Saturday, December 6, 2008

SKELETRONIC




An 8-Bit video game I am developing. Now with screenshots!

In the ancient times there was a city of immense proportions with vast citizens and warriors. But the city fell into darkness under the influence of the Technomancer, a powerful wizard able to create matter and space. Unravel the mystery of the ancient city, Simulacrum, and your own haunted past.

You are Ishmael, a robot in the giant undead city. You'll explore decaying palaces, forgotten towns, fields of graveyards, a cursed tower, castles, ruins, and more! Solve puzzles and collect the artifacts necessary to unlock the key to the Necropolis and defeat the immortal Skeleton Kings. This cursed land is filled with thousands of individual skeletons programmed to kill you.

Featuring a real time battle system. You have no way of defeating any monster in the entire game. Dozens of unique monsters, including the impossible Skeleton Kings. You will have to outwit a literal army, with no weapons, to beat the game. It can be done.

Enlist the help of other heroes! Johnny Star, the human, Rocket, the red robot, and Arthur, the fallen knight.

Journey through the Simulacrum on an epic journey of knowledge, a tale of redemption and tragedy.

Stunning state-of-the art graphics will blow your mind as backgrounds are pre-rendered in stunning monochrome.

These screenshots are taken from a working build of Skeletronic, which has been in development for about 6 months, but was announced on the sidebar November 19th. A Summer 2009 release date is anticipated.




12 comments:

Anonymous said...

Cool man,
Looks awesome.
What prog are you using to develop
the game?

Anonymous said...

cool. 8-bit = hardcore!

8bitcity said...

I'm using OHRRRPGCE (google it) to make this game. A great tool, I highly recommend it to anyone interested in making games.

samiorigami said...

"Johnor Star, the human,
Rocket, the red robot,
and Arthur, the fallen knight."

1. you changed his name?
2. love love love him!
3. have you finished the graphics for him?

your game looks great!

Benjamin Fennell said...

Very cool. I'm looking forward to playing this. Still working on some early design on an iPhone/iPod Touch game my older brother's making - I'm literally the only other team member, contributing a lot of design ideas and writing every bit of text and dialogue in the game - but I likely won't have anything to post on it until a ways into 2009 when we have some concrete things to unveil to the internet. The basic gameplay engine and early character modeling are the current foci.

Interesting to see something this versatile done with OHRRPGCE too. I used to have a pretty decent ideological presence in that community way back in the late '90s when I was still in high school. And I had a little bit of a presence in the Klik community the mid and earlier late '90s. I never released much, most of my projects being ambitious beyond the scope of my abilities. I even had my own little freeware development group focused on Klik series and OHRRPGCE platforms way back in those days. I basically drifted away from the Klik community over time - in part due to some typical teenage drama I'm pretty embarrassed to look back on. And the OHRRPGCE community was turning into a bit of an overly derivative, ego-driven cesspit in the late '90s (Though I'd imagine that it'd be diverse enough now that it'd be far past that.), and after some particularly awful turns, I withdrew from that, and haven't actively done any game creator-based game design in close to a decade now. I usually just thoroughly document ideas and concepts and don't end up doing anything with them. (I actually have several large scale, elaborate Mii-oriented WiiWare games that I've been planning for fun for months now coming together in terms of conceptualization and writing, though I'm sure they'll likely never materialize at any point. Same with an ambitious Wii RPG drawing heavily on JRPG influences while working to subvert genre stagnation.)

I've done a pretty good job erasing my tracks from those communities in the past too. It's very rare that anyone from those days manages to track me down on the internet, though for some reason, those who still remember me regard me as a bit of a design veteran from the mid-later '90s indie creator-based freeware game design scenes. I just find it funny because I produced very little in the way of concrete playable releases. I've just fully dedicated myself to my writing since - and I'm working on making the iPhone game as funny as I can (It's being written specifically so that it'll be a pretty E-rated family safe game, but with a writing style adults can appreciate and laugh at too, with the sense of humor I'm approaching the writing wtih.) - though I haven't lost any of my passion for game design and writing. I just tend to be more ambitious in that regard than I can actively pursue. And given my somewhat scarring experiences with the indie dev scenes I was involved back then, I'm hesitant to attempt another game creator-based project again. Though there seems to be more diversity in today's scene, at least - I like a lot of the indie gaming blogs and sites like TIGsource.

But yeah, it's interesting seeing something like this made in OHRRPGCE, couldn't help but reminisce a bit about the days I left behind so long ago. This'll be the first game made in that engine that I'll have played in closing in on a decade. Sorry for the long comment, but as you've seen in my writing anyway, I tend to ramble when I get something on my mind, haha.

Anonymous said...

dude i'm excited your working so hard on this game. Looking forward to seeing it go live.

Anonymous said...

Oh wow, I missed this post before. This looks GREAT, man. I can't wait to try it out.

And also, holy shit Benjamin you need to sandwich that post with some leather and drop that puppy off at the library. That'sa one spicy meatball!

Anonymous said...

Now it hits me:

"Featuring a real time battle system."

Sounds great, except:

"You have no way of defeating any monster in the entire game."

Wha, what? Battles where you can never win eh? I wonder what you have cooking, Heronblade.

Benjamin Fennell said...

Haha, for better or worse, I ramble everybody's face off.

theNestruo said...

Looks great! Hope to play it soon :)

Anonymous said...

Wow! Those are the kind of screenshots that make me stop in a large list of games.

Pixelated skeletons!!!
Inmortal enemies!!!
lots of hidden places and objects?

Jason Moses said...

Man, this game looks awesome.

(I just recently started doing the RSS thing. You're totally added.)