VXAce - Beyond the Veil

Exiled and cast into the Veil, you find yourself in an unknown world. Desolated, ruined by war and the Plague; a world where death does not bring you salvation, but lets you face your challenges - time after time.
A world that lost the Balance. Your goal is simple - open the Veil again and find the King. Restore the Balance that was lost.


Immerse yourself into the world of Beyond the Veil; a rich, twisted fantasy world, where you will travel through empty lands, forgotten dungeons and mazes of deep caverns. Fight hordes of enemies - ranging from victims of the Plague stumbling around to mythical beasts. Face your fears and come victorious - or fall and learn.

• Dark and Difficult - Learn to strategize and overcome obstacles stopping you on your way.
• A Deep World - Explore and learn the story of the world; how did it become, and what was it like before?
• Progress - Enjoy hours of gameplay, with many kinds of enemies, bosses, and NPCs, all contained in a nuanced RPG system. In Beyond the Veil you choose how to take on the world!
• Flexible Character Development - As you progress, you must choose and determine your playstyle. Will you be a mighty warrior, sly thief, or perhaps a mage? A Jack of all Trades, or a Master of One?
• Every Choice Matters - With an active autosave system, each choice you make is definite - each mistake, each death - they all influence your progress.

Some more details about game and gameplay:

Plot:

Character Creation:

Character Development:

Battles and Equipment:




Screenshots and Videos:

This looks really good, and the graphics are breathtaking. Is there an expected release date, and an idea of how much it will cost?

Thanks! The graphics are made by PVGames, here on the forum, although I do edit them quite a bit when making maps.

As for release date, I'll do my best to finish it sometime next year. The locations are quite large and mapping them out does take a good while (it's all done in photoshop), and they're done out of multiple maps (I've posted some stuff up on PVGames resource pack screenshot thread, like that bit, roughly half of the outside of first large locations - the Fallen Fort). That location itself is about 30ish maps if I'll count the interior, connected together!

And the cost, well... I'm about 90% sure it'll be free. I'm using quite a lot of other people's scripts, some are quite minor and hard to find, and making sure I can use them in a commercial project would take a good while. And even if I'll get around that, and get an okay from every script author, I don't think I'd charge more than a $5 on itch.

Well I'd say that $5 is more than a fair price if you decide to go that way. I would happily give you that, even upwards to $10. I am excited to see where this goes, but no rush! You are for sure working very hard on this and it appears to be paying off. :LZYsmile:

I didn't realize you were building this in Ace, looks fantastic buddy. Been following your screenshots for ages in the forum. You do great work with those assets.

This looks great,. The influence of Dark Souls is felt very, very strongly here, especially in character creation but also in the overall feel of the plot and setting. I mean, you could more or less cross out your whole character creation section and replace it with "basically, like Dark Souls" : P.

While i'm at it, that round dais rather reminds me of the Pillars of Nosgoth where the vampire Kain saves (non-canon) or dooms (canon) the world at the end of Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain, and you have dialogue on the very same screen as it mentioning a "King Cain". Reminds me of some bizarre blend of King Vendrick from DS2 and Kain from the Blood Omen series.

I'd suggest acknowledging this inspiration/these inspirations right up front (forgive me if you did and I missed it, I tend to skim) so no idiot accuses you of "plagiarism", but I am not the one to give anyone demerits for being derivative. Souls series is a notable influence on my current project, just less obvious than the influence of the old JRPG Vagrant Story.

Are those Jesse's Pioneer Valley Games (PV Games?) graphics? They look like it to me at a glance, and if they are, congratulations on making such attractive maps with them, they're difficult to use well.

Using the POWER OF LITERACY I have deduced that yes, they are in fact PVG lol.

I'd love to see a battle screenshot. Also, the mythic, minimalist writing style of the Souls games takes more talent than you might think to mimic so I'll be paying close attention to the writing here.The Souls world is one of silence and isolation and dialogue like that shown in your 5th Screenshot is vanishing rare. People encountered in the world of Souls are usually loners, often untrustworthy, insane, or at least a bit "off", or Scottish. They very seldom do sensible things like forming parties that make any kind of sense.

My only criticism is what resolution are you using? I feel like I can see too much of those maps and it's overwhelming and not in a good way. The "camera" feels much too "zoomed out" at this (I'm guessing massive) resolution, and I feel like I can see too much of the map and too little detail of the characters on it.

Edit: your last three screenshots in particular are very impressive. Want some helpful Ingles tips?

"Wanderer" is an awkward thing to call an "Attribute" since it's a job/class in the Souls games and elsewhere. Might I suggest "Wanderlust" instead? It's one of my favorite words. I'm not sure if "Fervorous" is even a word--I doubt it--but the correct adjective for one possessed of great fervor is "Fervent". You want to call that one either "Fervor" or "Fervent" depending on whether you want your attributes to be nouns or adjectives (Wanderlust, which I mentioned above, is a noun).

