2021-03-23 14:07:25

About the rumbles, I mean old styled pads with strange haptic engines, like spinners? I don't know how to describe them.

ice, fire, water, thunder.

2021-03-23 15:43:21

The Golden Sun series, at least the first two games, had a gimmick like that. At the end of the first game you would receive three passwords, all of which were incredibly long. Depending on which one you entered into the next game, a certain portion of the character stats would be imported, the third level password meaning all their levels, spells, items and Djin. So when the main party from the second game eventually encountered the party from the first game, they would have the stats they had at the end of the first game. Of course you didn't actually have to do this in order to complete the second game since the first game party would have sufficient stats to survive even if you didn't use a password. One game set where you did actually have to use passwords to get the full story was the Oracle games for Game Boy Color, part of the Legend of Zelda series. At the end of whatever game you beat first, whether it was Oracle of Ages or Oracle of Seasons, you would get a password or Secret as it was called, which you would input into the second game. That would give your character the same name as he had in the first game, give them a sword and an extra heart container. More importantly though it would also continue the story beyond the first game, since playing either game by itself would be like starting the story over. Not only that, but if you continued the story with a password, characters from the first game would make cameos in the second. They would give you passwords which you could then give to characters in the first game, who would give you a special reward and an accompanying password that would let you import that reward into the second game. While I'd love to see a series of audio games that incorporated a system like that, I can see where it could be hard to implement conveniently. Indeed, the Ravenscroft series of games I'm toying with, which as I said earlier are based on a fantasy story idea I've been playing with for the past several years, could be a prime candidate for that. I'm just not sure exactly how I would do it or what it would entail even if there was a system in place.

But wait, what's that? A transport! Saved am I! Hark, over here! Hey nonny non, please help!

2021-03-23 17:44:50

I completely forgot about the Golden Sun games.
To be honest, one thing I'm surprised nobody experimented with in the 90s was the Sega Genesis' lock-on technology with JRPG's. It couldn't exactly be used to move characters between games, as far as I'm aware, but it could be used to add characters and areas to games, sort of how Sonic 3 + Sonic and Knuckles combined to become Sonic 3 and Knuckles.

#FreeTheCheese
"The most deadly poison of our times is indifference. And this happens, although the praise of God should know no limits. Let us strive, therefore, to praise Him to the greatest extent of our powers." - St. Maximilian Kolbe

2021-03-24 01:28:23

Another thing I like in RPG's, although it admittedly has pissed me off on more occasions than I care to count, is enemies that have final attacks that they perform even as they die. Final Fantasy VI, one of my  favorite RPG's of all time, had one or two bosses and not a few normal enemies that would do this. Sometimes you could preempt this if you used certain abilities that delayed a counterattack by a turn, the character Gau had a few Rage abilities that could do this, but others were pretty much unavoidable, so you just had to know that a given enemy had a specific final attack and prepare accordingly. I think the most famous or maybe infamous example of this was a boss called the Magic Master, whom you fought at the top of the Tower of Fanatics after stealing its treasure. He could hit you with all kinds of powerful spells, although most of them could be reflected back at him with Wall Rings or the regular Reflect spell. But at the moment of his death he would always hit you with the Ultima spell, one of if not the absolute most powerful spell in the game, and it couldn't be reflected. I think the only way you could prevent that was to drain him of enough of his MP by the time the battle was over so that he just didn't have enough for the spell. If you didn't do that you had to either have a hell of a lot of HP or make sure that at least one character had had the Reraise spell cast on him or her at some point before the boss used his final attack. I realize this is probably het another battle scenario that would be more easily addressed in a potential second generation of Sable. This isn't quite like the specialized counterattacks I was talking about in a few earlier posts but it's another way that some mainstream RPG's had of keeping you on your toes.

But wait, what's that? A transport! Saved am I! Hark, over here! Hey nonny non, please help!

2021-03-24 13:01:53

Not that this enemy's final attack feature will ever make it in, but just for the sake of completeness, you forgot to mention enemies that explode.
Later!

