Hellion

There is something strange going on at the old temple in the remote village of Salidar.  You are the Mysterious Wanderer - a warrior chosen from destiny to face the evil within.  You fate is tied intimately with what lies at its depths.  Will you bring salvation to the forlorn hopefuls of Salidar  Or will you unleash destruction, whether by design or disaster  It is in your hands....

Hellion is best described as a cross between Dragon Warrior, Diablo and D&D - you have a blank slate character with 8 classes to choose from at the beginning of the game.  You adventure solo.  You can hire hirelings.  The monster drops are random.  The graphics are NES.  The battles backgrounds are black.  There are traps.  There are locks to be picked and NPCs to be persuaded.

..:: FEATURES ::..
- Dragon Warrior NES-style theme
- Several outside of battle skills, including lockpicking, hiding, running, pickpocketing and persuading.
- A simple Alignment tracking system
- Random monster drops and chest contents
- On-map traps and monsters
- Unique Skill trees for the 7 character classes
- Fatigue-based Running System



..:: SCREENS ::..











..:: Outside-of-Battle-Skillsets (OOBS) ::..

OOBS, or outside-of-battle-skillset, is just some generic term I came up with for the skills and abilities that you use outside of a battle environment.  

Your outside-of-battle-skillset includes the following actions your avatar can make outside of battle:

Run
Detect Traps
Detect Hidden Monsters
Detect Hidden Doors
Disarm Traps
Unlock Doors
Unlock Chests
Hide
Pickpocket from NPCs
Pickpocket from Monsters
Preemptive Attack on monsters
Persuade NPCs
Find hidden treasure
Forage monster remains


The success rate and effectiveness of your OOBS are determined using your current level in ability points.  Abilities are capped at 31 (+ class bonuses). Upon leveling up, you receive more Ability Points to distribute - how many you get depends on class.  The abilities that you can beef up your character with are:

Lockpick - used to determine your success in picking locks on locked doors and chests.

Disarm Traps - used to determine your success in disarming detected traps without setting it off and taking damage.

Hide - used to determine the effectiveness of your Hide skill.  While hidden, you can pickpocket NPCs or monsters, or begin a preemptive attack on monsters.

Pickpocket - used to determine the success or failure of pickpocketing both NPCs and monsters. Failure results in being sent to jail (NPC) or a Backattack battle (monster)

Bash - used to bash locked doors, chests and traps when lockpicking or disarm traps fails.  Bashing doors results in taking some damage, while bashing locked chests may result in detroying the item inside.  Bashing traps may destroy the trap without taking damage or only taking 1/2 damage.

Decipher - used to decrypt scrolls (which in turn allow you to cast a spell one time) and read runes.  Some doors are locked using magic runes.

Persuade - used in conversation with NPCs.  This may result in a reduced price for goods and services, or progression in story arcs, or increased rewards for quests.

Stamina - used to increase your stamina bar, which drains when your are running or hiding.

Detection - used to detect hidden things such as traps, monsters, treasure, and doors (and a certain Hireling!)

Forage - used to improve the success rate of scavenging the remains of defeated monsters.  All monsters have drops, but only a high forage skill will allow you to capitalize on that.



..:: CLASSES ::..

The classes in Hellion are:

The Rogue
A moderately balanced fighter with a strong outside-of-battle-skillset (OOBS). The rogue gains 7 ability points/level up to distribute among the 10 abilities, plus his cost to increase abilities is low, making the rogue the ideal class for those who enjoy lockpicking, hiding, pickpocketing and preemptive attacks.

The Kensai
The warrior class. The kensai is the foremost fighter in the game and a veritable tank. He can equip most any equipment and further improve his fighting ability by dual wielding and attacking multiple times per round. His OOBS is almost non-existant, though.

The Animagus
A secondary warrior class that has access to shapeshifting and totemic skills. Though not a tank like the kensai, the animagus is more than able to handle himself in a fight. Plus, turning into a dragon is cool.

The Cleric
The cleric is a surprisingly effective fighter (due to her ability to equip some great weapons and armor) as well as a proficient healer. The cleric can further improve her in-battle prowess with stat-doubling skills. She also has access to powerful anti-undead spells that lay waste to any ghosts and zombies lurking in the Pit.

The Warlock
With the ability to summon skeletons, ghosts and liches to fight by his side, the warlock rarely travels alone. His access to the dark arts further bolsters his powers and his curses weakens his enemies.

The Elementalist
The fireball-flinging, lightning-casting, earth-shattering mage can unleash magical fury upon his enemies. Which is a good thing because he can't fight very well. A golem or fire elemental helps out in that respect.