Bravo, you found both inspirations in story, world and the feel of the game - Dark Souls and Legacy of Kain! I was wondering when someone will pick up the latter one! And I was thinking about putting a note in the first post about those inspirations, but I'm afraid if I'll outright say "An rpg-maker soulslike" people will expect a proper soulslike, which I probably cannot give them!


I could, but not everyone has played Dark Souls, so at some point I would still have to write more details about character creation.


Again, that is sort of my intent. King Cain, one of the Guardians (no Pillars there though!) failed his people, and left the land to seek answer, cure to the Plague. Kain (in LoK) was a part of the Guardians of Pillars (Balance if I remember correctly), while Vendrick failed his people by falling for Nashandra's ploy. So yeah, a bit of mix between these two.




It's pretty basic looking, although I'm still trying to tweak some bits around, like the windows, etc. And I noticed I messed up the battleback, made it a bit too small.

As for Souls writing, I know it is going to be difficult to recreate the atmosphere. I'm trying to take it slow, plan it, and occasionally I come back to some bits and pieces of dialogue and lore (items have descriptions, of course!), tweak it a bit, rewrite, alter etc. For the first two months my facebook friends kept getting random messages like "add character X in area Y, that's going to tell this story; ignore me, just making a note before I forget", until she told me I can just message myself.

And about 5th screenshot, when Anthia and Lucius are introduced - these are the only two NPCs that do join us. I wasn't planning that at first, they were supposed to just be recurring characters (think Lucatiel, Anri, Siegmeyer) that we meet occasionally, but then I realized that fights with only one character will be much more difficult to balance and will probably be more boring. I still believe a solid ABS would do that game good, and I tried to do something, but while I'm quite familiar with RGSS3 (and Ruby itself), it's a bit outside my scope


That's another thing I had others point out to me. The resolution is 864x480, but things are looking smaller mainly because I'm reducing everything to fit 32x32 frame (while the original graphics are made for MV at 48x48). I have Fullscreen+ script, and options menu set up, so the player can increase the scale of the window, zooming stuff 2x, but that only makes things larger, without really changing the scale. I was thinking about using full sized graphics, but then I'll have to either make (and redo) maps with both 32x32 (for blocking) and 48x48 grid in mind, which will be difficult. I might think of some other way of making it look better though.

And I do definitely want some English tips! It's not my first language, and while I use it daily, I don't find myself using words like "fervor", "cloister", "prithee" often ;)
""Wanderer", Fervorous" are meant to be adjectives, they're describing the character - "He a Hard Worker, She's Caring, He's Average". And I think Wanderer was the hardest to pick, as I can't really think of any adjective that will describe someone that travels, wanders. Wanderlust could work though. And as of Fervorous - Merriam-Webster describes it as adjective for "full of fervor". Still, "Fervent" (a word that I didn't know until now) means the same thing, so changing it is a non-issue!


Thank you :D I am editing those graphics around to my needs (thankfully I learned some photoshop in college!), which really changes the feel of the graphics. And it's quite fun, when I have to do something more than copy and paste in correct spot :)

A small update about how the work's been going lately, and, well, a minor bump for the thread! ;)

I'm currently about 95% done with the first major area of the game - the Fallen Fort! And it's a pretty large area too - the outside of it, the interiors, and the dungeons (big images warning) cover over 1600 tiles. I'm pretty much only left with making one additional NPC, a couple item pick ups around interiors and dungeons, and adding a boss fight. So, mostly done.

Other than working on that location, I've spend some time polishing stuff up, trying to catch up on stuff I was ignoring. Also, added language script and worked on moving all dialogues, descriptions etc. into external file, which allows me to organize myself better, fix language stuff "on the go", tweak lore etc., and add another languages into game (working on polish version too, but english is a priority).

And lastly, I've been trying to improve AI in battles, as they were really basic. It's still an ongoing process, but I'm slowly working on it - not the main thing I'm doing now, but still doing it ;)

Now that this location is nearly finished, I'm gonna have to start designing and working on second major area - Jail Ward. Once that is done, I might make a demo out of it, depending on how well everything's going!

A bump, and an update on the progress!

Because of COVID, and lockdown, I was very busy at my real work (retail) which slowed the progress on the game considerably for about 2 months. Add the fact that I kinda felt I'm not moving much with the game itself, just tweaking stuff here and there, adding something, and working on maps. At one point I decided to connect all the maps into one world-map, to see how exactly it's shaping up, and honestly, I was surprised by it. A VERY LARGE IMAGE HERE, the whole map scaled to 25%, all of which (maybe apart from one minor area) will be available in the demo!

Speaking of the demo - I'm getting really close to having a playable demo (at least for testing purposes) - all that's left is few events, one minor enemy and two boss fights, and I can start testing. That doesn't mean the demo is coming just in next couple days though - I'll probably have to play it through 2-3 times, fix all bugs I find, adjust enemies and equipment, some balancing stuff etc. and then I'll probably send it out to couple friends for the second round of testing. So it depends on how the tests will go, but I'm close to the demo anyway - could be this month, could be early next month!


And just a few more things to showcase the progress. First - I have recently finished the intro cinematic (finally!) for the game. It took me a while, but I'm pretty happy with it!