2021-03-24 15:13:59

Oh yes, bomb type creatures. If I recall correctly they did damage to you ased on however much HP they had left at the time when they exploded, so if you could manage to get them down to critical you would take less damage. Of course heaven help you if more than one of them decided to explode in the same round.

But wait, what's that? A transport! Saved am I! Hark, over here! Hey nonny non, please help!

2021-03-25 19:09:08

Hi everyone,

Sorry for the really late reply, I had my uncles funeral to attend on Tuesday, plus I’ve been pretty nonstop over the last couple of days trying to get my current section (status affects) of testing complete before the end of the week, so I haven’t been online much the past couple of days.

@ SLJ, the gamepad support is more designed for game  play than editing, although there are some editing keys I’ve assigned, normally when editing you need access to the keyboard regularly to type things like stat values, descriptions, names etc, plus whilst editing first letter navigation really is a must for quick navigation through menus, so gamepad support isn’t that efficient whilst editing, since I spend most of my time editing rather than in a game I don’t often actually use the gamepad, so  I can’t remember exactly what I set the current key/buttons as. The right stick is used though, I think from memory pressing up reads your party’s money, down gives your coordinates, left and right do something to, as does pushing the stick in too, I just can’t remember what I assigned them to do , its obviously my old age creeping  up on me hahaha. the current configuration was more just for testing though, nearer to release I’ll sit down with the rest of the team and we’ll try to decide the best lay out. Running isn’t something I ever had planned for sable, but its been asked for a few times now so its on my list of additions, but as ever it might be a second gen thing. If I added a running mechanic to the game it would at that point be a simple addition  to set walking speed to be based on how far you push the stick whilst using a gamepad. I’ll add it to my list of future ideas as an addition to the running mechanic.
@ Zenothrax, ahh I see what you mean now. as far as being a creator making a project, providing I don’t make any drastic changes to the current file system for sable, it is possible to take data from one project and place it in another. This actually comes in really handy if you have multiple people in a team all  working remotely on the same project. It means you can run your own local version and then take your work and place it in a shared  copy of your game. this does involve some careful planning though as two people can’t obviously be working on the same thing, so you need to avoid stepping on other team members toes, but it does at least allow for working on a project as part of a team. It’s not  possible in play game mode however, I’ve specifically built in security to prevent this and also to prevent  swapping game save files, stopping things like the classic entombed army cheat (even though I did get some fun out of that one hahaha)
@ pates, regarding gamepad support, I’ll probably just keep it to PS4 and Xbox 360 controller support, since I think these are probably the main controller types used by gamers, but also just simply as these are the two types of controllers which I have at my house that I can test with.
@Brian and Threeblacknoises, some interesting mechanics, I do like the final death  attack idea, it definitely gives me some food for thought. It’s not something that will make it into this version, but as mentioned in previous posts   I’d like to add a more robust, advanced system into gen two which lets creators have more control over enemy attack patterns, things like the attack counters  we discussed previously, but also trigger points which would initialise certain attacks based on certain criteria, one trigger type would almost certainly be the enemies HP, I think the final death  attack would fit into this nicely, with an option to allow you to set something to happen when hp falls to zero. Again, thanks for the interesting ideas.

Paul Lemm

2021-03-26 01:15:25

That seems reasonable. I figured a lot of these features I've suggested would probably have to wait till a potential version 2. Depending on circumstances I could always try and update my project to add some features that didn't make it into the initial release. I've pretty much got the story worked out in my head, so it'll just be a matter of waiting to see what we have to work with in the initial Sable release, which will determine what I'm actually able to do when the time comes to actually sit down and start building.

But wait, what's that? A transport! Saved am I! Hark, over here! Hey nonny non, please help!

