Phantasy Star New Line: A 2-D reimagining of PSO

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Phantasy Star New Line: A 2-D reimagining of PSO

Postby cala » Sun Mar 25, 2018 4:15 am

Hey! Recently I've been working on a little fan game that's intended to be a very loose reimagining of Phantasy Star Online Episodes 1 and 2 in the style of the older Phantasy Star games, particularly IV. Initially I just began it as a way to practice a variety of skills for an original project I was working on, but it turned out to be so fun that I kind of just kept going with it. I have no idea how much of the game I'll do, given that completing the whole thing would be a pretty huge task, but I've finished quite a lot of the early game art assets, and I also have a more or less complete battle system and a rapidly progressing menu system, so I'd like to at least finish to the end of the forest section. ^^

I thought I'd share my progress here, both to motivate me to keep going, and to see if anyone except me would actually be interested in playing something like this. :'D Here are some screenshots of some of the things I've done so far.

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Re: Phantasy Star New Line: A 2-D reimagining of PSO

Postby rodrigo » Sun Mar 25, 2018 11:24 am

how didn't anyone think of the before.

looks great!

What about the music?
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Re: Phantasy Star New Line: A 2-D reimagining of PSO

Postby cala » Mon Mar 26, 2018 12:44 am

rodrigo wrote:how didn't anyone think of the before.

looks great!

What about the music?


Thank you! I wouldn't be surprised if other people have thought of similar ideas before. ^^ Regarding music, in an ideal world, it would be really nice to remix songs using the FM functionality of something like DefleMask to create authentic Mega Drive-style remixes of PSO's music, but that would represent such an enormous amount of work in itself that I'd probably only embark on something of that sort if I had a finished game. For now, I'm just using MP3 music from Phantasy Star Online drawn from the game and its arranged album. With MP3 music, it winds up feeling more like something on the Mega CD or Saturn than the Mega Drive, but oh well. ^^''

I've also added a handful of supplementary songs drawn from Phantasy Star Portable, Phantasy Star Online Episode 3, and Phantasy Star Universe that I thought fitted with the sound of PSO's soundtrack. PSO is pretty light on story scenes and dialogue, and what's there is just delivered rather bluntly and awkwardly through the same dialogue boxes used to drive player to player communication, so I noticed as I wrote and built up story scenes that its soundtrack is quite small and doesn't have a lot of the event / character theme-y type of songs you'd expect to find in a single player, story-driven RPG. I didn't want to add random songs with radically different styles and instrumentation, though, and leave the game sounding disjointed and jarring. So I thought I'd fill in some of the holes with tracks from games that all share many of the same composers, a relatively similar style, and similar audio quality.
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Re: Phantasy Star New Line: A 2-D reimagining of PSO

Postby augmentedfourth » Wed Mar 28, 2018 2:18 am

Oh wow, this looks really cool! Usually fan games aren't my thing, but whenever you have a demo or something ready, I'll give it a try!
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Re: Phantasy Star New Line: A 2-D reimagining of PSO

Postby cala » Wed Mar 28, 2018 11:00 am

Drew a Rag Rappy today (and also an Al Rappy, given that it's largely a palette swap, and only really differs in two ridges across its belly). I thought about using the Rappy sprites from Phantasy Star IV, but the Rappy design changed quite a bit for PSO, and the PS4 Rappy was also so much better than what I can draw that I feared it would make the rest of my graphics look terrible.

Almost done with the Forest's monsters now! I just have to do a Monest and finish the Dragon. Then begins the long and arduous process of making them all animate. I'm not really much of an animator (I'm not really much of an artist in general :'D), but this was always supposed to be a learning project for me anyway, so it'll be an interesting challenge.

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augmentedfourth wrote:Oh wow, this looks really cool! Usually fan games aren't my thing, but whenever you have a demo or something ready, I'll give it a try!


Thanks, I really appreciate the kind words! I don't generally do fan games either, either as a player or as a developer, but I'm having so much fun with this. The story, setting and characters of PSO are barebones enough that there's tons of room for expansion, but also interesting enough that it's a fun setting to write in, and the gameplay is so far removed from the older games in the series that it's been interesting thinking about how to implement some of those differences within the framework of a story-driven, turn-based 2-D RPG.

I'm still a long way away from releasing anything that's actually fun to play, but I'll definitely let you know if and when I do! I might throw up a battle engine demo here in the not too distant future, as that side of the game is approaching completion (albeit with some missing sprites and not too many enemies, techs, items, and skills programmed in just yet), and I'd appreciate people testing it / doing their best to break it. I've been testing it pretty rigorously as I go along anyway, but invariably one of two things always slip through. ^^''
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Re: Phantasy Star New Line: A 2-D reimagining of PSO

Postby BenoitRen » Wed Apr 04, 2018 7:45 am

This looks really cool! I'd definitely give it a try! :D
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Re: Phantasy Star New Line: A 2-D reimagining of PSO

Postby cala » Mon May 07, 2018 3:23 pm

Unfortunately the aging laptop I was creating this on died a month or two ago and left me temporarily computer-less, so progress ground to a halt for a little bit. But the harddisk inside was totally fine, so no progress was lost. And I finally got things back up and running on another computer yesterday.

Yesterday I finally got around to implementing popup damage windows after attacks like in Phantasy Star IV. Damage was already being calculated and delivered correctly, and it was possible to finish and lose battles, but no damage numbers were shown outside of debug windows. It wasn't something that was particularly difficult to do, but for whatever reason I hadn't got around to setting it up yet, and it was probably the biggest thing still missing from the battle system. Battle engine framework is soooo nearly finished now! Just a couple more little things to do, and then I'll have a complete replica of Phantasy Star IV's battle system with some extra bells and whistles.

I also drew a bunch more graphics, and made it so that your party members follow you on the map screen. I figured it wouldn't feel like Phantasy Star without that good old caterpillar party. :3

BenoitRen wrote:This looks really cool! I'd definitely give it a try!


Thank you! It's still very much a work in progress, but I've put enough hours into it now that I think I'm committed to at least releasing a demo of the Forest. ^^
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