Legionwood 2 *Indie RPG* [Beta 3]

[Dark Gaia]

This game is the sequel to a completed, 20+ hour free indie RPG which you can find here: http://www.rpgfan.com/boards/index.php?topic=5525.0

Introduction

Being developed in the new RPG Maker VX Ace engine, Legionwood 2: Rise of the Eternal's Realm is an epic length traditional role playing game and a direct sequel to the much loved Legionwood: Tale of the Two Swords.

Legionwood 2 offers you a 15+ hour quest that takes place in the sprawling empire of Trevelle which is filled with involving puzzles, challenging enemies and tons of adventures. A new class and sub-class system allows you to customise your characters to a high degree with over 80 different class combinations available.

Story Outline

Legionwood 2's story follows on from where Legionwood: Tale of the Two Swords left off. It has been nearly three hundred years since Castoth was banished from the realm and the world has been at peace. However, it seems now that this peace was short lived. Barbarians from the western land of Entoban have invaded the empire of Trevelle, occupying two major cities near the western border. Lionel Morton, a guard in the Imperial Capital, has transfered to a battalion assigned to retaking the captured towns. Tonight, they move to liberate the city of Corinthe, where Lionel's lover Clara waits, alone and in danger.

Several other things of note have been happening in Trevelle of late: monster attacks seem to be on the increase for some unknown reason and trade with Charn in the north has mysteriously stopped without notice. Can these things be connected with the war that is seemingly about to engulf the Empire?

Game Features

- An epic length quest with 15+ hours of gameplay and lots of optional side quests.
- An interesting storyline about love, revenge, political intrigue and forgotten secrets with 6 fully developed protagonists.
- Tense Condition Turn Battle (CTB) inspired by Final Fantasy X featuring challenging foes who react intelligently.
- Intuitive class system for a high level of character customisation. Your Main Class determines your stat values, usable equipment and Tech category, but you can also equip a Sub Class, which grants you access to an addition category of Techs. Over 80 combinations are possible!

Screenshots















Download

The current released build of Legionwood 2[/b], offering ~7 hours of RPG gameplay, can be downloaded here:
or [url]http://www.indiedb.com/games/legionwood-2-rise-of-the-eternals-realm]http://rpgmaker.net/games/3811/[url] or [url]http://www.indiedb.com/games/legionwood-2-rise-of-the-eternals-realm

[Two Sheds Jackson]

seems interestin

[Dark Gaia]

Hey everyone,
It's come to my attention that the game folder I zipped up for upload was the wrong one, and was missing a lot of the files needed to run the game. Without these files, the game will constantly crash.

If you downloaded this broken version, please re-download, as I'm re-uploading with the correct project folder as I write this.

Sorry for the inconvenience!

[Maxximum]

Still at it I see. Have you ever considered putting a team together? You obviously have a passion for game making because this is the n'th game I've seen you pump out. You have the patience to stick with a long project, which is pretty rare among the RM community. Why not get a team together and make something that doesn't look like Alex in RTP land on his magical DBS adventure (yes, I'm aware you probably put some custom stuff in, but the key words here are "looks" and "some").

[Dark Gaia]

Hello there.

It's nice to see you taking an interest in my work. Unfortunately, I can't consider forming a team because I don't work on a schedule (I'm a full time university student and a published fiction writer with deadlines to meet) and wouldn't be very accessible to team members. I basically do this as a hobby, and in my own time.

If you are concerned that my use of RTP makes my game less playable, you are free to pass on and play something else. Despite its use of RTP, the predecessor to Legionwood 2 was featured in many gaming magazines, was reviewed by a number of digital distribution services and gained enough popularity to wind up with a page on Wikipedia.

I will certainly not be scrapping a project just because someone feels that the graphics it uses make it essentially a waste of time.

This is also not the system's Default Battle System. Both this game and its prequel used custom scripted battle systems, as well as menu and character advancement systems.

I understand your concerns - custom graphics are nice and do add a touch of freshness to an RPG Maker game, but I'm confident that people who play my game will judge it based on its merits as an actual game, not what graphics it uses. This is an old style RPG, after all.

P.S Consequently, only two of my five released games have used default graphics. If you have followed my work, you would see that the One Night trilogy uses completely custom graphics.

[Maxximum]

Woah, hold your horses there cowboy. Who said anything about scraping the game.
I just said that your future projects could benefit if you got yourself a team of talent. I've been dabbling with game making for years and know that most ambitious projects die because of the sheer amount of work and range of skills they require. The areas of your games where you have to make compromises and cut corners can be filled by other people. You cant honestly say that you use stock resources because you think its the best fit for your game. You already proved that you can complete a game. In the inde world that counts for something, because no one wants to join a guy that will bail on the project half way through.

