Introduction
Crystalshire is a unique experiment exploring the possibility of story-driven ORPGs. The genre as a whole has become mildly stagnant over the years, with little innovation which actually affects the experience. Grinding and generic boss fights have become the norm. In my personal opinion an ORPG can become so much more by giving emotional weight to the player's avatar. Without sounding too blinded by nostalgia, I'd like to re-invent this class of game as an experience not dissimilar from the old 2D era single-player RPGs. I believe that mixing the good stories and experiences from these classic games with the ability to play through them with a group of friends is something which, although attempted in certain games, has never been truly realised. This is, however, an end-game vision. Due to the small team involved and our real-life responsibilities it'll certainly take a while to develop the software, graphics and content to the point where this vision will be realised. In the mean time I'd like to invite you all to experience the unfolding of this experiment and log on to our alpha release to see how things are and maybe even give us a few pointers.

Cinematic Trailer
Although still a heavy work in progress, we did start putting together a video trailer to show off just some aspects of the game.

External Link:
Video link.

Embedded Video:


Features
Combat:
As with most RPGs, combat is a large part of the game. Crystalshire currently has over 20 levels of character development, dozens of unique enemies to face and hundreds of items you can use to defeat them. Crystalshire currently offers three base classes; Warrior, Wizard and Whisperer. Tank, DPS and Healer. By keeping the basic roles down to the basic three we believe it streamlines the experience and doesn't overwhelm players with complicated information they need to compare and keep track of. Although they're all currently very set in to their roles, we're planning on bringing in a large amount of customisation by pushing character specification builds which will let you design your ideal avatar.



Each class is given a balanced array of skills which can be used both in and out of combat. These can be anything from directly doing damage to teleporting back home to stealing an enemy's spirit. Each skill is given a beautiful unique icon and both casting and hitting animations which really give the skills a sense of weight. Although fairly basic right now due to the level 20 cap we'll be giving players more and more unique, interesting and funny skills later on which should really bring the environment to life.



There are hundreds of unique items in the game which each bring a little something to the experience. There are hefty plate-mail amour sets for absorbing damage, brutal axes for taking people down in melee, enchanted robes for boosting spirit and health, elemental staves for raining fury down on your enemies and, of course, onions and dandelions allowing you to sit down after a long battle to eat till your health and spirit are regenerated. Each monster has a unique drop-table which gives you a chance of receiving common, uncommon and rare items from anything. You can also get unique equipment and items from the various bosses which you can fight, each of which requires a strong party to take on.

Community:
This is the one thing which makes an ORPG stand on its own. People. What online game would be complete without an active user-base and the systems required to communicate. Not only this but the genre as a whole has become well known for its ability to unlock people's basic tribal instincts and form groups of people who do things together, such as questing and boss fights.



To make sure people can communicate as quickly as possible we've designed a chatbox which allows people to personalise what messages are received and what messages aren't received. We've also created a very minimalistic interface which shows during normal gameplay. This system allows us to give the user all the systems needed to communicate but also only show the important bits when they're just playing normally.



Playing with friends is one of the big draws of Crystalshire. You can create parties in the game which can hold up to four players. In this party all experience gains from killing monsters are shared equally amongst the group. This makes it much, much easier for a healer to do their job rather than having to keep up their damage to get the experience needed to progress. Although a relatively small system, it makes a huge difference in the experience and we're hoping to use the same kind of mentality when developing guilds and other multi-player systems.

Stories:
Quest systems in MMORPGs now-a-days have devolved in to a repetitive grind of collecting items, escorting idiotic npcs and killing random bears in the woods. What we're wanting to do differently in Crystalshire is create a system which allows us to design group-based stories which will play out through a series of instanced dungeons, cutscenes and npc interactions. Think back to when you'd play through Final Fantasy 6, Seiken Densetsu 3 or The Legend of Zelda. You didn't go around piling up collection missions from static npcs standing around with glowing exclamation points floating over their heads. We want to write a series of self-contained storylines which you can play through either by yourself or with a group of friends. We want to try and get you to actually feel an emotional attachment to the characters you interact with by actually fleshing them out and giving them their own story. This can lead to all sorts of exciting situations with recurring characters, awesome arch-villains and proper group gameplay. (None of this forced helping which is common in multiplayer games at the moment.)



Although we're currently severely limited by our technological advances, we've already tried to work in basic character interaction. We're planning to start work on an area instancing system soon enough which will finally give us the base systems needed to begin work on a cutscene designer and, by extension, a story system. We're really excited about the experiences we'll be able to deliver once this is finished.

Screenshots


Links
Website: Crystalshire
Community: Crystalshire Community
Download: Crystalshire Download

I think you are basically me, this is exactly what I did (spent years working on a game only to finally make it in 24 hours and release it). Unless I misread there

This looks great, might play it later in the week if I have some time free. The screenshots there look nice though.

As soon as I load the launcher, I get a pop up saying "Permission denied", and when I click OK, I get another saying "Run-time error '13': Type mismatch", and clicking OK on that closes the whole thing o.O

Wyatt, this wasn't made in RM despite using RM graphics. So don't feel like you wasted your time ^^ I remember Vengeance for RMXP, and all it was!

OP: Game looks fine, but I will reserve trying it until there is more content.

