Tales Of The Heart: Chapter 1(Demo available Now!)

Tales Of The Heart: Chapter One

 

With each of the seven deadly sins tormenting the world of Toshin(subject to change) the goddess, lady Touki has become desperate for aid. So she decides to summon two people from another realm, and gets an unexpected surprise. She summons forth Ronnie (male protagonist) a video game programmer, and Kim (female protagonist) a writer who’s got a brave heart, much to her surprise, her world is in shambles because the story for it is largely unfinished.(or is it?) Regardless, she sends Ronnie and Kim on a quest to stop the seven from reviving their master, Pride, because she is pretty much the source of all evil in this world. Both of our protagonists are ready to serve the goddess without giving it a second thought, but something seems a tad unusual after a while. First of all, Touki reacts strangely when she realizes that the protagonists know her name, and second, well let’s just leave that surprise for later-DUN DUN DUNN. Either way, this quest heavily inspired by the critically acclaimed Tales Of series will have you invested 100% until the end. Don’t have the time for a full length epic as heck ten hour RPG? No problem, this adventure will be around 4-5 hours long, possibly 7 hours if you do every little thing and talk to every person. Dialogue will change depending on the gender and decisions you make during cut-scenes will directly influence the story. This game has all the flavors of a JRPG without all the extra baggage. Random encounters? Forget it! Game over when you die to a boss? Forget it! Difficult but not impossible, yup, you got it. Finally an RPG that doesn’t mock the American people *cough*a certain Final Fantasy game on the Gameboy*cough* that has a deep story, colorful characters, and loads of effort despite using stock maps from RPG maker!

 

Characters:

Protagonists:

 

Ronnie: Originally a hacker who loved breaking the system, Ronnie now uses a powerful yet simple tool to make Role Playing games with his partner Kim.(Anyone who guesses which tool wins the internet) Even while in character, Ronnie likes to break the fourth wall to lighten the mood a bit, and sometimes he just can't resist.

 

Kim: A strong-willed girl who likes Karate, Video Games, and most importantly CATS! She appears to be a tomboy at first but to be honest, she’s just being herself. Kim loves a good challenge but always approaches her tasks with a serious attitude to stay focused.

 

Gregor: Gregor is simple woodsman, Gregor is a man of love, Gregor was a nice man until The Seven Sins took Gregor’s wife away from him. Do you know what Gregor does when Gregor becomes angry? No? I am not thinking that you are to be wishing to know!

 

Lady Touki: A goddess who watches over the world of Toshin, she is abnormally chipper even during grim times such as these. You might find a massive plot spoiler if you put her name into google translate.

Antagonists:

 

Gluttony: A playful witch who is more misguided than evil, she was once a normal human before being bullied and teased for her unusual remedies. Envy took the chance to make her dreams come true, at a cost.

 

Greed: Originally a stock broker who was too good for his own good, Greed became consumed by his love of all things green, gold, or silver. Especially after Envy transported him to this world.

Wrath: Believe it or not, Wrath was actually a beautiful actress once, but Lust came along and ruined it all. Torn from her fans, she became consumed with anger and Envy took this chance to turn a once friendly woman into a dangerous warlord.

 

Game Genre: RPG 

Game Rating: E Rated (ESRB rating system)

Note: The Seven Deadly sins are simply the villains of this game, they are not a religious reference as the seven sins are more of a cultural thing (yes they are focused on in religion but it’s not religion based here) and I thought since it’s called Tales Of The Heart I might as well be creative with the antagonists. Have they been done before? Yes, but I wanted to get my own spin on it~

 

Demo Download:   

https://www.dropbox.com/s/c3xa9ifd3ntk0ic/Tales%20Of%20The%20Heart%20Demo.zip

Note: Some browsers block downloads of .exe files, so I've compressed the game into a winzip file for easy downloading ^_^

The demo ends at the first village, you still get a decent preview of what I have in store, and a decent chunk of the plot too. :) Hope you enjoy~

 

Screenshot 1: Amazing what some small changes can do to make a stock map look original. 



 

Screenshot 2: Batte Lost Souls and Corrupted souls!



 

Screenshot 3: Stock Title Screen images for the win!



 

At this point I'd say the game is at it's 0.5 alpha stage, I've squashed most of the errors (grammar or otherwise) so hopefully things run smoothly :3 

Just from the screenshots here is a few things:

1. in battle the ally's name is dude, it's not even the real main character...

2. the kitchen wall is one tile smaller then the other walls, what happened to the room to make it smaller then the rest of the house?

3. while we are on the house, are all the objects in that room like, on the wall/inside the wall. I would SERIOUSLY recommened moving it down, it looks odd.

4. Dear god that is some bright babyblue windowcolor...

The window color isn't final, I just picked something that's easy to look at while I'm testing text in game.(blue is a relaxing color when I'm looking at it in microsoft word....)

In the game their original names are Ronnie (boy) and Kim (girl) but since you're supposed to pick the name of the character in the game in an RPG it's something else. I'm not sure why it's just dude in that shot, cause I named him dudeguy during testing. xD The partner that you don't pick (if you pick Ronnie, Kim will join you later, if you pick Kim, Ronnie joins you later) will have their respective names, they also address you by your original name, but only your partner from the real world does. The reason you change your name is because "ronnie" and "Kim" don't really fit the atmosphere of an rpg that well (at least not a fantasy rpg, maybe in a modern one it would...)

To me having certain objects, such as bookshelves away from the walls looks a bit weird (they're supposed to be up against the wall anyway so....) in my eyes, I've played a lot of the pokemon games, and for at least bookshelves they do that. I'll probably move the beds down one tile though since that does look kind of weird. Fireplaces may extend from the wall, but when I do that in game it looks kind of odd.

I've uploaded a complete version of chapter one on my steam workshop, you can play through the entire first chapter, I should note that I haven't balanced out the enemies or classes yet. I'm actually looking for someone who can help me on that end, since I've spent most of my time working on the story for the deadline.( I have no idea what feels right and what feels impossible.) I've put some stuff in the beginning of the game that tells the player which rank of stats each class has, but I have no idea how to balance that stuff. I want it to be difficult, but not unaccessable to casual players. It doesn't matter if whoever wants to help use different numbers for different classes even when the rank for a certain stat is the same.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=274214895

Any thoughtful input(good or bad doesn't matter) on the actual story would be welcomed too, I should also say that this is my first game with RPG Maker, period. So I've learned quite a lot in the last month. I should also note that a good portion of the game's humor comes from breaking the fourth wall (I mean, they're game makers sucked into the world of their own game, I can't let a story like that get away without at least some fourth wall breaking) so if you don't like that sort of humor pick Kim, as she doesn't do it as much.