On a side note, I do know your stuff from GW and RMN. I can't say I'm a fan, One Night just didn't click with me, but I do respect your efforts.

Ill give this one a go when its done, I hate playing RPGMaker demos, even if they're long ones.

[Tridius]

I am liking how they are using everything in ace for this games especially the clever ways of making the facesets look. I'm going to give this game a try. Considering i need to play a good VX ace game.

[Dark Gaia]

@Maxximum: Hey, no worries. No offense meant. I just thought you were one of those RTP haters, is all. I agree with you completely though; if I got some people to cover the places where I cut corners (such as graphics) it would make for an awesome game. That's why it's unfortunate that I'm simply too busy to be active enough to administrate a team :(
I also agree with your feelings on demos. I too prefer to wait for the full game, but I know some do play demos, so I posted it up anyway.

@Tridius: Glad you're interested! Enjoy playing! I'd like to say this is a good VX Ace game, but of course, I can't really talk :)

[Two Sheds Jackson]

I also think the price is very very fair

[Dark Gaia]

Hi, everyone. I'm not sure whether it's safe to necropost in this topic with a post that doesn't really add any new content, but I wanted to pop in and let people know that the development of Legionwood 2 is still progressing nicely, and the next beta with the entire second chapter of the game will be available soon. I've taken on board some of the feedback that I've received in this community and others and the next release of the game will a lot more enjoyable than the current one. If you're interested, keep an eye out for it and be sure to provide me with lots of great feedback so that I can improve the game even more.

Here's the official update post, copied from my blog:

Hail, Legionwood fans! I've got an update for you:

As of this week, I'm resuming full time work on Chapter Two of Legionwood 2. Previously, I had university assignments as well as admin and publishing stuff with my novel to take care of, but I'm happy to say that I've got a few weeks coming up where I don't have any other matters to attend to, and I want to use this time to really push myself to work on the game and get the Beta 3.0 release closer to being in a playable condition.

At the moment, Chapter 2: Aftermath and Alliance is roughly 30% complete. I was aiming for a late September release of the new version of the game and if I can still meet that, it would be great. On the other hand, I'd like to continue working on the game at my own pace, and take my time making sure that the new content I release is properly tested and worthwhile instead of rushing it, so please don't hold me to that release date. I just wanted to post and say that yes, Legionwood 2 is still being worked on, and I do still have plans to finish this game, and I want to make sure that you guys get the best game possible.

Some info about what you can expect in Beta 3.0: Chapter 2: Aftermath and Alliance will see Lionel and the party travelling out of Trevelle into the neighbouring nation of Entoban to try and establish a peace treaty with the invading barbarians before full scale war engulfs the two nations. They'll also try to enlist the help of the king of Entoban in the quest to find out how to close the remaining Eternal Gates and discover more about who is behind the plot to infect Legionwood with the Darkness and their motives. Meanwhile, Lionel will continue to cope with the loss of Clara and forge bonds with his new friends. They'll race to stop the enemy from opening yet another Eternal Gate and, at the end of the chapter, one of the party members will die. In addition, you'll get to play with two new classes (Barbarian and Ranger), 20+ new Techs, and experience the consequences of Lionel's moral choices, with certain side quests, dungeons and bosses being sealed off in favour of others depending on the path you've chosen.

I've also overhauled many of the game's systems. The battle system has been optimised and no longer crashes, there are now turn cooldown periods, alternate costs for skills, new buff/debuff rules, and more.

[Dark Gaia]

Beta 3.0 is out!

Well met, Legionwood players! The third public release of Legionwood 2: Rise of the Eternal's Realm, Beta Build 3.0 is now online and ready to download. This major update includes the first half of Chapter 2: Aftermath and Alliance, adding around 2 hours of new content, including new locations, new Techs and one of two new classes (Ranger and Barbarian) to play depending on your morality, as well as numerous tweaks and bug fixes to existing content. In this release, you'll finally start to get to see your moral choices come into play as dungeons, treasures and quests change depending on the decisions you've made, and you'll need to play through the Beta twice, on both moral paths if you want to see it all.

The original plan was to have all of Chapter 2 available in this release, though this wasn't possible due to time constraints. Much of the time I spent working on this release was used to make sure the existing content is stable and free of any remaining bugs. I've updated all of the game's scripts and overhauled the engine  while also tweaking the game's art style a little and implementing some more non-linear elements to the game in both of the chapters. All of this extra work unfortunately meant that I wasn't able to complete all of Chapter 2 as I had planned, so I decided to cut the chapter in half and save the rest for the next Beta.