This looks damn professional, I really like the auto updater :) good job on this.

Small things though, you need to implement a loading screen, and sometimes my character keeps jumping on screen, but it looks really cool, Good Job!

Pretty much. The main problem with mine was that I simply kept running in to problems with my game engine. Obscure memory copy problems with the packets for example. These have all been fixed in the beta release and I decided to show just how you can make a game with it!



Please read the installation instructions.



Aye, it's fairly bare now. I would have had a load of content done by now but I'm really having to spend a lot of time creating tilesets to use. RMVX is simply too gridded. I'll post a look at what I'm currently trying to do in the screenshots thread.



Thanks. :]

I'll be fixing up the engine soon enough. Fades between map warping, loading screen etc. I just want to concentrate on getting the level 1 - 10 content done for now.

WN v1.1.0 has been released. Simply run the game as always and the patcher will take care of the rest. Completely re-mapped out the starter village. I'll start work on renovating the forest maps and the interior of the village.

I did follow the instructions...

I believe that error will only occur when trying to access a file locked by another process or when you're not running the program with the proper permissions. I've had this engine out for 4 years now and I've never once had a report of that type of error so it's quite vexing.

All I can really suggest is download a fresh patcher and let it do it's magic. Try restarting your machine if you haven't already.

v1.2.0 is out!

Patch Notes v1.2.0:
• Fixed item binding system.
• Removed status image connection spam.
• Added flashing '|' in text boxes.
• Added party and option systems.
• New tutorial system in place.
• More dynamic character database put in place.
• First, and hopefully last, character wipe.

One things that botthers me, when you mispell your acount the window closes with a message, maybe make it go back to the menu? :P

Number of hotfixes have been released. All the maps have been re-done to a much higher standard, new tiles have been added in and the maps given nice polish. Whisperer's healing magic is now a ranged target spell which should make them more useful for partying.

Version 1.2.1 is out.
• Added HP bars to players & npcs.
• Fixed overflow errors in party screen.
• Various server-side bug fixes.

Um i tried installing then it came up with a splash window, saying i need to patch. Only problem was the window was screwed up and i cant click the patch. xD

Right click 'Winds Nocturne.exe' -> Properties -> Compatibility -> Turn on 'Disable display scaling on high DPI settings'.

Then I start launcher I get message "runtime error-53" File not found... wtf? I followed intructions.

v1.2.3 is out.

Patch Notes v1.2.3:
• Spell damage now scales with level.
• Level cap raised to 10.
• Glenvale area now unlocked.
• Exp gain is based on enemy level.
• Level 5 equipment available in new shops.

Do monsters drop loot?
EDIT: Hmm, can't see any font.

Shattered. I changed the properties, and it still came up the same xD

Change your DPI settings to 100%. Right Click Desktop -> Personalize -> Display -> Set custom text size (DPI) -> 100%.

Are there any fonts I have to install?

Shouldn't be. Anything ingame is rendered using a custom textured font, not the Windows fonts.

Hmm... well the screen is blank except for the background when I try to register so I don't know what I'm doing?

Hey this is pretty cool man. The minor lag can be annoying, buts is not terrible. Also I understand that the lag issue cant be helped at this point. What did you use to make this anyways? I've always wanted to make a mmorpg, or even work on one.

My own engine.

Link.

Lag is there simply because I'm hosting it on my home computer in the UK. Anyone outside of Europe is going to experience some bad latency.

Version 1.2.5 is out!



Patch Notes v1.2.5:
• All textures converted to POT ('scept anims).
• Modified the GUI to be more practical.
• Added item information to item description.
• Added spell information to spell description.
• Added a little shadow to the game screen.
• Alerts will now simply reset to the menu instead of closing down the entire game.
• Shops now show how much they'll buy/sell items for on hover.
• Removed buy/sell buttons in shops.

Just wondering, but is there a way, or could you make a way, for us to:

- Have more than one character per login
- Choose the appearence of our character as we make them, I was playing the other day, and all three of us in the party, warriors, were the dude with green hair, could we maybe see some customisation, even if it's just changing the entire sprite, sometime in the future?
- How about visual equipment while we're walking around or something? Maybe just for the weapon or something, I don't know.

I love what you've done, after I got past the inital bad install by reinstalling it from scratch, it worked fine, and it's a pretty cool game that's just lacking in the content department, granted you did put it together very quickly so that's forgivable, I'd just love to see something like this evolve into something much bigger.

By the way, have you had a stress test yet to see how many players it can hold? Is there a cap or something?

Creates too many complications in the server, I'm afraid.



I already have a graphics artist on the team who's working towards making the characters 100% customisable and paperdolled.



See above.



Thanks. Yeah, content is slow but that's mainly because I'm having to do everything. Right now programming the engine is taking priority over everything else. I've brought a couple of good friends on to the project. I've worked with them on some projects in the past and I trust them to develop good content. In fact, Anna has just finished mapping off the first town!

Version 1.2.6 released!



Patch Notes v1.2.6:
• Spell scaling removed.
• Spell ranking system added.
• Various GUI changes.

Managed to log in without having any text...
Now there isn't any interface aside from text!

I guess the program is that it's not loading the graphics, but looking in the folder it seems like it's all there.