RPG, Monster RPG 3

[trentg]

Hello everyone,

A user of this forum suggested I post about our new game here, so here it is.

The game is called Monster RPG 3 (it's a sequel.) It's an RPG (JRPG battles, but not-so-JRPG gameplay.) It's still in early development. I will get this part out of the way right away: the game is open source and on GitHub, but the data and binaries are being charged for. It's being developed by my company, Nooskewl, and I work full time on open source games and need to earn some income. Incidentally, our other games are also on GitHub, though the data is free/libre for those so if you build them yourself, there is no monetary charge. All of of our libre content is zlib licensed.

The game is still in early stages content-wise as I've spent all my time building a foundation, which is known as Nooskewl Engine. Here are a few screenshots of the game:








The game's website is http://nooskewl.ca/monster-rpg-3. There is a devlog on our site here. I accept pull requests on GitHub and feature requests (preferably also on GitHub, but anywhere I see them I will listen.) However, for the time being, I don't accept contributions to the artwork, since that is something I earn money from and I don't want to get into that territory.

So far I've built the game myself, with a few contributions to the open source parts from users on our site. At the moment, I'm not looking to hire anyone but I may do so later.

That's all I can think of to mention right now. Any feedback, suggestions or questions are appreciated. Thanks.

EDIT: Nooskewl on GitHub, Nooskewl's website

[Akien]

Hi trentg and welcome on FreeGameDev

I've played a bit with Monster RPG 3 yesterday, and though it's indeed very early in development, it's IMO really promising; I encourage everyone to check the devlog linked above to see how it's progressing, you'll quickly want to preorder the game too and help fund the development of another great libre RPG.

For the reference, here are links to the GitHub repos of the free other libre games developed by Nooskewl:
- Monster (open sourced recently): https://github.com/Nooskewl/monster
- Monster RPG 2 (open sourced three years ago after a successful Indiegogo campain): https://github.com/Nooskewl/monster-rpg-2
- Crystal Picnic (open sourced recently): https://github.com/Nooskewl/crystal-picnic

Those three games are definitely worth checking out! Have fun, and don't hesitate to give feedback to trentg, he's very community-friendly

[Evropi]

Well, as a JRPG fan, I can give you one improvement you can make right off the bat. You seem to have abstracted every skill and most menu items into 3-letter abbreviations. This is an anachronism that hurts usability, and exists solely because of the technical difficulties of translating Japanese games to fit English user interfaces -- particularly given the memory constrains of the Super Nintendo and the like.

For a game developed with English and real i18n in mind from scratch, it would help usability to just write it out. And drop the all caps, or at least don't use that pixellated bitmap font. I think the Front Mission series has good examples of retro-style interfaces (though granted that's a 1999 game) that still feel usable and unconstrained by technology.

[qubodup]

@Evropi STR is more retro though.

@trentg congratulations to making a business out of this! All I can think of is that you might want to make google play android versions free with IAP and ads.

[Akien]

All I can think of is that you might want to make google play android versions free with IAP and ads.

Omg please no. Why would anyone who cares about user freedom as a libre game developer indulge in such a low business model? Let people pay a well-adjusted price for their game, and enjoy them to the fullest. IAP and ads are the plague of the gaming industry (though arguable "free" (gratis) apps that resell your personal data are not really likeable either).

Edit: If it's well established by market studies that Android gamers only play gratis games, then the game could come as a free long demo or 1st episode, and the rest would be paid-for material; once people started playing and enjoying the game, they might be enticed to buy the full game/sequel. But for the love of FLOSS, no IAP or ads, I beg you

Edit 2: Of course take my answer with a bit of salt. I'm not in the industry myself, so I can't really speak about how bad a business model based on ads and IAP would be; I just personally can't bear it as a customer.

[trentg]

@Evropi, thanks for the suggestions! I'll hunt down a better font and play around with using full stat names.

@qubodup, one thing I really dislike in games and apps is ads. I also dislike overly done IAPs (one time unlock is OK.) However times are changing so I will consider your suggestion. Thanks.

Edit: If it's well established by market studies that Android gamers only play gratis games, then the game could come as a free long demo or 1st episode, and the rest would be paid-for material; once people started playing and enjoying the game, they might be enticed to buy the full game/sequel. But for the love of FLOSS, no IAP or ads, I beg you

Edit 2: Of course take my answer with a bit of salt. I'm not in the industry myself, so I can't really speak about how bad a business model based on ads and IAP would be; I just personally can't bear it as a customer.