2021-03-27 00:37:03

I also agree that actually controlling Sable with the keyboard seems much more practical to me than with a gamepad, although I don't personally own one. But it reminds me of an old game I had back when the original PlayStation was still a thing. It was an RPG Maker program like some that used to be available for PC, although as I recall none of those were ever released officially in the US. The only English translation I ever saw was by a Russian guy who went by the named Don Miguel. The main difference between this PC version and the PS1 version I had was that in the PC version you had the ability to import your own music, sounds and presumably graphics to use in your projects, the way you can import your own audio in Sable. The music had to be in midi format as I recall. This of course meant that you could give your projects some uniqueness in the graphics and things, whereas with the PS1 version you had I believe thirty-five music tracks to choose from, and while you could use them in pretty much any way you saw fit, it nonetheless meant that projects created in the PS1 version sounded more or less the same, since you were also limited in your sound effects choices. The reason why I bring this up is that, unless I'm much mistaken there was no keyboard accessory for the original PlayStation, although there was a mouse which I never had. But this meant that ALL! the text in your game had to be typed using the PS1 controller, and as typing out text comprised quite a considerable part of your creation process, it ended up being the most tedious process. So I'm glad we'll have the keyboard for Sable LOL.

But wait, what's that? A transport! Saved am I! Hark, over here! Hey nonny non, please help!

2021-03-27 00:59:48

Is it actually possible to play around with this? I did some stuff a long time ago but was wondering if there's a new version or something. Post 1 doesn't have any info.
Oh and as a side note, I was actually part of this dev team when it started up in 2016 I believe? I got kicked out because I'm an asshole and I fucked up and they wanted to cover their asses from backlash.

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2021-03-27 11:33:17

Unfortunately, their isn't a version you can play around with.
The public alpha testing ended in June of last year.
And even if you were; somehow; to get a hold of that code, it wouldn't work for you, as keys for that version stopped working at the end of the test.
As a humorous aside, one of the testers actually played off this and made his project about someone braking into the ebon sky studios development center in an attempt to alter the key system to extend the time of the public alpha to march of 2021.
It didn't go well...
Later!

2021-03-27 12:48:19 (edited by lemm 2021-03-27 12:51:09)

@Lord Lundinn, I’ve seen this username pop up on the forum before, but didn’t realise it was yourself.  Regarding Sable, we launched a public alpha test version last May, so anyone could have a play around and test Sable. it was only open for public testing for about three weeks, so its no longer available to download. I’m just doing a final play through/test of Sable and the game design team are working on our first game title Crimson Eclipse. Our plan is to release our game first, that will give us a chance to showcase what Sable is capable of, but also at the same time lets us fully road test Sable and make any fine tuning adjustments where needed. At some point after we have launched Crimson Eclipse  we then plan to launch Sable. Good to hear from you and to hear you are still interested in Sable, I hope you are doing well . to avoid the topic going off track and prevent random questions  comming in and detracting from the conversation of Sable itself, As Lord Lundin says, yes he was originally part of the initial team when me and Justin first met in November 2016 and first started to discuss the possibility of creating an RPG audio game. Sadly a few months later we had to let Lord Lundin go. this wasn’t anything to do with his time on the team, but stuff external from Ebon Sky Studios and the Dev team. I don’t intend to get into specifics about his actions, since that’s not my place to say, but also the past is the past and I believe that’s where it should stay. I do appreciate though Lord Lundin that you recognised in your previous post that you were as you put it ‘being an arsehole and fucked up’. we were all young once and as long as you have learnt from your mistakes then I genuinely hope you are doing well.

Paul Lemm

2021-03-28 19:36:07

The funny thing is, I think I might still have the zip file for Sable on my laptop, although of course as has already been pointed out it wouldn't work even if I tried to boot it up again. In a way it's kind of a shame since I'm anxious to get building, but as Master Yoda might say, patience, yes. Then, only then, a Jedi will you be. LOL. But it's funny how talking about Sable has reminded me of that old RPG Maker program for PC and the PSX version. I have the music for that latter on my laptop which I hadn't listened to in a while. Well after I last posted about it I went back and listened. The sad thing is that it sounded more like music you'd be likely to hear in an old Super NES game than what you'd expect from the PlayStation. The sound effects weren't much better as I recall, sounding like old cartoon punching noises. That's also a gripe I had with Entombed. It didn't matter whether the enemy you'd just killed was a goblin, a dragon or a stone Golem. They all sounded like little toys when they hit the ground. But at least Jason either lucked into a good music composer or a good music library. Speaking of music I did go back to that page Paul shared a few pages back and listened to some of the other tracks. That boss battle track is pretty epic.

