The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

I was watching a Final Fantasy Legend 2 / Saga 2 video let's play (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjiK9SL16hQ), and randomly also thought about Star Control. Saga 2 is kinda fun because it's such a mish-mash of humans, playable monsters and technology / fantasy.

I suppose this idea doesn't make much sense at all, but I was in the mood...

(http://androidarts.com/starcontrol/Star%20Control%20Saga%20rough.jpg)

That's all!

Seems like an ambitious project.  Probably doable on RPG Maker VX (http://www.rpgmakerweb.com/product/rpg-maker-vx) if you had the patience to draw the sprites.  Not sure what game you're getting at, though.  Pokemon?  Gotta catch 'em all (and sell 'em to the Melnorme!)

LOVE the artwork!  Thanks for sharing.  I always enjoy seeing this sort of fan-art, especially SC-themed. =D

All of my projects are ambitious, even the unambitious ones. Art-wise, I don't know if a still-picture and 2-frame-walk RPG is that demanding, but these things are always more work than one thinks when staring out. I'm just playing around here anyways.

Now some ship doodles, unrelated.

(http://androidarts.com/starcontrol/Star%20Control%20ships%202011.jpg)

Inconclusive experiments. GB resolution stuff has the advantage of being so small and abstract that you never really notice whether your guys are properly equipped, are drawn in an odd perspective or scale, etc. One solution is to use a vehicle for world map travel, but that doesn't work well in towns where the characters needs to be shown after all. Towns with no people might look dead and stale... unless perhaps a zoomed out solution is used (cute small people and vehicles). But, vehicles sort of distract from the guys-on-foot combat mechanic.

(http://androidarts.com/starcontrol/SCS_mapwalk.jpg)

If I remember correctly, Nintendo supported different graphics modes such as a grid layout and showing a textures at an angle to give an impression of 3D.

Awesome art as usual.  I'm sure someone could slice those images into a rough walking animation of the Syreen.

In addition to the mix of humans, monsters, aliens and tech, even the ships looked unique in both shape and color.  Some of the ships do not even look like space ships at first sight.  Such as the Slylandro Probe and the Andrysynth Guardian.

I actually made a simple program which loads my image and shows me the animation. I don't like animating in PS much.

I didn't like the SNES Mode 7 much in RPGs. It felt very flat. With isometric gfx you can have some simple overlap. However, doing tall grass and stuff which covers the feet does take some extra work.

Today's doodad. Doing just 2 walk frames is the simplest option. A standing frame requires a bit of extra work, but it can perhaps be snuck in as a mid-step frame.

(http://androidarts.com/starcontrol/Star%20Control%20iso%20test.jpg)

The world map would be using a different scale than indoors/indungeon.

The greedy Druuge could actually be used to explain (better than most RPGs) why the heroes, who are saving the world, still has to pay for stuff.

Do you find it illogical that the heroes still need to pay for stuff in most RPGs?  I mean, just because you're out to save the world doesn't mean everyone else can suddenly afford to give away their goods and services for free.  More to the point, you haven't saved the world yet.  Maybe after the game is over they can get whatever they want for free, but if claiming you and your friends are out to stop the big bad nobody else has beaten yet was sufficient to get free food and gear, the game world's economy would collapse pretty quickly.

Economics aside, I love the artwork.  Keep it coming. =)

P.S: If the Druuge are the defacto merchants around here, does that mean the player can trade away party members for gear? =O

I guess there are a few RPGs where you're just one of many adventurers throughout the game. MMOs for example. Diablo perhaps. I'm sure there are other examples too. But, I was more referring to RPGs with chosen ones, or eventually obvious and recognized saviors.

Let's imagine parallel RPG worlds, one where the hero is eventually recognized and given free endgame stuff, versus one where the hero has to grind for everything.

Which world would you like to live in? Let's assume that if the hero dies even once (no magical resurrection), everyone in the world is tortured to death, including all of the merchants.

But yeah, there is the chance that a bad hero is given the Vorpal Sword and falls into a volcano, severely reducing the real hero's chance of defeating the boss. Or that lots of heroes suck the merchants dry and no one even has swords anymore.

On the other hand, in some RPG's you don't have to be a magical chosen one. Any mediocre, randomly generated characters chosen by the player has a chance of saving the world. Examples are Final Fantasy Legend and Dragon Quest 3 (bunny girls!).

The world economy may or may not be wrecked when the merchants in the last town gives the heroes free items, but you're probably looking at a 90% chance of the world being saved with this scenario.

On the other hand, you can wager that the hero will make it without help, and save the world economy too! Who completes a game on his first run without dying though?

But, you also have to consider that... in a game like Dragon Quest 1, the evil monsters will disappear once the last boss is defeated. The swamps turn into flower fields and stuff like that. Every moment the player is forced to grind, people are dying, cities are sacked and and economic damage is done. Higher level monsters give higher XP, so a player with great items could level much faster to match the endgame equipment, and defeat the boss quicker.