No need to worry, the plan is to sell it for a fee upfront, even though that's not the most profitable. I hate ads and IAP as much as anyone.

[c_xong]

Not all IAP is equal; the really bad ones are pay2win and energy systems, then there are cosmetic extras and game mode unlocks. Some people still hate all IAP, but then again some people just want stuff for free!

Check out Crossy Road and Alphabear for two good examples of unoffensive IAP. The core game in both cases is completely and unlimitedly playable without any purchases.

[trentg]

I played around with another font but I don't like it. But I did end up increasing the resolution of the text and expanding most of the stat names, but not all because it doesn't fit nicely with "Experience" or "Alignment." Here's an updated screenshot:



I found a couple nice fonts but really expensive licensing. Maybe I'll find something else down the road, still lots of time for that or maybe someone has a suggestion that fits nicely with the rest of the game.

[Akien]

Not all IAP is equal; the really bad ones are pay2win and energy systems, then there are cosmetic extras and game mode unlocks. Some people still hate all IAP, but then again some people just want stuff for free!

That's true enough, I played League of Legends a few years ago and found they had a pretty goo IAP model (more "IGP", it's not an "app" per se ). Their success tends to confirm it too. Basically I could play dozens of hours without buying anything, and then I was very glad to spend an overpriced 10€ to get some custom skins for my favourite characters

[qubodup]

@Akien I would hope an unlocked (paid) .apk would still be available on itch.io in that scenario.

@qubodup, one thing I really dislike in games and apps is ads. I also dislike overly done IAPs (one time unlock is OK.)

Shame one me. I can't actually remember whether I thought that a one-time unlock IAP (which probably means that 95% will uninstall as soon as they hit paywall) or decorative IAP was what I was suggesting... But as long as you have few users, ads are most likely to be more important. I would suggest showing them 1. during level transitions 2. after or before shopping for items 3. while dreaming and not during walking around in levels.

[trentg]

Guys, I don't plan on using any ads or IAP, but thanks for the suggestion. Making money isn't my #1 priority (not a good businessman...) I want to make good games, that I'd like to play myself. That's it.

[trentg]

A lot of work has been done on this since the last time I posted... I couldn't give an accurate summary without looking over git logs... I'm not going to do that though. :P

I just wanted to let you know, that everything that goes into making this game is now open on GitHub. We are charging for the game but the license allows you to demo it, and we're using an honesty policy so everything is available. There are instructions for building on Debian based systems on https://github.com/Nooskewl/monster-rpg-3. Once you have installed the necessary packages, just checkout the monster-rpg-3 repo and run monster-rpg-3/tools/build.sh (use -j8 or whatever to use all cores) from that directory level. It'll checkout everything else and build and put it in a mo3/ directory.

[shirish]

can somebody tell what is IAP ? Ah it's called in-app purchase. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microtransaction . Reading about it.

Btw have you tried pushing or getting some of the older games in Debian proper. It would go a long way in letting know about you and the games. Also, if it's in Debian, you are bound to get pull requests if for nothing but maintenance at the very least. Also if they are in Debian, then you would get access to not just Debian but Debian-derivatives as well (such as Ubuntu) . Mind you, I am talking of getting the older ones packaged, the ones which has marginal profitability to you and more or less is feature-complete , mature and is more or less into maintenance-mode.

[trentg]

I have some old games which I don't support anymore, but the ones I do still support (Crystal Picnic and Monster RPG 2) still make me some money (not a lot, never did but I have low income so a few bucks is good for me...) So I feel like if I packaged them for Debian, it would be an insult to people on Steam who buy the game. However, since both those games are zlib licensed, there's nothing stopping someone else from doing the work, and if it happens then I deal with it, I'll still support them as much as I can. I'd have to check if the required version of Allegro is in Debian. If not, I think we're planning a release of 5.2 sometime early this year.