But wait, what's that? A transport! Saved am I! Hark, over here! Hey nonny non, please help!

2021-03-28 20:46:13

@Brian, Do you remember the name of the PlayStation RPG creator game? I don’t remember seeing that title, but then I only really got into RPG’s  after the play station released final fantasy 7 (which I think was a couple of years after the play stations original release). Pleased you liked the music from the website I recommended, in the test RPG game I attempted when first learning to code (long before Sable  or Ebon Sky Studios was ever a thing) I used various music from that site in the game, even though I only really wrote the training area and first area, so it was more just a little test project than a game. Actually, flipping back a couple of conversations when we were talking about enemies which couldn’t be defeated the first time you met them, actually in that test project in the training area I coded there was a weapons master you talked with that gave you some of the basics of equipping, battles etc, you had to fight him, but there was no way you could win as he was way to over powered, so you had to lose the fight to continue. I think at the end of the battle he invites you to come back anytime to brush up on your battle skills , the idea was that eventually you’d be able to get your player really high level and eventually head back there, absolutely kick his arse and reap some huge EXP reward and gain some unique items. So I do like the idea of having enemies which can’t be defeated, or can’t be defeated straight away, so that feature will definitely go in at some stage to sable, just not sure as to whether it will make it in for the prototype or for the second generation. At the moment though just trying to finish my testing of status affects, man its taking ages to do the testing and add the polish as I go, almost there now though, although  I think after the amount of time I’ve spent testing status affects I think I’d be happy if I never heard the word status affect again hahaha. hopefully I’ll have a new change log up in the next couple of days though

Paul Lemm

2021-03-28 21:25:56

hi
congratulations we are already approaching 1000 post.
and so with each passing day we are approaching the sable release date

2021-03-28 21:39:54

@989
Surely you could script those in as separate characters but keep the descriptions, displayed names etc the same to provide at least the concept even if the implementation isn't fully complete?

Looking forward to trying this out when I am next able to do so.

Regards,
Sightless Kombat.
***If you wish to refer to me in @replies, use Sightless***

2021-03-28 21:49:22

Hay Paul.
The RPG creater program is; unsurprisingly; called RPG Maker.
The PlayStation 1 game is actually part 3, as the first two came out on the super Nintendo.
They just released a new one for pc in October, and a PlayStation 4 port of the previous one; RPG Maker MV; in September.
Later!

2021-03-28 21:59:12

That's right, there was an RPG Maker for the SNES. I didn't know there were two. I do recall that RPG Maker for the PS1 also had a separate Anime Maker that came with it, but for obvious reasons I never played with it. But I didn't know the RPG Maker was still being made for PC. That's pretty neat actually. The last one I played with was RPG Maker 2000. That was the one that was translated by Don Miguel. I do recall it had some pretty good music included and, as I said earlier, you could import your own if you wanted to, although it had to be Midi files. I remember I had one Midi file that I'm guessing was written as a sorrow theme, and seeing as one project I was hell bent on making was a game version of David Eddings' Belgariad, I'd planned on using that file in the serf villages sprinkled throughout the land of Arendia. I'm not sure if it was a piece from another game, but it really fit the mood for what I imagined those downtrodden villages would have sounded like. Hell, as I said, one of the tracks you bundled with Sable, the piano track to be precise, really fit the mood for the female lead in my Ravenscroft project since she has a tragic secret in her past and her guilt about that is part of why she's fallen off the rails so to speak.

But wait, what's that? A transport! Saved am I! Hark, over here! Hey nonny non, please help!