The player probably earned a lot of gold in the process too, and could compensate the merchants afterwards and salvage the economy.

That's my take on it. It kind of comes down to what type of game world you're in.

The price the merchants are asking for does not necessarily come from pure greed. Whether the hero is the world saviour or not, swords are manufactured items, which require iron, coal to power the forge, food to feed the blacksmith, special cristals to enchant them, etc. Maybe the merchant hasn't the money for that upfront and needs the hero to chip in somehow. Paying it in gold instead of assorted resources and making the sword available straight on purchase is just a way of taking the tedious part out of the narrative.

It might be so... but many RPGs have crafting/fetch quest mechanics for producing equipment as well as regular stores with finished goods.

At any rate, it brings up an interesting point. Should enemies drop what they're actually carrying? Very few RPGs work like that, and I can see how such a system might cause problems:

1.) Should the player carry tons of loot around? I was thinking of using a tame hopping/prancing blobby as a mule to solve the backpack problem, regardless.

2.) What shall be done with all of the loot at the end of the day? Sold? Gifted? Converted to raw materials / re-crafted? Used to equip an army?

3.) Enemies probably shouldn't drop over-powered stuff. Stuff can break though... Maybe critical/skilled hits damages equipment less? Something to think about.

I wrote a few lines of code for this project today (character/stats class), but I doubt I'll get further with that. Maybe I should just finish a simple gfx set instead. Or do what I'm actually supposed to be doing.

If I recall right, the Ultima series worked a lot like this, so did the original Fallout games but that would take some serious coding to make it work right.

The SC universe actually could be revamped into many kinds of games I think. A MMO using the races already present would not be a bad idea. We have the basic character designs as well as the races ship builds so we could create other classes along the same appearance and technology as well as a way to write dialog choices among them as we know how each race likes to act and talk.

 I think I would be a part time human trader delivering copies of the Umgah guide to practical jokes in my Chmmr modified fighter while simultaneously working as a merc for the Yehat/Pkunk hunting down Iwrath survivors from the war and killing them ...with love...for money.

Or better yet! A corrupt tax collector collecting back taxes on Sapthiwa from Sapthi who forgot to pay on time while threatening them with a carrot! My hobby can be to use the money to get rare utwig masks for my walls.

or a pirate working for the Druge, an Arilu seeking enlightenment, A kor-ah survivor trying to rebuild there fleets to begin the war again, A Vux beautician, A supox accidentally having chosen Charlie Sheen as my symbiont, a Chmmr with brain damage thinking he is a borg...

See the possibilities are endless! :)

In seriousness I love the drawings, I wish I had even a 10th of the skill you had so I can at least make my stick figures look good. I'd be interested to see what/if you make something from this.

Have any of your personal projects ever been anything more than a bucketload of graphics with a supporting concept behind them? You seem to have a lot of good ideas and great graphics, but they don't ever seem to turn into something actually playable, sadly.

In my experience, one of the more common traits of "chosen ones" is a selfless desire to help others.  I should think that such a person, in a world of Black Villains and White Heroes, would insist on paying fair market value for the items he sought from merchants.  Even if they were willing to give stuff to him for free, it would only be right to compensate them for their efforts.  Heck, a hero like that would probably go around giving away money to those in need (and not just "those in need who will probably repay the favour in some way later on.")

For those games, the requirement to pay for stuff could be seen as a character trait of the hero rather than a demand on the part of the merchant.  There's a reason there aren't generally too many chosen ones running around worlds like that, after all.

Steve-O> Game worlds are of course very different from our world, so it's hard to draw parallels about economics and grind and world destroying villains. Moral is not an easy thing. Does the end justify the means? Perhaps the hero needs to be a little thieving bastard, or the world is likely done for? Like you sort of said... Maybe it's probable that the gold initially belonged to the people, and it should probably be returned to its former owners right away. A hero who insists on paying merchants, might also insist on first returning the gold to the people who lost it or just strangers who are suffering, and thus have very little gold to spend on things, further reducing his chance to save the world.

It's also possible that merchants are actually antagonists in the sense that they are preventing the world from being saved, along with the monsters (who might just be going about their natural monster business). A good merchant (or one with any sense of self preservation) would offer his goods for free in order to expedite the world being saved, or go and save the world himself. Thus, the merchants can be seen as being more on the side of evil and the thieving hero can remain fully "good" in the sense of a B/W RPG world.



Megagun> I'm coming closer and closer to finishing stuff every year. I almost finished three different projects this year. I think I've written about 15000-20000 lines of (BlitzMax) code. I have so little left to do on them, it's embarrassing.


