Edge of Light - A modern interpretation of SNES era ARPGs

UPDATE 01.11.16:
I spend some time creating a small title scene that I would like to share:

https://www.youtube./watch?v=voK9o-eY0Zg

It has some obvious flaws (like an embarrassingly stretched part in the texture of the tree) but I was trying to work on the presentation a little bit and I think it turned out a lot better than my previous scene: The gray box from the default level. :slight_smile:

I also want to talk about the setting a little bit:
The game revolves around the conflict between nature and technology. Centuries ago, the conflict lead to calamity leaving a crippled and barren land with both sides defeated.
Now the land is mostly healed and time erased the memory of the past.
The central focus of the plot involves a huge library that keeps long forgotten records of that past as well as stories and legends told by the people over the course of centuries.
The story begins when the words written in the books of the library start to come alive forcing the protagonists to live through history and fiction alike while trying a achieve their own personal goals that somehow involve the powers of the ancient library.

ORIGINAL POST:
I recently started developing something that I would like to share.
Originally, I started the project to learn how networking works in UE4 but I had way too much fun to stop.
Before I reveal any details, I would like to propose a game: What game was the inspiration for this project? Can you tell by watching the video of the demo level I made?
=pSlON9edCn4
I made the level to experiment with visual styles. So far all the assets are a mashup of several marketplace packages.
Most of the foliage stuff is taken from high-fidelity-forest-package.
The water assets are from procedural-nature-pack.
The character animations are from sword-animset-pro.

So far, my only contribution to the visuals is my wasp model and its animations. (My first animation attempt to be honest :slight_smile: )
I will start creating original assets once I settled for a visual style although I probably won’t do any character animation myself.
I experimented with the wasp model a little bit. Here are two gifs of the textured model:

https://s9.postimg.org/apenpkj6n/wasp.gif

https://s9.postimg.org/h4dom8pwf/wasp2.gif

The gameplay will be heavily inspired by a certain SNES classic but I will try to take off the rose tinted nostalgia glasses and fix some
of the most glaring gameplay issues these games had back then. And probably introduce several new ones :slight_smile:
The combat will be timing and accuracy based. Depending on the weapon type the player causes more damage when a certain time since the last attack has passed (swords)
or a certain part of the weapon overlaps a certain part of the enemy (spears). I hope this will create a dynamic an challenging system that provides enough
entertainment even after several hours of gameplay. The timing system for swords already has a working prototype although it might be difficult to see in the
video. The lower bar in the HUD displays the current timing bonus. If the player attacks when the bar is filled up to the marker, the attack deals more damage.

I would really appreciate some feedback concerning the visual style. I am absolutely not sure which way I will take in the end. The engine works very
well with a realistic style but I would have a lot of trouble creating realistic assets myself because I am not a very talented artist, to be honest.
A more stylized, cartoony style would have the advantage that I would be able to create most of the assets myself. Although it seems to be much more
challenging than I thought to create a good-looking stylized environment.

However, now that I have a decently looking test level, the highest priority will be to get a working gameplay system ready including everything from character stats,
ranged weapons, magic-like abilities, etc. Also the AI needs some drastic improvements as you can probably see in the video. No one is acting very smart.

The long term plans are to get a story telling system ready. I am planning to deliver the whole story via non-gameplay-interupting dialogs between the three characters but I am
very far from a working implementation. I will also try to find a clever way to allow sequence breaks that makes it possible for players with enough dedication to
turn the story progress upside down without crashing the game.

Looks really interesting. I like the map. It reminds me of Gaias Navel in Secret of Mana :stuck_out_tongue:

That is correct. :slight_smile:
Secret of Mana was my favorite game as a child and I hope that with the help of today’s tools something like that is managable for a single developer.

The wasp animation looks great!

It’s definitely refreshing to see a game in the vain of Secret of Mana while being 3D instead of the expected “pixel-art” style. This has some incredible potential!

Thanks for the encouragement. :slight_smile:
I updated the opening post with a prototype title screen. I also put some work into other aspects but the title scene is the only think visually appealing.

I have been (with help of friends) trying to do a similar project. I am really interested to talk to you about this and would even pay you for your time. If you want to talk please contact me.

Thanks for your interest. I sent you a PM.