2021-03-29 23:54:49

@Toto, wow almost 1000 posts, that’s crazy, can’t thank everyone enough for all the support, it’s great to see so many people excited about the project.
@sightless, sorry I’m not quite following what you are suggesting I script? are you talking about wanting to see the concept of my test project? It was only something I created whilst learning to code, it was never finished and is only a training area  and then the first outside map. since it was hardcoded in, as this was long before Sable it took me quite a while to get as far as I did (even though that wasn’t very far hahaha), ironically I think I could recreate  most of it in an hour or two using Sable. there are a couple of bits Sable doesn’t support though, although the areas I built so far, I coded in by hand, I wanted certain sections to be procedurally generated, I’d started work on the first of these, which is the area once you head into the temple and the high priest tasks you to head into the temples catacombs  to rescue someone, the catacombs would have been randomly generated (a bit like entombed, but with other more open areas to explore which weren’t generated). its an abandoned project now though, since I realised I was terrible at story writing   hahaha, plus I’ve since met up with the Ebon Sky studios team (who unlike me are excellent writers and could do a much, much better story than I ever could hahaha(not to mention my full focus is obviously all about Sable these days. Rather than me spending time recreating something I don’t intend to ever pick up again, if you’re really interested in seeing the test project I think I’ve got a video play through of it lying about, which I sent a friend  many years back now, again its absolutely nothing to do with Sable, since this is just something I hard coded in from scratch to help me learn to program, its only about 15 or twenty minutes long, but if you really want to see it I’ll send you the video. Pleased to hear you are excited about Sable, lots of changes and additions have gone in since the last time you got to play around with it in the public alpha last year.
@ Threeblacknoises and Brian, thanks for the extra information, I have heard of RPG maker for the PC, but I didn’t realise that the PlayStation version was the same thing, that’s also really cool it was out on the SNES too.  It’s a shame RPG maker isn’t accessible, I heard a rumour it was originally meant to have some accessibility features , but they for whatever reason never got added, I don’t know much about how the game works, so not sure how feasible adding accessibility would have been and maybe that was why it never got added.
@Brian, regarding the piano track, since the public alpha wasn’t something we originally had planned, I think I just grabbed two of our sound designers  tracks, but to give more variety the other two tracks I just grabbed from my own personal testing version of Sable, those other two tracks were two of my favourites from Final fantasy  10 which I used to like to have playing in the background whilst I created maps/tested  Sable, one of those was the piano track, so although I do really like that track, sadly it couldn’t be used in any actual games. it was because of those I added something in the release notes to say that the sounds and music  included in the test alpha project were just place holder sounds and shouldn’t be used outside of  testing, so sorry if you thought that might have been something you could use. there is actually a couple of really good piano tracks on that website I recommended, plus the specific artist I linked to has a really good sorrowful sounding track too.

Paul Lemm

2021-03-30 09:48:23

@994
All I was doing was trying to work out a way you could achieve the same results with the current version of Sable even though the feature isn't strictly supported yet.  Would be great to have, much like in the Fromsoft games, bosses that, though they can be beaten, are pretty much meant to be a losing matchup when you first encounter them.

Regards,
Sightless Kombat.
***If you wish to refer to me in @replies, use Sightless***

2021-03-30 19:10:14

@sightless, sorry I totally misunderstood you, that’ll teach me for replying  at the end of the day when I’m tired smile   to add a basic version of what people are asking for would be really simple, I could just add an extra option in the event trigger which fires a battle, which lets the user specify that if the party members are all killed that it won’t cause a game over.  This would allow for this type of battle, where you might get totally destroyed by the enemy to start with when you first encounter it, but being defeated by the enemy is actually part of the story, or an enemy where you could keep coming back to try and kill it  when you are more of a higher level and with better equipment. The only reason I’m reluctant to say for definite that it will go in, is just as at present my key goal is to just finish my final test play through I’m currently doing in Sable at present, where I’m looking for and fixing any bugs, but also adding some of the final polish too. There’s a few new features I wouldn’t mind adding before Sable is released, but I don’t want to get side-tracked with adding new stuff, whilst I’m trying to finish my final playthrough. On a plus side I did finish all the status affects testing today (at last hahaha). So the latest change log should be up on our website shortly.

