Student Project to Full Product
When I last posted here TCGames was a collection of students finishing their last year at University and Velisia was the main submission for that degree course. Since TCGames and the Velisia project has been picked up by a publisher Merge Games, with the added investment of an established indie game developer SmashMouthGames assisting in the completion of the project.
Chibi Artstyle
All the old characters are still around but they have undergone a makeover from the old standard anime style to a cartoony chibi stylisation. All of the characters have been re-designed and modelled by the art team and they are now currently being re-textured by hand rather than the old ink and paint method, although far more time consuming the results are vastly improved and in our opinion well worth the time.
New Combat Interface
The original Velisia used a series of videos to display characters attacks and then the defending characters reaction to the attack. Although this method fit with the anime style of the game and was reasonable attractive to look at it also had some major flaws.
To list a few:
- Video files are extremely large compared to game engine sprites which limited how many attacks we could have per unit
- The characters where always in separate windows and never came into direct contact, combat simply lacked excitement seen in many other RPG titles.
- The transition between attack and response meant that each attack lasted roughly 5-10 seconds, and this meant the turn sequences where much longer than we intended.
To combat this we have designed and programmed a brand new combat system to rival that of the best RPG's currently in the market. Below is a video of the current working prototype of the new combat system featuring the new Marcus (duelist) and Tyrus (heavy) characters sparing.
RPG Element Expansion
The balance between turn based strategy and role-playing elements of Velisia have been readdressed to support the RPG sections much better. Characters now have a complete set of stats that improve as they gain experience from killing enemies and level up. When the characters level up they are then able to spend points to improve their existing skill sets and finally specialise in one of four fields of their class. Essentially Velisia now has 16 hero characters in 4 different arch-types. The same is true for the enemies you will encountered, each has a full set of stats, a set of 2-3 abilities each and that's not even to mention the new boss encounters.
Full Narrative Rewrite
The story of an RPG game is vastly important to its players enjoyment and although we liked the overriding narrative of the original concept we also found it a little weak and over looked. Therefore the entire narrative of Velisia has been rewritten to fully explore the history of the world of Tarn, its heroes and the reasons behind the Velisian/Azakari conflict.
Coming Soon!
- More of the new art from the Azakari Enemy Legions, and their new Infamous Commanders
- Full Lengh Demonstrations of the New Combat Engine
- Details of the New Levels that will be included in Velisia: A Traitors Legacy
- A brief insight into the story that will be told within the gameplay experiance
Be sure to set yourself as a watcher so not to miss any of our updates and we hope you will come back soon.
Chris Wilson
TC Games
Director/Producer/Lead Designer