So, if you've been itching for some more adventuring, download Beta 3.0 of Legionwood 2 and tuck in. This Beta contains over 6-7 hours of old-school RPG gameplay with more than enough content to (hopefully) keep you busy until the next big release. Players who are continuing from the previous release of the game can simply copy and paste their save file ("Save01.rvdata") into the Beta 3.0 directory to continue from where they left off, while new players can feel free to start right from the beginning and experience all of the new surprises that the revised Chapter 1 has to offer.

At the end of the Beta, remember to retain your save file for use in the next release, and please don't forget to report any bugs or issues that you find so that they can be fixed up.

Well, that's it for now. Please enjoy the new additions to the game, and stay tuned for news about Beta 4.0 and Legionwood going commercial (possibly), when it happens.

For those too lazy to scroll back to the opening post, get the Beta here: http://rpgmaker.net/games/3811/downloads/3435/

[Dark Gaia]

Update![/b]

Beta 3.2 is now online, which offers a few tweaks, bug fixes and small additions to the game.

Changes to Beta 3.0 and 3.1 include:

- Donation trays at churches are now fully functional. Donate 10 Kyphers for a 1 in 4 chance of getting a morality boost, or donate 400 or 800 Kyphers for guaranteed morality boosts (1 point for 400 and 2 points for 800).
- The Rusty Helmet in Dead Mountain (as part of helping the Revenant) can now only be picked up once, instead of an infinite amount of times.
- Most stealable battle-use items (such as Silk Sack and Eye Stone) and rares (such as Hannelores and Malt Ciders) have had their sell price reduced to 1 Kypher. This is because they used to sell for thousands of Kyphers and some players were farming money by stealing them over and over, which was breaking the game's balance. General items and sellable loot items (Chitin Scale, Wolf Pelt) have not been changed.
- The intro area now teaches new players how to save, and reminds them to do so often.
- Selecting "no" when asked if you want to watch the game's intro now actually skips it, as opposed to going into an infinite event loop.
- Tweaks have been made to several classes. The Defense and HP of Gunners, Rangers and magic casting classes has been slightly increased, and Magus and Cleric weapons (ie. Gold Sceptre) now grant a small Defense boost as well as Intellect and Wisdom.
- The Focus Headband and Shoulder Pad grant 5% more HP now. This is to offset the 5% penalty that equipping a sub-class gives you, which cancels out the effect of equipping these items.
- The Gladiator Blade has had its chances of inflicting statuses lowered and is now a 2 handed weapon. It also gives the user a 10% Defense penalty. This is to counterbalance the fact that it inflicts 3 different status effects.
- The Northern Keep dungeon is now fully operational. A chest and switch that were inoperable because of impassable tiles have now been fixed, and the quest can be completed. If you have good morality, you'll fight the Garuda boss, and if bad you'll fight the Dark Dragon boss.

In other news, Legionwood 2 will soon be going commercial. However, there will still be one more release before this comes to pass: as promised, the next release of the game (Beta 4.0) will become available very soon, adding the rest of Chapter 2 to the game and rounding off the first 10 or so hours of Legionwood 2's gameplay (roughly the first half of the overall game, which will be 20 hours long like Legionwood 1).

This Beta 4.0 build will be the final build of the game available for free (subsequent Beta builds will be released for registered beta testers only), and, following its release, the full game will begin retailing under the title of Heroes of Legionwood at the usual RPG Maker game portals, and Beta 4.0 will be replaced with the typical 1-2 hour commercial demo. At the moment, the price has not been set, but it will likely be no more than $9.95, and there will be plenty of opportunities for loyal players and beta testers to get their copy of the game for free. The full commercial release is currently slated for mid 2013 (still a long ways off) so, until then, please continue to consider Legionwood 2 to be a freely available RPG Maker game, and have fun.

Happy adventuring! :)

[Maxximum]

Holy bananas dude, you just don't give up. I may actually have to give this a go when its done.

[Dark Gaia]

No, I really don't give up, as you say! To be honest, I really don't like the idea of leaving a project unfinished once I've started it, and I've had a lot of requests and messages of support from people who want Legionwood 2 and I really don't want to let them down. I'm not trying to make a revolutionary game like To the Moon or anything - I mainly make games for myself, but if someone enjoys what I've made, then it makes me happy :) I've had some of my games featured in magazines and on cover discs, and this is something that blows my mind and that I'd love to achieve again with my current projects.

As a novelist I've had to meet deadlines for editors and make sure things are complete and polished before sending them out, and this mentality has kind of transferred to my game development, as well. As I've made the decision to move into commercial games with Legionwood 2, I'm doing my best to appear professional and enthusiastic to make a good game.

Also, an update for you fine people... Legionwood 2 is now available on IndieDB (and will be on Desura in the future, too). The download is constantly updated to reflect the latest version available on RMN, so anyone in need of a download mirror, or who just wants a way to show their support by making Legionwood 2 visible to the world at large should check it out!