The Mindfreak
The brilliant mindfreak is a master of misdirection. Fear, confusion, invisibility and powerful psyche attacks are her weapons of choice. With the aid of some skills, the mindfreak is also a fair OOBS specialist.



..:: DOWNLOAD ::..
Hellion v1.0 FULL GAME



..:: NOTES ::..

Hellion is a dungeon crawler cross with gameplay elements inspired by Diablo and D&D games, using retro NES Dragon Warrior IV graphics, sounds and music.  The gameprofile is at RMN: http://www.rpgmaker.net/games/146/


..:: RAD SUNGLASSES ::..

After Deacon Batista suggested that Hellion could use some light effects (and was shouted down), I ran a little competition to make some XTREME maps for Hellion.  The Hellion Rad Sunglasses mappack was released today and it's chock full of overlays, light effects, rocking MP3 music and arrow tile puzzles.

In v0.6 (the old demo you played), the stamina bar didn't turn off and on properly due to some coding issues.  I've fixed it mostly in v0.7 (the demo the beta testers played), but it will still appear in menus sometimes (and I don't know exactly why yet).

The skeleton's IS_DEAD switch wasn't turned on in that event, so he wouldn't disappear.  This has since been fixed.  Thanks though.

For the lag - I really didn't make this game terribly efficient.  There are several parallel processes running all the time, so on slower machines, or event-heavy areas the game can lag.  RM2k3 wasn't really designed for games like this (and I coded 90% of the game in about 17 days) so lag is an unfortunate side effect.  If I ever do a game like this again, I'd code it myself.

I think when I was making the game, I treated books like chests, and opening a book would reveal an unidentified scroll.  In v0.7, I added identifying scrolls to the list of things that get automatically checked when you use the hotkey ("9" I think).

There isn't enough room on the screen for both skills and abilities to fit, though the difficulty ramps up the deeper you go.  The first 4 floors are a bit on the easy side for locks and traps and such.

Rouge notwithstanding (he's supposed to be awesome at OOBS), a common complaint from my beta testers was that OOBS (outside-of-battle skills) were underpowered with no alternate way of improving them - especially cross-class skills. I realize now that I didn't really think that one through too well.

So, the goal is to provide the player with a way of improving their OOBS. I have 5 ideas:

1. Have an OOBS trainer in the village that will permanently increase particular skills for a price

2. Have Hirelings give you a boost in certain OOBS when they are in your party
For example, Lars the Brute would give a bonus to Bash.

3. Increase the available skill points on levelups

4. Have more quests where the reward is a boost to OOBS

5. Have equipable (or consumable) items that can boost OOBS

What do you guys think?

(hedge[1] is alive??)

When I was initially designing the game, I definitely had that view in my mind - where OOBS is one of the aspects that you should consider when choosing your class.  I deliberately chose to make the Rouge weaker in battle skills than any other class with the idea that OOBS would make up for the overall.  What I didn't consider was how easily you can beef up your battle effectiveness by simply recruiting some of the heavy hitter hirelings (or finding awesome equipment).  There was no equivalent for OOBS.  If you had bad OOBS, there was no way to change it.

So now, some of the hirelings give specific OOBS bonuses (like the Brute gives a bonus to Bash, and the illusionist gives a bonus to Detection) while a trainer now beefs up some skills as a one time thing.  It helps balancing the classes (because right now the Rouge is one hella-awesome character).

Hellion v0.8 has been released

This is a vastly updated demo from the one publicly available from over a year ago.  It contains 12 of the 16 planned floors, many fixes and upgrades.






Download it here!

Hellion FULL GAME has been released

..:: DOWNLOAD ::..
Hellion v1.0 FULL GAME


..:: RAD SUNGLASSES ::..

After Deacon Batista suggested that Hellion could use some light effects (and was shouted down), I ran a little competition to make some XTREME maps for Hellion.  The Hellion Rad Sunglasses mappack was released today and it's chock full of overlays, light effects, rocking MP3 music and arrow tile puzzles.  The mappack is a complete optional sidequest with no battles.



http://rpgmaker.net/games/146/radsunglasses/

SOMEBODY MADE THE RAD SUNGLASES TOO

I thought that competition's deadline was put somewhen after the 28th?

After Deacon Batista suggested that Hellion could use some light effects (and was shouted down)

*cried down!

I thought that competition's deadline was put somewhen after the 28th?
*cried down!

Hey, if you send it to me I'll add it to a future mappack or something.

This game's really looking awesome. =)

This game is really done.  I'm just not sure who to ask to move it to the completed games forums anymore.