Looking at the amount of GFX (http://androidarts.com/starcontrol/scs.htm) that I need to do for this project, I think I'm looking at a month of fulltime work, if I do it using a simple B/W gameboy palette and don't do any tile variations and such. I don't have the time or health now to do that, but it's still fun to play around with the idea and research old games.

Gameboy style test. A Spathi town hidden in the mountains. A Druuge tower city to the south-west.

(http://androidarts.com/starcontrol/SCS%20GB%20test.gif)

Arne, I'm going to point you in the direction of Lukipela's Otherwhen Odyssee (http://star-control.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=490). It's set in pretty much exactly the sort of world you're trying to come up with - perhaps an opportunity for collaboration beckons?

Hey this looks like fun- especially when I'm also a sucker for sprite games and making sprites (do you have some sort of process to which you draw/pixel them? Finding how artists sprite as such is usually hard to find save for replicating certain styles from ripped sprites in old games)

Perhaps having the game set on a slave shielded world would in some ways limit the exploration and races arriving to said planet-  as everyone would have had to piledrive there for some shoehorned reason before being shielded off. I guess you could explain it by having some sort of precursor tech superweapon but to stave off RPG cliches (especially those of the JRPG which do not/find it extremely hard to innovate) I'd probably go for something else. Slave shields also are red (at least the Ur-Quan/Spathi retro engineered ones and give the environment on the surface a dull red from the light and thus this would mess around with palletes?).

Perhaps have it like some sort of Dyson Sphere? With the fall of the Ur-Quan sphere of influence an age of exploration starts as a gold rush of venture captains and their motley crews start exploring the galaxy (Star Control only really exists as an entity thanks to Zelnick, this doesn't stretch to corporations or mercs that could leave after the Earth slave shield fell?). Eventually ships go missing in this particular sector which starts a frenzy of curiosity- many blame Kohr-Ah but they can't really find evidence of them being there, raises more questions, etc.

So anyways more ships arrive upon this whole Dyson Sphere (that probably has a cloaking device that uncloaks whenever something is in range to prevent it being found) that zaps whatever ship approaching it inside that gets too close a la Star Trek TNG's "Relics" and they find themselves unable to get out. Thus you could have individual ships that were just minding their own business until *zap* and they end inside (so you have a bunch of alien types/classes there as well as explorers/military patrols etc).
Fortunately the interior of the sphere contains a bunch of worlds that are very habitable and thus the search to escape (or remain/use it as a base of ops/claim it) begins as well as asking who built it.

Some idea anyway, could be interesting whilst also keeping it solar system bound (restricting all races from their faction support, putting everyone on equal terms) whilst introducing solar system battles, the ships of Star Control and diplomatic intrigue. You could choose your race but your interactions would change depending if you decided to go rogue or stick to the tenets of your race/faction, etc. Intact spaceships from the outside are ultra-valuable and can't be worth losing as they can serve as ad-hoc colony ships/flagships for some races as they try to establish a foothold in the system. Perhaps the New Alliance and Hierarchy are different factions, then you have the Unaligned ones that band together? A sort of RPG with Strategy and such if you will with an atmosphere of isolation, colonization, mining and mystery (whilst being able to include all the races with a bit of thought).

A Dyson Sphere would be immense. I suppose it could be done with proc-gen, but I dunno. It feels too big.

It's sort of difficult to come up with a solid reason for the mixing of aliens on a planet. My three main ideas were:

1. It's Arilou's mysterious experiment or 'ark' planet.

2. It's Zex's zoo planet.

3. An Ur-Quan science team (green?) is studying the potential of the involved aliens, coexistence, predisposition, and stuff like that. The team arrived centuries before present, abducted a bunch of aliens and life forms, left them with little technology on a backwater planet.

Zoom to almost present.

When the player's party is powerful enough to defeat a dummy quest/boss that the Ur-Quan had set up, the Ur-Quan left in a monitoring station is convinced that the aliens of this sector can become too powerful and dangerous to the Ur-Quan (something which it already sort of knew). The Ur-Quan decides to purge the planet, ending the experiment, sending it's recommendation to the Ur-Quan HQ something. Perhaps the green one is now more convinced the black ones are right with their cleansing policy. The last report it sent just recommended standard slave shielding + technology reset (and battle thrall potentials).

However, the player's party gets a chance (enabled by an Arilou warping in?) to surprise the Ur-Quan stationed on the planet. It ends with the Ur-Quan killed, no one ever finding out about the planet, and a Chmmr and Mmrnmhrm starting the work on cracking the slave shield. To their help they have some of the Ur-Quan's equipment (which it attempted to destroy with its dying breath).

A Star Control-themed RPG game sounds very fun if it ever gets finished!

IIRC, Arne only does art because it helps him with what he likes, building worlds. So a pre-packaged deal probably isn't to his liking. Now if we could team him up with Dragon, whose one true goal in life is to create the computer game system to bind them all (TM) but isn't that interested in making content, we might be on to something.

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