AREA

This is one I'll probably actually do at some point, considering it seems fun and fairly small in size. Basically, it would be a short RPG Maker game with no story, where you just wander around a little fantasy world and interact with things. Then, when you're done playing, you can just turn the game off.

I have a bad habit of cheating at rpgs so I can skip all the combat and just go through the story, so I've always wanted to make a game like that, where you can just wander around and interact with objects and people. To that end the interesting things in it would have to be fairly dynamic npcs and lots of dialogue to read, and maybe some ways of impacting the world as you go through it.

The main thing I've been thinking about for this is what to put in the world. If you open up that image somewhere else you can see I just started roughly drawing out a bunch of little spots you could walk around in, and some people you could talk to. Of note is the childhood friend NPC, someone who would wake you up at the start of the game and could then be found shopping or farming in the village as you keep talking to her. Another concept was a magical forest with rune inscribed stones that you could activate, or a white fox that's always out of reach.

At this point the ideas start to diverge pretty heavily from the concepts of this universe as a whole. I imagine this having a more pastoral kind of fantasy feeling, rather than the space antiquity of the rest of this. It might possibly fit in 0-100 ADU, when interplanetary travel has been wiped out.

UPDATE AS OF 10/25/22: Over the last summer, I decided to try to actually make this in RPGMaker 2003, as barebones as possible. I say that, but in reality I had to scale down what I thought was possible. Life and lack of free time have gotten in the way of actually working on this, so I thought I would add what did get completed to this section.

I got through a good number of screens, trying to figure out how RPGMaker worked along the way, to varying levels of success. It's more than enough for a very low-interaction game like this one, but even then the logistics were frustrating.

I've put a map of all the screens I did actually make below, as well as my theoretical plan for what the entire game would be like. There is also the tavern map that I never implemented but did sprite out. Writing this now really makes me want to work on this again, even though I have other stuff right now.

UPDATE AS OF 8/1/23: I had another burst of energy while unemployed and ended up making a bunch of new maps which I am going to call the 2.0 update of the Area beta, because it sounds fancy. Finally finished up that damn town and made the palettes and tiles for the swamp and magic forest sections of the map, though i ended up getting a job while working on the magic forest and development really petered out. Maybe in a year I'll be back with a sweet 3.0 build of some kind.

I put the updated map below, and the build is downloadable here if you want to see it in it's mostly nonfunctioning glory. I just had a lot of fun making random things to interact with!