VXAce - The Death Due Us is a stupid title?

Not entirely sure this belongs here so please don't ban me! ;-;

Just a little background. I plan to set the game in a decadent gothic city that was destroyed 100-200 years before by an unknown disaster. The majority of the population was killed, leaving behind opulent amounts of wealth in a dead city plagued by scavengers/thieves, madmen, and things only glimpsed in nightmares. Gangs come from all over the world just for the chance to rob the dead and to follow the legend of the fallen star whose landing is rumored to have caused the disaster that cursed the city. Everyone knows that whoever touches a fallen star will be granted whatever wish their heart desires. Mordheim inspiration, fam.


The only mockup I've made so far that does look like complete garbage. I'm thinking of using a minimalist art style like Hyperlight Drifter or Kingdom. Side note: does that name sound as stupid as I secretly think it does? The Death Due Us?

Now the combat is the part that sounds tricky to me. I was considering a turn-based combat system that relies heavily on exploiting your enemies weaknesses while managing your own on the fly. Standard attacks alone do very little damage, to the point of being near useless on their own. Only special damage types do any real damage and are blocked by the same damage type. To work this in, every character has buffs that add a certain type of damage to their attacks and protects them from another at the same time. You can only have one buff up at a time, meaning you can only have one attack and one defense up. It's like switching stances. It sounds like there'd be a lot of potholes in this type of combat system, but I can't think of any before starting it. Any thoughts?

I'd split the game into 2 parts just to be able to sneak the rest of the quote in: "Death due us, part 1", just so it makes sense.

I'm liking the proportions of characters to scenery.... what's your sprite size?
I've been trying to make something similar, but I'm having trouble finding the right proportion.

The main sprite is 48x36 but the body's only 16 pixels wide without the sword and arm extended. This minimalist style is harder to separate characters from the background than I thought so you might wanna make it a little bigger if you use outlines. So maybe a 3:1 height to width ratio?

16px? that's TTTTIIIIINY! I thought it was way bigger.

I've been working with 64x48 sprites, with the legs just fitting into the 48 in the walk cycle, and the whole body just fitting into the 32p wide of one map square. I thought yours would be close to 92x48 or so.
I might switch to 3:1 ratio tho... the perspective I use is making it hard to make walls and doors properly.

16 px is just the body in a standing pose for that particular sprite mind you. A 48 width sounds about right when you include walk cycles and other animations like reaching for things or holding out weapons. It gives you plenty of room to work with. I was planning on using a 56x48 grid size myself, but 64x48 might actually be a better option. Is that the golden ratio? I can never remember...

I like the aesthetic you've got going on here, looks very different to your standard RPG Maker look, but unfortunately yeah, The Death Due Us doesn't make much grammatical sense any way you slice it. I think the closest you could get would be something like The Deaths We're Due, which still reads as a bit awkward to me as a title for a project despite being more gramatically on-point.

More grammatically sensible - The Deaths We're Due or The Deaths Due To Us. Or how about The Deaths We Deserve? The game looks awesome by the way!

How you phrase the title depends on the meaning. If the "us" is responsible for the death, it could be "The Death Due To Us" or "The Deaths Because of Us". If the "us" is owed the death, maybe it could be "The Death Owed To Us" or "The Deaths We're Owed".
Title aside, the art style is nice, and the concept for the world/story sounds interesting.

To be honest, I'm never too much into titles that not directly have anything to do with the story.
So unless the game directly goes about Death Due to Us... I feel like something refrencing scavengers, a legend about a fallen star.

The game itself looks really great tho )_(

Something related to the Fallen star for sure
Maybe even dubble title.

Fallen Stars
Death due to us

Can't have the main be a good guy now... let us be bad and evil :D

The game looks beautiful--I really like the dimensions of the characters. In the game that I'm working on, I'm planning on having similar dimensions to that. It really doesn't look like an RPG Maker game. How long has it taken you to get it to be worked out like that?

For the combat system, maybe each buff in terms of attack and defense is represented by an item. For example, an attack boost for swords or something is represented by a pair of gloves that lets you 'grip the sword more firmly' and the defense buff is a certain kind of ring or something that increases your defense for something like arrows or knives. Perhaps in the turn-based combat, you can make it so that you can only switch out a maximum of one item per turn, which will add a lot of strategy when facing off against multiple enemies.

The title does sound a little bit stilted. 'The Death Due Us' just sounds grammatically incorrect, although ignoring the grammar the alliteration does make it sound wonderful. If you're looking for an alternate title to work with, you can go with 'The Death Due To Us', 'The Death We're Due', 'The Deaths We're Due', or something similar. Then again, as shown with 'Attack on Titan', you don't necessarily have to have the most grammatically-correct title in order for it to function correctly as a franchise. As a matter of fact, it might actually help your game gain popularity and stand out whenever you do publish it. Pushing aside the grammatical errors, it's actually a really neat title.

I was actually thinking of having each of your equippable items give you a different buff skill so that part of the strategy would be equipping yourself properly would be part of the strategy. But I hadn't thought about being able to switch off weapons on the fly IN combat. I saw a really nice script that lets you change weapons in combat too. That's a really great idea!


Same. I figured since one of the heaviest themes would be death, it would work pretty well. But the title kinda implies that the death is being denied and I didn't really want to focus on undead stuff, ya know. maybe you're right.