Heya! Welcome to my first blog post.
This post is going to be about a project I've been meaning to make for a while now, called CORE RPG (working title.)
Beginnings
CORE RPG has been an idea I've had for a while; over half a year. Its design is inspired by things like OFF, Fear and Hunger, corru.observer, and, of course, Earthbound. It's definitely supposed to lean more into the sort of abstract RPG with eldritch horrors and enemies, wacky music, and the game changing its own rules on a whim.
I've always thought that these sorts of RPGs are charming, how they create and break and warp their own rules, how unpredictable they can be in their direction. I'd like CORE RPG to be like this, in a sense. Have every aspect of the game be a thing that can change, due to you playing in what is basically a dying reality.
Premise
In the world of CORE RPG, the world runs off of a Drive, which is inside a central terminal. The game starts when, mysteriously, the Drive is lost. The main character, for whatever reason, is in charge of finding this and putting it back into its correct place. The world goes to shit as this happens. That's it. You just go on your merry way after that and hope that you survive while the world decays.
Now, I think I want there to be multiple endings. Kind of in the sense of something like Undertale? Like, you can definitely have varying results depending on how you behave. But the most different endings would come out of taking the most extreme or specific actions, doing things a bit out of the box.
Gameplay/Mechanics
I'm thinking the gameplay would likely be (at its simplest) a turn-based RPG with a party system. Now, this party system is a bit glorified, where each member of your group would be a 'Core.' You can collect an assortment of Cores throughout the game, you can upgrade them in varying ways—likely a skill tree—and you can allocate them to yourself however you want, though there is a limit of 4 Cores at once. Creating loadouts of Cores is essential to performing well, I want it to be relatively open ended, but with some synergies in mind.
The combat, like mentioned before, would be turn-based. The player's Cores will always go first, unless it's a special enemy or Core action that changes it. I'm kind of debating whether or not I want to make enemies segmented like Fear and Hunger, I suppose it'd just be something I'd have to play with. It would make singular encounters a lot more dangerous and tactical, necessitating you to build your team wisely to deal with certain encounters. The more dangerous an enemy is, likely the more specialized its limbs would be, or it would have more limbs. Fodder enemies would be simple, with a few limbs at most, and little variation in their attacks.
I think the system would have to go through a bit of trial and error. I would need to play around with it, see what feels right.
Development
I haven't decided what engine I want to make this in yet. I'm thinking that I might use Penguinmod (in fact, I'm desinging some things in there already, see in a moment) but I also want to learn LÖVE, which seems appealing, since I already have some Lua experience, and I think that it would be more appealing to some if the game was made in something that... isn't a Scratch mod. LÖVE looks like it's quite powerful, and I find the shader programming very intriguing! I would like to use shaders to represent status effects, I think. I definitely need to broaden my horizons, so I think that prototyping in Penguinmod to figure out how to implement specific things wouldn't hurt, as long as I start putting the work in somewhere else. Like LÖVE! I've been meaning to learn it for the longest time, truthfully. We'll see how it unfolds.
Here's a mockup of the turn counter thingamajig for the combat. It's just a HUD element, but it's been the most enticing thing to me so far, I think! I've had the idea for it bubbling in my head for a little while. It rotates counter-clockwise every turn, and centers on the Core that goes next. I think it looks cool, and is thematic to the game! I'm unsure if I want to continue prototyping this combat system and HUD in Penguinmod, or if I want to hop into LÖVE to play around with it. I think I might try out LÖVE when I have the time for it, but as of writing this, I truly do not have much time to properly dive into it.
In Conclusion...
Well, that's all I have for now! I may come back once I've explored LÖVE, or when I've made notable progress on the battle system. Stay tuned, I hope you got something valuable out of reading this!