I just remembered, that there is actually a map in the Benezos Inn, the way there is explained at the beginning from "Breg":

still haven't managed to take ome time and play further than the intro. Last time I wanted to take the time I accidentially selected "exit" and the game exited right without any confirmation. I was just done with the introduction part... doh.

Back to the menu:
On my system they are too fast. I tend to skip the option I originally wanted to select because it switches so fast to the next one. You could improve that a bit.
I haven't played Secret of Mana much, but I wondered why I can equip weapons directly from the main menu whereas for armor I have to go to a sub menu first.

The bear hunting was a bit strange to play. I wondered how the game would play if double tipping a directio key enables running isntead of Shift. Maybe it's worth a try.

I found some minor mistakes in the texts - you should check them again.

But now to the positive things. This game is really fun and I like what I've seen so far. You came further than msot people here trying to create such kind of game alone. That deserves a "well done"!
The flair of a console classic is there, so keep on improving the game.
I think when taking a look at the proposals odne in this thread and picking some of them, you can make a really great game.

I will report again once I played more than the ship wreck sequence.

Thanks!

You're right, I should make a "security confimration" before exiting the game. I'll put it on my to-do list.

I don't think the menu rotation speed can depend on the system, it's framerate-compensated (MY.PAN += 30 * MY._Drehrichtung * TIME).
Just don't hold down the button until you reached the object you want to reach, because it'll rotate to the next one automatically after you hit it once.

In Secret of Mana weapons and armor rings are made the same. The reason is quite easy:
You have to change weapons much more often than armoy.
If armory was part of the main menu it was to big to roll through, thus therfore armory is collected in a sub-menu.

I don't exactly know what mistakes, some things are my... "personal style of writing" when I don't write texts for the university or something like that.
For example "sz" or "ss" instead of "ß" or "ae" instead of "ä".

After the story part on the ship there are only ~two litte quests to solve in the area of Benezos, but there you can play with all the technical features like different kinds of weapons against the enemies, charging attacks, casting spells, using skills, evading attack, stunning enemies, playing around with different character settings at the Trainer NPC ect.

Hello again!

Here comes the 2-language version of Dragonrise!

I just saved all im the cirtiques from you into a text file so that I can look them up later more easily.

During the last week I worked much on the translation and finished it yesterday.
Thus you're now able to select wheather english or german at game start (can be made changeable ingame later, too).

It was really really much text so I'm sure there may be mistakes here and there, maybe forgotten a newline or a letter, but I've looked through it and think it's quite ok so if you find something, please tell me.

The translation is more or less a context translation, maybe the "depth" is not the same as in german...

But I hope you'll now be able to use the menu or see the sense of the intro part!

A friend of mine said he'd prefer a demo where you really only have the stuff you can have at this time in the game, do you think so, too?


Beside the translation I fixed some minor stuff:
- Controls are mentioned in dialogue before you need them. (thanks beegee)
- At the name input screen you now can use arrow keys and enter as well. (thanks excessus)
- At the name input screen you can now immediatelly select a character after moving the cursor. (thanks excessus)
- Fixed two little string bugs in the menu.
- Fixed a little animation bug in the bear hunting sceene.


This time I don't have any new screens because there is nothing new to show beside the translation...

DRise2.exe - 29.8 MB selfextracting winrar archieve of the two-language-version

Ich hatte die letzte demo gespielt, also die vor dieser. In dem Level mit dem Schiffwrack waren die Texturen von allen Terrains schwarz.

Die Bärjagtszene musste ich bestimmt 10 mal spielen bis ich sie geschafft hatte. Weiß nicht ob das so gedacht ist. Achja, ich hatte es nur dadurch geschafft, da ich Geschick upgrades und sowas bekommen hatte, da ich anscheinend mit jedem Versuch mehr Erfahrungspunkte bekommen hatte.

Und ich hab nicht kapiert wie ich das Schwert ausrüste das ich am Schiffwrack gefunden hatte.

Die ganzen Zwischensequenzen (zB auf dem Schiff) sind etwas Langatmig. Wenn ich das Spiel zum zweiten mal Spiele würde ich das Ganze gerne abkürzen oder beschleunigen können.

Achja, das man da schon soviel Ausrüstung hat verdirbt den Spaß schon. Wäre besser wenn man das nur durch einen Cheat aktivieren kann. Dann setzt man es nur ein wenn man wirklich nicht weiter kommt.

Anonsten gute Arbeit.

Hello EX Citer, thanks for your comment.

Where is the black Terrain, in the last or the new demo? (maybe it makes no difference because I doubt I could do something against it... )

In general to the bear hunting sceene:

1. The sceene is _not_ intended to be easy.
2. You do _not_ have to kill the bear.
3. The bear _can_ be killed at the first try.
4. Thus to point 3 the sceene is there to _teach_ you how the battle system works, too.

To the weapon selection since everyone asks it over and over again:

- The ring menue functionality is shown at game start, there you can see that you have to go up/ down 2/ 3 times from the status ring to reach the weapon ring.
- In the weapon ring there is a description how to equip you weapon (press the action key twice)
- Thus when you open the ring menue to the status ring you equip the sword by pressing [up], [up], [action], [action]

To the ship/ story part:

Maybe the first demo made Dragonrise look like a hack'n'slay-game, but that's not my intention. I don't want to create a game like Diablo where you log in and start to smash enemies. I like it to be more like Final Fantasy, thus there will be much more story parts which keep up the game.

I'll think about your idea with the equipment cheat.

I hope this cleared up a bit?

Hello again!

Did anyone try a spell.. ?
Minutes ago I realized that there were some sprites and models missing so only the fire spell worked.

However I now included them and fixed a lot of other bugs through the last days.

I made my own savegame system so that it is not necessary any more to replay the ship-sceene all the time.
- There is one saved game included where you are in the Benezos Inn
- Clickin on an empty slot in the loading screen starts a new game, too.
- The game can be saved at the Benezos Inn when talking to the innkeeper.

One thing I did as well was the new message managemnt system. Before that the messages overwrode each other, they are now stored in a string-array and given out one after another so that you don't miss important messages any more.
In addition to that I made that message window slightly transparent so that you're still able to see you health/ mana/ power-bar through it. (Thanks for the idea Firoball!)

So maybe if you want to try some technical stuff and not only play the ship sceene it may be worth a try.
The saved game that is already there has only the items included that you can have at this point in the game, nevertheless there is still the character trainer NPC and some weapons at Benezos fishing dock.
To have some armor and spells you'd have to play the ship sceene once and then save at Benezos inn ("Sleeping Winds").


DRise2.exe - Selfextractin WinRar archieve (29.9 MB)

I tested Dragonrise and I think its very good but I have a little graphics proplem - look at these Screenshots:


I think I need a new graphic (or graphics? bad english!)card.

hmm... yes that's a problem of your graphic card.
It has to support PS V1.1 to be able to render the terrain correctly.

What you see is only the mask-texture which "tells" the shader, how the different textures have to be rendered on the terrain.

The reason why you see the sky/ water through it is because the alpha channel of the mask texture is used as shadow-map for the terrain.
When the shader runs correctly it disables alpha-blending so that there are no "holes" (the blue areas behind the stone or the church) in the ground and the z-Buffer can be rendered normally.

Indeed it is, I have the same problem with my GF 4000 MX.



I already told ya Shore, do you remember?