Support characters was something I had in the back of my mind since you often have support characters in major battle play throughout the series. Not to mention it would be difficult to implement a Apple as a fighter but it would be a shame to exclude such a reoccurring character for that reason.

Yeah character assists would be the tits! The antagonists could even be assisted by monsters for example Luca could be aided by a golden wolf or Neclord could call on the Abomination or a zombie for help. There are some old ideas in this topic: viewtopic.php?f=36&t=9636 . They may prove usefull, but perhaps not.

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If it's not found out, a lie becomes the truth.

monster summons as one of certain characters moves is definitely an option. i briefly considered it with neclord, but luca is a good idea too, and i'm sure there's many more that it could work for. one thing i'm trying to map out a little bit is single player. i don't want it to be linear like most fighting games (and most of the suggestions i've seen in other topics). right now i'm thinking i would take one of the games, like s1 for example, and in single player you have to play as tir. you would start out with the castle already probably, and some default amount of recruits that would be the default playable characters in multiplayer. probably something like gremio, cleo, pahn, camille, taiho, mathiu(support), and whichever others i'm missing from that early in the game. you wander the minimap kind of like in s3, but you can't actually visit towns, a menu would just pop up at each visit. you could buy gear, runes, explore, or whatever. if a recruitable character was in the town you could fight them to recruit them to your castle. there would always be somewhere you could visit to advance the story also, at which point you would fight a boss (kwanda for example). maybe your character gains experience as they progress through single player which makes them more powerful for multiplayer. etc. etc. etc.

most of that is distant future type of stuff. right now i need to work on character selection discernability for the sprite sets (so that when you select your character on the selection screen, it shows that sprite on the combat screen). i have it working for the portraits so it shouldn't be too hard to make it work for the sprites. i also want to spend a little time on making health bars looks good, setting up possible power gauge, spot for support character, spot for lives, etc.

here's a zoomed in capture of what i'm thinking of making the character panes look like during combat. consists of character portrait, support character portrait, life count, health bar, power bar, runes equipped, and magic points.

i intend to make the background color different for playable and support characters in the future. also if you look closely you'll see that luca's attack is behind tir in the combat pane instead of in front like it should be. this is something i'll have to work out when i get more into the actual moves for the spritesets.

If only my laptop wasnt stolen with photoshop, illustrator and loads of other art programmes on it i could give you a hand with this project but alas those filthy thieves left me an artist with out tools which pretty much = useless. I've been trying to save up to buy another one and get the programmes but my money keeps on going on rent and the car, DAMN YOU OVERPRICED WORLD WE LIVE IN!!

Its looking promising mate. Keep up the good work!

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If it's not found out, a lie becomes the truth.

there may or may not be other ways of obtaining software....or you could download a 30 day trial or something.

i think i solved some things so far today. got the character selection working for the sprites (although i'm going to have to redo keybinds as a result, which isn't too bad). also had a nice surprise when i figured out how to set up stats for characters which is a step in the right direction for integrating some rpg aspects into the game.

i need to add something to the character selection screen where you can see the level and stats, runes, weapon, etc. for the character you are selecting.

not much work this past weekend because of some prior obligations but i'm getting back to it, working on the stat sheets. there are a lot of new problems to solve and bugs to figure out with this though. once i get everything in place i'll get a screen capture up so people can see what i'm talking about.

side note: also been a little distracted by my suikoden 4 playthrough.

moderate breakthrough today. stats on a char's stat sheet now link to the combat sprites and i have some calculations working for when one sprites attacks the other (the damage done is actually the difference of the atk and the pdef, like it would be in s2). also got some combat text working, basically showing a number indicating how much damage was just done, above the characters after the hit connects.

yay suikoden 4! this looks awesome dude! you have to include Sierra pretty please

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I don't regret the decision I made that day. Even now. But...my heart still aches. I..I want to follow my heart. Whether it is right or wrong will be judged by history.-Pahn. Suikoden.

hahaha. yeah sierra will very likely be in the game when i get that far, but i'd say it's quite a ways away. my big goal atm is to just get a playable version with two characters (luca and tir just b/c that's what i started with).

i tried to screenshot some of my most recent work but it's distorting the text for some reason. i'll try to get something else up for people to look at soon though.

wow that would be the koolest! you've got the right idea i think starting small and then keep on adding. it would be an achievment in its self just getting two playable characters with attacks and a life bar. all the other stuff can come in the next stage. good luck with it, i cant wait now that sierra's going to be in it.

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I don't regret the decision I made that day. Even now. But...my heart still aches. I..I want to follow my heart. Whether it is right or wrong will be judged by history.-Pahn. Suikoden.

working on putting what i have done so far on the web so that people can see my progress in full and bug test for me and stuff.

if anyone knows a good free web host where i can just dump files and write some html, let me know.

also if anyone wants to look into some suikoden-esque fonts or anything like that, i could use it to make things start to look a little prettier. right now my title screen is pretty crappy.

this project is going to be revived and slightly overhauled. i now have an excellent artist on the team with me, so hopefully that will provide a big boost to getting a product available for the community. i had previously gotten some crude pixel art to a very very very basic and trivial phase of play, so with some real art imported into my code, i should be able to get something on the web at some point. don't expect anything just yet and certainly don't expect anything that resembles a completed game for a long long time, but feel free to ask questions and give us ideas.

Also, if anyone has a skillset that may lay in a field that could assist us, feel free to pm me and we'll see if we can add you to our team.

Hooray for suikoden fan work!

Please keep us updated on this because it looks awesome. I can't wait to play it.

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PSN: FreshMetal80

I agree with freshmetal, I've just read up on this for the first time and like what I see so far, please keep it up!