[shirish]

These are the versions of liballegro in Debian testing -

{l Code}: {l Select All Code}

[$] aptitude search liballegro                                                                         
i A liballegro-acodec5-dev                                          - header files for the Allegro 5 audio codec addon                         
i A liballegro-acodec5.0                                            - audio codec addon for the Allegro 5 library                               
i A liballegro-audio5-dev                                           - header files for the Allegro 5 audio addon                               
i A liballegro-audio5.0                                             - audio addon for the Allegro 5 library                                     
v   liballegro-dev                                                  -                                                                           
i A liballegro-dialog5-dev                                          - header files for the Allegro 5 dialog addon                               
i A liballegro-dialog5.0                                            - dialog addon for the Allegro 5 library                                   
i A liballegro-image5-dev                                           - header files for the Allegro 5 image addon                               
i A liballegro-image5.0                                             - image addon for the Allegro 5 library                                     
i A liballegro-physfs5-dev                                          - header files for the Allegro 5 physfs addon                               
i A liballegro-physfs5.0                                            - physfs addon for the Allegro 5 library                                   
i A liballegro-ttf5-dev                                             - header files for the Allegro 5 TTF addon                                 
i A liballegro-ttf5.0                                               - TTF addon for the Allegro 5 library                                       
p   liballegro4-dev                                                 - development files for the Allegro library                                 
v   liballegro4.2-dev                                               -                                                                           
i A liballegro4.4                                                   - portable library for cross-platform game and multimedia development       
i   liballegro5-dev                                                 - development files for the Allegro 5 library                               
i   liballegro5.0                                                   - portable library for cross-platform game and multimedia development     


{l Code}: {l Select All Code}

[$] apt-cache policy liballegro5.0                                                                                                 
liballegro5.0:
  Installed: 2:5.0.11-2
  Candidate: 2:5.0.11-2
  Version table:
 *** 2:5.0.11-2 600
        600 http://httpredir.debian.org/debian testing/main amd64 Packages
          1 http://httpredir.debian.org/debian unstable/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status/


Hope this tells you the state of things.

[trentg]

5.0 will not work. I don't remember exactly which things from 5.1 we use, but I'm pretty sure a lot of it.

[Danimal]

That colour palette hurts my eyes, why dont you use one of the premade ones from OGA?

[dulsi]

Is the source code for this or the other games (Monster 2 and Crystal Picnic) still available. Your github projects seem to have been deleted. I did manage to find 2.11.6 of Monster 2 but haven't found Crystal Picnic. I've heard source is included with the purchase of the games. Is that true? Is it still under the zlib license in that case or more restrictive?

[Akien]

Oh that sucks, the source repos seem to have been deleted from GitHub indeed.

I have online forks on Monster (https://github.com/akien-mga/monster) and Crystal Picnic (https://github.com/Nooskewl/crystal-picnic) as I contributed some patches to them. I also have local clones from the ashedit, monster-rpg-2, Nooskewl-Engine and monster-rpg-3 repos (from last time I had time to really playtest, so August 2015 or something).

I'd like to have the situation clarified by Trent before I upload my clones though; why were all those repositories taken down? I may understand that you had a change of heart for Monster RPG 3 which is in development, but why remove older games that were not particularly being developed further, and had been available as open source projects for a while?

[Akien]

I found this fork for Monster RPG 2 which dates from Jan 2016, so it's more recent that my local clone: https://github.com/carriercomm/monster-rpg-2 (I just forked it too, one never knows...)

I guess I should start forking even active projects in my https://github.com/LibreGames ...

Edit: I asked Trent about it on twitter: https://twitter.com/Akien/status/712909546168139776

[Akien]

Apparently this "carriercomm" account is a serial forker, so he has forks of all Nooskewl repos.

I reforked them in my own organization meant to archive libre games (mostly unmaintained, or maintained games without many forks, that I fork to ensure they don't get lost if their author decides to delete the repo):
https://github.com/LibreGames/crystal-picnic
https://github.com/LibreGames/monster
https://github.com/LibreGames/monster-rpg-2
https://github.com/LibreGames/monster-rpg-3
https://github.com/LibreGames/Nooskewl_Engine
https://github.com/LibreGames/Nooskewl_ashedit
https://github.com/LibreGames/Nooskewl_tgui3

The only repo that it did not mirror is the one containing the assets from the monster-rpg-3 demo, as those are not libre and thus I'm not entitled to distribute them.

[dulsi]

What library is wrap.h from? I've been trying to compile crystal-pinic.

EDIT: Nevermind I see it now in the libs directory.

EDIT: Requires allegro 5.1 which an unstable and therefore not included in fedora. I found a discussion asking for 5.2 back in 2012. I even seen Trent posted some in that thread.