Do you want to be in my game? I'm looking for people who would like to appear as an NPC in Magelore.. There's no pay involved - just the excitement of being able to show friends and family that you are in a game on the iPad/iPhone At the very least I can make sure you get a promo code when the game is out... (which is looking to be early next year at current progress)... Basically, I need single profile shots + a full body shot ideally. If you have any shots in interesting attire - like medieval or gothic - that would be great, otherwise I can photoshop you into an appropriate pose.. Also, if you have any specific desire on type of character or questline you'd like to be (or would like NOT to be), I can put that under consideration also - the storyline is very flexible at the moment but generally everything has a comical spin to it - sort of "secret of monkey island" style writing.. This old video will give you an idea of what you will look like in game. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yt2rqiEUIAI If your interested you can post here, or mail me direct [email protected] I could use about a dozen people so first come first served though, of course, the quality and suitability of any pictures will get preference.
I'll be cutting the character our from the background, so it shouldn't matter too much, but if you have long transparent hair bits, its good if the background is monotone or dark behind the hair or I'll probably end up trimming a lot of your hair off. If the background is chromakey'd like a solid green or blue, like in movie special effects, then it can make the cutting out job much easier for me but it's not essential.
ALSO, I better mention.... I'm looking for adults here and NO RUDE PICTURES or under age people please - you may get me in trouble. I only need full body shots if your in some sort of medieval dress and I can use you for the ingame character. Otherwise, I'll just cut your face out and paste it on one of my NPC ingame bodies so I just need a clear hi-res head shot. Your facial expression will be important to determine what kind of storyline/quests you'll be giving the player. I'm not planning to support multiple moods for charaters, so a neutral expression is probable more useful than something overly scared/mad or happy.
Cool, I'll see if I can find my old ren fair garb. Can I make a suggestion? The live pictures seem a bit cheesy and out of place - why don't you use a Photoshop filter or two on them to give them an artistic feel? I'm assuming you're using this method because you can't afford to pay for an artist? Well this would be an easy way to give the images that more artistic look. If you need help I'll be glad to do some for you.
Yeah, you're on the mark about it being a budget thing, however it's really grown on me over the year and its working for me in it's context... The writing style will be quite cheesy - think more monkey island than a final fantasy epic. I also had another feature planned where people would be able to put their own faces on the npcs so you could play with all your friends and relatives in the story. This feature will probably have to wait until after release though because I'm already way behind my original target of releasing by christmas.
well, that attempt to get NPCs for the game was an unmitigated disaster. I guess I'll just need to go back to plan A and use all my relatives. Anyway, new blog posted after a long gap. http://magelore.blogspot.com/2010/11/much-ado-about-nothing.html Executive summary - Company folded. Lost my job. Got a job. Lost that one. Doing contract programming now from home. Magelore making very slow but positive progress.
That sucks about the job - I've been there a couple times. I was going to try to get you a picture for the NPC stuff, but I've been so busy lately, I completely forgot. I saw in your blog that you're having trouble with quests/story. I've done some of that on my own time (currently finishing up a NWN2 module that has a lot of story) - let me know if you need some help. Been wanting to do some iphone game dev for a while (especially RPGs), but being more on the design side, I don't really have enough of the programming or art skills to do a full game all on my own (actually, time is really the main issue - like you, got family to take care of and all).
I just wanted to say that I'm very much looking forward to getting this game on my iPod as soon as it's released. Huge fan of classic PC style RPGs (which the iDevices seem to get in spades with games like RogueTouch, Fargoal, The Quest, and Undercroft). Really enjoying the Ultima vibe I'm getting from this. The enchantment system looks particularly interesting. My question is what limits things like life regenerating enchantments will have? I'm hoping they're not like an automatic God mode when you get more powerful ones? Like faster regeneration than any enemy can realistically hit you for per turn? Also, the NPC pictures are strangely unsettling LOL. Keep up the good work here. I'm very excited to keep getting news.
SideQuest, still balancing the regeration enchant. It's fairly easy to keep it from becoming a GOD enchant, but I also don't want it to detract completely from healing - so not sure what the solution will be yet. It plays a big part on enemies like trolls, but for the player characters they are quite restricted in power and have a fair amount of randomness to the healing. At least enchantments are unique, so as long as I don't add regeneration to multiple enchantments, you'll only be able to have one socket'd at any given time. I may still need to put extra requirements on it - like consuming certain herbs while socketed. Artfoundry, extra writing help would be awesome, though not sure how to structure it. If you have any scribbles on a sub-questline that you think would be interesting, you could send those. The conversation system supports full trees of conversation, though its not mandatory that all conversations need to be complex. I've started another Job and thats eaten up all my time getting on top of that but I think I have it under control now so no excuse to not get Magelore moving.
