboard.

No problem.

English doesn't have a gender-neutral version of him/her, so they/their is generally what is used. Sometimes you can phrase it in a way that avoids the problem alltogether, but if it sounds more awkward then it's not worth it.

What about tabbing through the links in the text and selecting one when your menu cursor is over it?

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Will it work on mac? If not, will it work with wine on mac?

No idea, I haven't tested it on that platform yet since I don't have any OSX devices lying around. So far, I only tested it in the Windows platform.

The game engine I used to develop this game is supposedly to be able to handle the porting to Mac or Linux quite easily so if you want to test it out for me, I have no problem creating a OSX 32-bit version of the demo.

Do tell if you encounter any problems when you play through the demo.

That said, you still have to wait until my audiobro finish the audio portion of the demo. ;)

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This looks sooo legit!

Are you planning on making a single-player campaign for this? Would be cool for a nice story to go with all of that.

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This looks sooo legit!

Are you planning on making a single-player campaign for this? Would be cool for a nice story to go with all of that.

Actually that is the actual and only plan, considering the amount of human resource I have.

And there is a story and a few branching paths depending on the decisions you make and don't do in the game (ala Chaos Frame in Ogre Battle Series).

Basically, some posse will be either your enemies, your allies or uninterested in you and that will affect what classes, items, traits and techniques you have access to in the game since some are specific only to certain posse and they only grant access to people not looking to bash their skulls in.

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No idea, I haven't tested it on that platform yet since I don't have any OSX devices lying around. So far, I only tested it in the Windows platform.

The game engine I used to develop this game is supposedly to be able to handle the porting to Mac or Linux quite easily so if you want to test it out for me, I have no problem creating a OSX 32-bit version of the demo.

Do tell if you encounter any problems when you play through the demo.

That said, you still have to wait until my audiobro finish the audio portion of the demo. ;)

I'd be happy to test out an OSX version of the demo!

I'll make sure to tell you any problems.

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Finished about half of the shop functionalities for the game.

Let's talk about the finished portions.

First part is training.

Certain places in Oaksville offer training either in techniques or traits in exchange for money. As said before, access to those locations with sometime be decided by your relationship with different factions in the game.

I think the functionality is pretty much done. If a character learn more techniques than he could hold, he have to drop one of his existing techniques. You can see this through the gif below.

[spoiler=Images]

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[spoiler=Gif]

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Second part is recruiting.

Unlike most games, there is no one place in Oaksville where you can simply recruit any classes. The availability of classes in shops will be determined by the type of shop, the wealth of the district, whose turf is it and others.

In this example, since the place is a gym, you can only recruit brutes from there. The level which the recruit have is also determined by location.

[spoiler=Images]

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[spoiler=Gif]

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I will work on the buying and selling of goods after this.

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Just finished the last two of shop functions, buying and selling items.

In this game, buying and selling work differently from most other games in that the price of each item is not fixed nor is it the same in every shop.

Some shops may sell cheaper potions but be more expensive in other items such as grenades or guns.

Some shops will refuse to buy any potions from you while willing to pay above market price for your guns.

Moreover, certain characters and "limited time" shops have only a number of a rare item for sale, making you unable to purchase a huge number of the said item.

As said before, relationship with different groups in Oaksville will also alter the behaviors of certain shops.

The same also goes for recruiting and training, of course.

The intent is to make every shop and district unique and memorable.

Perhaps, in the industrial district, you will find cheaper industrial products and related services while in the commercial district, fashionable items are vastly more cheaply than in other districts.

And there are always wandering dealers and street traders willing to make a trade for the right price...

[spoiler=Buying]

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[spoiler=Selling]

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On the side note, I change the colors of the general UI for the game to invoke a fresher and lively look.

I think it does the job well.

For comparison, a before and after image are in the spoiler below:

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Going to work on improving the look and feel of info boxes in the game next.

Edited by FuriousGamer87
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The audio still haven't finished so we still have to wait for quite a while. Still left a few BGMs and SFXs to do, according to my audiobro.

On the side note, I finished several classes and the sprites to represent them.
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Fullback
This heavily armored fella finally bring his formidable skills to the streets.
Role: Defender Major, Physical Striker Minor

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Technician
Handy to have when your appliances are broken yet again.
Role: Debuffer Major, Defender Minor
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Upgraded the saving functionality to allow for custom slot names.

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It is surprising the amount of work needed to code and polish some features that we taken for granted in AAA games.

In case you are wondering, it's a hell lot.


On the side note, also finished yet another class.


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Chemist

A sadistic f++ker who use his knowledge of chemistry to screw with others.

Role: Special Striker Major, Debuffer Minor


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  • 2 weeks later...

Sorry I was gone, was on a trip.

I tried to open it on my mac, and got this:

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I am on OS X Yosemite, if that matters. (If you need any other info, feel free to ask.)

Damn, I don't have a Mac to troubleshoot this.

I apologize for making you waste your bandwidth and time on this. Sorry.

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Damn, I don't have a Mac to troubleshoot this.

I apologize for making you waste your bandwidth and time on this. Sorry.

That's okay! Thanks for taking the time to work on it! I will try downloading the windows version and running that with wine, I'll tell you how it goes :P

EDIT: Also, I might update my laptop and try to run it with OS X El Capitan (or whatever it's called, I think it's that)

Edited by Willie
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  • 3 weeks later...

Seems decent, but the UI comes off as a bit... confusing. Idk. Maybe just not my style.

Regardless, I'll at least keep an eye out for it. Thanks for sharing it!

Imma give this a spin this weekend

Thanks. Enjoy yourself.

Finished some stuff. Here are the highlights:
  • Upgraded the AI schematics to allow AI to take account of elemental advantages and affinity. In this new setup, the AI will compute all possible flow of actions of a single turn while taking account of its personality, AI type, movement focus, action type favoritism, target priority, tag team and elemental knowledge to calculate the final value of each flow. After all is calculated within nanoseconds, thanks to all the necessary variables are already inside data tables beforehand, the AI will always choose the flow of actions with the highest value and enact it.
  • Change the existing initiative system which is "roll every character's initiative at the start of each battle" to a new one which is "roll every character's initiative at the start of each round in battle". This make agility boosting and lowering techniques significantly useful in battle for adjusting turns, since initiative is calculated based on agility + initiative dices.
  • Game trailer is being worked on by audiobro. The visuals for it are done.
  • Removed unsupported Linux and Mac build of the demo after being unable to troubleshoot some issue that people have with them because I simply don't have machines running those OS.
  • New demo uploaded with the top two features added to it.
  • Working on making chapter 1 visual assets.
  • Finished the design for a new character class called Outcast. Specialized in attacks with nasty special effects attached, specially the type that screws both enemies and allies.
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An unhinged person that nobody want to be caught associating with. The strong BO doesn't help either.
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  • Removed unsupported Linux and Mac build of the demo after being unable to troubleshoot some issue that people have with them because I simply don't have machines running those OS.

You can actualy get linix on your windows computer for free by running ubuntu or another free build in virtual box or vmware (which essentially acts exactly like using an emulator, exept that it allows you do things like access the internet.) (dual booting works too, but it is more annoying from what i heard.) OSX is vastly more complicated though (entierly because apple intentionaly makes it as hard as possible to run OSX on a non-apple computer.)

With regard to the screenshots in the OP, some of them have unreadable text. It looks like you took them before the text had finished loading. You might want to replace those.

Edited by sirmola
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