sabao

sabbysabao@hotmail.com Seeing as none of this is final yet, there's no problem at the moment but yeah let's talk.

Not anytime soon, we're planning to release a demo without hired help first to test the waters. :P

Yeah, I feel for you, kinda. We tried doing larger sprites at one point too. We probably won't anytime soon though. We're working with standard sized sprites this time. Seeing as the mechs are supposed to be 10 feet tall but are represented in sprite form so small, the tiles will have to be scaled down in proportion as well. That's mostly what you will be dealing with as tile artist, if ever. Would that be alright with you?

@Chief: Sounds like a wonderful deal, actually. I'd be very willing to give more if the situation demands it though. Thank you so much for the consideration. Do you have any samples on you right now I can show my partner?

@Chief: I was hoping to get quotes from the spriters themselves. We're only just trying our hands at going commercial so we don't know how rates are for hands for hire. @zane203 The school system was terminated to keep the project simple (and more likely to actually come out with something playable). The game will be a very traditional Strategy RPG with side quests/scenarios triggered by choices made during scenes in-between battles. The story itself is still very school-themed, but as far as living the life of a school boy's concerned, that's been cut down significantly this time around. Anyway, we've decided that the final game will in fact be commercial. We're releasing a free tech demo though, to hype the project up some and hopefully pull any talent for hire out there to our cause (This is also an elaborate ploy to get people to donate to the development of the project, but none of you saw that.).

We could, and honestly we'd like to if we could for the sake of lining our pockets some and, I dunno, resume/portfolio material but right now it's too early to call. Spriters who'll work for free are harder to find but there seems to be plenty who'll do it for money. That's actually what got us thinking about it. If we're going to shell out cash then maybe going commercial wouldn't be such a bad idea.

Weird, link worked just fine for me.

So for those who actually still believe this game will be completed, thank you. If you missed the news, this project is undergoing a total revamp due to unavoidable circumstances. It's not necessarily a bad thing. Honestly, we're enjoying the whole re-thinking process and re-exploring the old concept. After all that's said and done we hope to begin actually building the game soon. Maybe this time we'll get something playable out. Maybe. ippus and I are mostly still spitballing ideas with one another, but for anyone interested in keeping up with the minute updates we have, I opened up a small blog for the project. It's not much, I just needed a place online to place all my notes on, and most of which are private. I might release some things there from time to time for everyone's pleasure though. I put up a few of our new sketches there just a while ago to give everyone an idea of how the characters look now. I must say I'm very thrilled about the new designs. It's been a while since ippus last drew anything for Steel Hearts, and her style's developed in the last few years since. http://studiopnb.xepher.net/steelhearts Sorry, the main post is being rewritten.

I'm surprised Naruto hasn't popped up yet.

Welcome to the forums. Post up a project concept in the projects section and I'd be glad to give critique.

It's a tough call. When you think about it, throwing rocks at things doesn't sound very interesting, but then again a standard FF game has very little innovation to offer all the same. You don't buy a Wii not expecting you'll be swinging the wiimote around a lot.

So I picked up a copy of this today and played about half an hour or so. Let me just say I'm impressed. This may very well be the first decent Final Fantasy title to come out for the Wii (Granted there's only been one other FF to come out. Oh, and the My Life As series but I wouldn't count those). Starting off with the most obvious, this game is probably one of the best looking games I've ever seen come out on the Wii, but considering you bought a Wii in the first place, you may not care about that a whole lot. The game starts off throwing you right into the action. There's no ten minute cutscene, no fanfare. Just a short two minute scene and then monsters start popping out of the sky, which you then have to shoot down. Having read so very little about the game beforehand it came as a mild surprise. The first bit was actually fun. Could've been just the surprise though, I dunno. After realizing how point and shoot's a huge part of this game, it then proceeds to add another element: swinging. This game's all about the swinging. Yessir. No surprise there I suppose, considering this is a Wii game. Battles are basically all about finding something to throw at the monster. Be it a rock on the ground or the Selky hiding behind a bush, you'll have to use your telekinetic abilities to pick them up and use them as a weapon, oftentimes while running for your life so battles do get hectic. This is reminiscent of what they'd planned to do in Dawn of Mana on the PS2 actually, where anything and everything on the field could be thrown at opponents (although DoM was poorly done overall IMO). Whether they add a twist to this formula or not as the game goes on still remains to be seen. I hope they do though because I can imagine this getting old really fast. The camera annoys the hell out of me. You have full control of it, sure, but sometimes when you need to do quick moves you find your camera at an angle where something or another is blocking your view, usually causing you to take damage from whatever beast you were supposed to be getting away from or falling to your death. Outside that I've had very little else to complain about though.

Whatever I had that was even close to playable was lost long ago. Haven't heard of that game before, honestly, but the visual novel presentation I'd posted before was pretty generic fare. It could look like a handful of several other games.

It might be a while. I mean, right now we're only re-conceptualizing so anything concrete may still be a long ways away from now. If anything though, I'll probably be bumping my thread from time to time posting concept art and the like.

I dug around for the thread and took all the content off when I came back. We're re-planning at the moment so whatever content is on there may not be accurate anymore later on. I'll change and bump it up later when necessary. Right now, my glorious reappearance in RM communities everywhere is only out of our need to scout around for options on how to go about the project when development gets on again.

^I <3 u. Shortening the Mongoose's post, if we were to judge stories on the bare bones and in individual pieces, everything is a cliche. As one of my more cynical friends points out, originality is dead. You just need to execute your work in a way that will trick people into believing it's something new.

Lovely thing is it's only going to get better in the revamp. I'm pretty psyched to see the changes myself.

Surviving a day on the road during typhoon Ketsana, hands down. Twice the wind speed of Katrina and thrice the rainfall. All alone, cell phone was dead, car was flooded in up to my ankles. I was stranded on the road for a full 24 hours. Compared to everyone else though, I had it easy.

Old stuff. VERY old stuff. We're hoping to revamp everything from the story to the art very soon.

I would kill for a decent Mana fangame. Forget the 3D generation stuff, translating those worlds into something RM can handle will wind up into something even the most hardcore series fan would think twice about touching. The Mana series (Legend of/Secret of/Sword of/Heroes of) would translate into RM format a whole lot easier.

DC/Marvel stuff. Batman, mostly. The gritty detective thing sticks a lot better than the space alien stuff Superman/Lantern throws around, as much as I loved what I read on Blackest Night. I'd read up some more on the newer issues of Marvel as well, but with how much the current arc crosses over I'd probably wind up spending a fortune every other release. I got into the hobby only recently, after tiring of anime/manga a bit.

Funny how I said that three years ago too. Thought I'd say hi again because I was barely here in the first place. I'm scouting around places looking for people to help with a project, among other things. That aside, I thought I'd roam around some communities to pick brains. So um, hi. I'm Ryan, 21, from the Philippines. I'm a college student right now, majoring in multimedia arts although I used to major in biology. I enjoy reading comics, photography, Muay Thai, and sport shooting. If anyone wants to know anything more about me, ask away I guess.

I hope to stop smoking by February, and then maybe get my ass back to training Muay Thai for the October tournament.

Agreed. I do say 5 was good though. Enough to put my faith back in the series, at least. It still misses that familiar feel you'd have in 1-3 but perhaps that's because the first three were so close together and in succession chronologically.