About Dragonfall

So, why am I making Dragonfall? I've always been interested in game design on a deep level, and after quite a few practice projects and lots of studying, I'm finally ready to make something to show off.

RPG Maker games tend to get a bad rap. A lot of people simply don't believe the engine has much potential to make good games. I'm doing my best to prove them wrong. While it's true that the basic unmodified engine has certain limitations, between my own skills and the liberal use of plugins and resources that other creators have generously made freely available, there's a great deal more potential.

So why work in RPG Maker at all? If it's so much work to make the systems I want, wouldn't it be just as much work to code something from scratch that better suits my purposes? To some degree, it would be. However, in the immortal words of Mark Rosewater, "restrictions breed creativity". I find that working within a system that already has certain parameters defined helps me to develop more interesting solutions than I might if I had total freedom to make everything exactly how I first imagined it. I enjoy the challenge of making an engine do things it wasn't designed for in a way that leads to exciting gameplay.

My main goal is to develop an interesting mechanical system that necessitates critical thinking and planing, with a wide variety of viable strategies for the player to chose from.

The most notable features I've developed so far:

1. The enemy recruitment system. This is the big one, the main mechanical hook. Various skills allow for recruiting any enemy in the game, with a different class based on the recruitment method, as well as their own base class. The game dynamically generates a new actor each time, allowing for the player to recruit as many party members as they wish, in many different combinations of classes. Thus, the player has numerous options as far as party configuration, depending on how much effort they choose to put into developing their team.

2. The class system. So far, I have over 15 distinct classes coded, each of which has its own basic strategic themes as well as different resource management. I also have plans for a few more interesting ones that won't be accessible later in the game. Since each character can equip both a base class and a subclass, with a bit of effort it's possible to build a large and varied party with lots of choices for strategies.

3. The status option. It doesn't look like much from the player's perspective, but the in-battle status option that describes all of the status effects on a battler is the culmination of about two weeks of research and programming. To my knowledge, something like that hasn't ever been implemented in an RPG maker game before. Most games have the problem where there isn't a clear way to check status effects, which means that there have to be a relatively small number of intuitive or easily-memorized states. The implications of having a freely-accessible description affect the entire systems of the game, allowing me to have numerous complex and unique states that simply wouldn't be possible to understand with a more default set of options.