Set centuries before the events of Escheron, "Presage of Darkness" tells the story of a relegated knight who sets out on a quest to reclaim his honor, only to uncover an insidious and subversive force lurking in the shadows of war. As relations between countries begin to break-down and kings are suddenly stricken with insanity, unwavering political alliances draw the world into an age of darkness.

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I wanted to do something robust, but not so robust that it would require a 15 MHz calculator. This one is for all those people who feel left-out of Escheron.

PoD is a turn-based strategy RPG similar to "Shining Force," or "Final Fantasy Tactics." The player assumes the role of a single character, but may be assisted by NPC allies from time to time. The game has several transitory modes; including exploration, combat and dialog. Exploration allows the player to freely explore a dungeon or village, speak to NPCs, buy equipment, etc. Combat places the player on a battle map where their movement and actions are restricted by turn order, movement range and other factors. Enemies must be defeated one-by-one to clear the combat objective.

PoD uses a fairly traditional experience-level system for character growth. Each enemy defeated by Anaximander will grant him experience points, which accumulate toward a specific requirement for the next level to be gained. Level advancements grant statistical bonuses, and sometimes new combat feats.

Anaximander's equipment may be customized with a broad range of swords, shields, helmets and body armor. Some have magical enchantments that allow Anaximander to unleash special feats, resist certain kinds of attacks or more effectively combat certain enemies. Anaximander may also learn a small inventory of magical spells, ranging from spells that heal or augment himself, or unleash the fury of the elements against his enemies.

There's a fairly good diversity of enemies. Some are quite lethal, and will be capable of destroying Anaximander's equipment, poisoning him and even draining his experience levels. For the truly hardcore players, there's an optional dungeon to test the player's skills against the undead "demogorgon."

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Progress and to-do:

- Graphical assets 60%
- Menu layouts 60%
- Character design 40%
- Dialog and story 10%
- Coding 0%

As usual, this looks amazing. I'm glad to see that you have a great graphical design for this game, and that you're working on developing a good set of character designs and story. Can I safely assume that Iambian will be doing the coding for this?

It's up to him. If so, I guess he would probably want to use Celtic III.

If not, what's the plan?

If not... Any volunteers?

Well, are you opposed to learning hybrid BASIC and writing the code yourself?

This looks good. You have good drawing skills evidently. I know I am impressed with the artistic value of this game outline. I hope it gets programmed. The only way I program is in basic, and I do not think that it would be impossible to recreate the graphics that I see with no grayscale of course, but with good speed. I wonder if it would be comparable in size? Doors does run archived right? I do not have time to help with this, but I do like it, and I would not mind programming a game like this in the future. Good work so far.

As usual, I just use sprite-rips from other games. (which I've downcoded to monochrome) I don't want to take any credit for the graphics. I've only actually designed bits and pieces; like the font.

I don't think I'm competent enough to do my own coding. I've looked into that before, but it seems beyond my comprehension. None of the relationships involved in the syntax and such make any sense to me. Nothing at all like a spoken language.

Tis why you start simple and read some tutorials to help with that.

And those graphics do look superb. =D

I'm with TIFreak8x; I think your intelligence and skills are more than sufficient to write code, and to even write good code, which is a significant feat over the first.

I agree with both KermMartian and TiFreak8x; I think that you are underestimating yourself. I have been trying to make good graphics in basic for eight years, I tried strings, ptton, and everything else, until I finally found the secret that works for me. I like lists, and all of my games will have them. They are easy to use, and they give good graphics. I was not sure how well I was really optimizing my programs either until I used sourcecoder 2.5, and passed the SourceCoder test. I felt really good about that.

For anyone interested, here is an early version of the design documentation. I haven't filled-in any of the enemy tables, even though the names and basic structure are there.

That's great, thanks for sharing! Looking good.

That is some pretty cool documentation. I like games that have a variety of armor, swords, and items. I really enjoyed taking a peak.

There was originally a much larger inventory of spells and equipment. I truncated it down in anticipation of a much shorter game than I originally planned. Poor Anaximander would practically be tripping over treasure chests every few steps, just so I could cram all the extra stuff into the game.

I'm even thinking about truncating the current equipment list just a bit more. It depends on how many places I have to put everything. I know the sword list is a little surplus as it stands.

A tad surplus, perhaps, but I think that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's relatively straightforward to add more weapon options to a game, and that would set your game apart from other games of the same genre for calculators that have little or no weapon choice at all.