And, as a last thing in the post, a couple newer screenshots from the game:

And that's it for now. Until next time!

A post with an update has been long overdue, but here goes...

In previous post I said that the demo is close to being finished, at least for testing purposes. And I have had it finished, and apart form few minor bugs, it was all done. The issue was that none of the testers actually finished the thing - one person got fairly close, but gave up in the end. The reason for that was the battles - they were dull, boring, and had too much RNG involved, making them not fun. So I, with a bit of help, started reworking the whole battle system, making it closer to what I originally wanted. It obviously took time, but in the end, I managed to get it mostly finished now. But over past two years I had a lot of stuff happening in my personal life, both positive and negative, which obviously had an effect on how much I work on the game. But, working on it still excites me, so I'm not giving up on it ;)

More about the battle system - it is now much more dynamic, using ATB and Stamina to turn it into somewhat semi-turn based. I decreased the RNG by a lot too, so mostly everything will now hit, unless we, or the enemies, are dodging the attacks. Below there's the bit from (now updated) first post outlining it a bit more:


Also a screenshot from the battle itself:


Also, since I'm not a fan of posting updates just for the sake of posting updates, I decided to record a video outlining early gameplay - character creation, tutorial area, few battles and the first, tutorial Boss Battle. The recording is in no way professional, as last time I had anything to do with voiceover recording, video editing and mastering was over a decade ago, in college, where I had access to a proffesional studio, not to a €35 mic ^^'



I hope the changes are for the better though!

As I said, I'm going to try and update the thread more often now, so here goes another update, about a couple engine related things I've done in past few weeks.

Before I'll start fixing up the battles for the rest of the demo, I want to get pretty much all of the engine changes done. For three reasons: after the demo is finished I can start mapping and working on the full version right away, without needing to fix up or add anything; testers will be able to continue their saves on test versions they'll be receiving; and so will the players once the full version is out (if I don't mess anything up ). So some of the stuff I've worked on for past few weeks won't be needed for the demo, but it'll be there as a base to expand on.

I'll start off with what I mentioned in the gameplay preview video - level up system. Currently, it's redone and redesigned to look like that:

And that's how it's working (video was from a bit earlier version, colours and layout differs a bit). Essence is the only currency in game, acting both as an experience and as a gold for purchases and upgrades. With the current system I have full control over how the levels affect stats, ie. I can have Vitality increase Health greatly up to 30, then medium increase up to 50, and very low past that, creating soft and hard caps for stats. Something the old system wasn't allowing me to do. This way I also removed the 99-level limit; now we can level the character up until all stats are at 99. But the cost is going to be very high for higher levels, and my plan is to balance the game out so end game is at around level 120-150.

Another feature I've been planning on adding for a while is Equipment Upgrade system. So far the only way to upgrade player's weapons was with the use of Gems, which improved some attributes of the weapon. Now, while we can still use the Gems, I added the ability to level up weapons up to +10, increasing weapon's base stats. Leveling up the weapon costs both Essence, and special upgrade items (Shards of Anith, Chunks of Anith, and Slabs of Anith). Here's an example of it, with another recording being from not-yet-finished version, and below is a screenshot showing the item costs for various levels. UI is yet to be fixed up


Another new mechanic that I've added is the ability to attack on the map. It's not an ABS system, actual battles will still happen on a battle screen that you can see in the video in previous post. This mechanic will be mainly used for some NPC questlines, traps, or to reveal secret passages. And as I wanted the character to have the weapon show during the animation, I expanded on the battler system and created a pseudo visual equipment on a map. It has the same limitations as battlers, so graphics will only change to show the type of weapon, with the actual weapon being the same regardless of what is it (all swords will look the same, all maces will look the same, etc).

And last feature added, which is an add on to the battles. So far, the player could access all of their item inventory in battles, and use all items they had. It was not great for a couple of reasons - first, with a lot of items, and the speed of the battle, it was difficult to navigate around and there was a high risk of losing the battle while trying to find the item we want to use. Secondly, there was nothing that could stop the player from spamming healing items and attacking items like bombs, which could make battles trivial. That's why I added a item hotbar mechanic. In the main Item Menu, upon selecting item, we'll have a choice of either Using the Item, or Equipping it. We have 6 Equip slots, where we can put items to hold, and only those items will be available to use during the battle. Here's how it looks and works in the game. This adds another layer of strategy, as the player will have to plan ahead for the battles, as well as making navigating through the items in battle easier (as now we can have a max of 6 of them).

Few of those things still need a bit of touch up, both UI and how they work, but they're mostly done.

So, until next time!

This game caught my attention but I noticed there's no download available right now. When would the first (public) demo come out?

Demo is still in progress, I'm tweaking all the engine stuff now, after that all I have left is fix up battles for the new, redone battle system (which won't take too long, but it's still a bit of work - have to reexport battles with new animations, and alter enemies AI). I'm hoping to have it out within two, three months though. I'll surely post here and update with download link when it's done!

alsome