Paul Lemm

2021-03-30 19:53:09

hey man, I am hyped about sabel, as I do intend to creating a giant project of my own when its out, all though that project will remain privat
a few questions and sugestions
1, consider adding it so you can deside the level limit for your party members, i.g, in my project, I want my characters level limits to be perhaps around 1250 to 1400
2, when do you plan to release sabel? just a general release point would be nice to know
3, what is sabel going to be prised at ruffly?
4, try adding some sort of perk point that your char gains every level or so, that would make the projects more intresting

Suffering's what keeps me alive.
If one never suffers, one doesn't live propperly.
So embrace the pain, the suffering life has brought you and will bring you in the future

2021-03-30 20:26:15

Hey Lemm, I have a question about this topic itself. Do you think you could put an FAQ section in the first post so people don't keep asking the same questions over and over again? I've seen people ask you for release dates and price points more times than I could probably count on one hand, and if an FAQ was posted somewhere it would probably stop most people from asking repeated questions like this. Note that I said most; some people can't be bothered to review info before asking questions, and that can't really be helped.

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2021-03-30 21:20:53

Hi everyone,

So firstly the new change log is up on our website, I’ll put the link to it below    . It’s a  pretty big change log, so pour a big cup of tea and get comfy before reading hahaha, although there’s no new major additions, there are lots of small and what I think are still useful additions and alterations which hopefully people enjoy reading about.  as a follow on from the recent questions regarding battles where the player  doesn’t game over if defeated by the enemy in question, although I’m not promising this will make it in, but out of curiosity: obviously if the party was defeated by the enemy their hp will all be zero, since they can’t walk away on zero hp (since they’d be technically dead hahaha)what do people think is the best way of handling this, i.e. restoring hp to a certain percent after the battle, restoring hp to what it was before the battle, or something else, would love to hear peoples thoughts on this.  Anyway link to the change log is below, it’s the top entry on the page for version 1.4.2, remember you need to expand the version to be able to read the full details of each change log entry. underneath that I’ve answered some of the other questions which have come in:
Change log link:
https://ebonskystudios.com/Sable-changelog/
@Fred, , to answer your questions:
1.    A level cap for players is a good idea, I’ll add that one to my possible future additions.
2.    There’s no release date for Sable yet, , I’m just doing my final play through/testing of Sable, but we don’t intend to release it until after we have launched our first game. before anyone asks, I don’t have a release date for the game title yet either sadly. Until we have a specific date for release we want to avoid giving even a rough estimation, as I’ve seen this cause  developers  problems before if those dates aren’t then met, even when they were only given as estimations.
3.    I can’t give any idea of pricing just yet, we have a couple of potential business models lined up for how we want to deal with distribution, , it’s too early to confirm specifics like that at this stage before our first game has even been released. we’ll confirm finer details like this though nearer to release and after Crimson  Eclipse has been launched
4.    Just out of curiosity, what would the perk points be used for?
@Dan_gero. That’s actually a  really good idea, my original plan was to do something like that, I think in post one there is a frequently asked section, but I haven’t updated it for ages, so it only has a couple of questions in there. I think I’ll update that at some stage, that way I can refer people to that section if the same questions keep coming up. Thanks for the suggestion/idea

Paul Lemm

2021-03-31 05:47:15

Yeah, I know that track you bundled couldn't have been used in an actual project. I just used it because I felt it captured the essence of Samantha's character. As for the quest you asked, I'm actually not sure how mainstream RPG's handled these situations. Yeah the party's HP would be reduced to zero, but since this was a story battle obviously it was coded so that you wouldn't get the game over screen, or even if you did it might only pop up for a second or two before the story took over. I think the way most games handled it was that an NPC would show up and either completely heal the party or restore them to the point that they could at least get back on their feet.

But wait, what's that? A transport! Saved am I! Hark, over here! Hey nonny non, please help!