Hello game developers.
I'm opening a devlog for my old-school story-centric tactical role-playing game Call of Saregnar.
To begin with, here's my vision for the project.
A Mature Story, A Believable World
A deep and engaging story with charming characters unfolds over ten chapters filled with murder, mystery, intrigue and suspense. The world is low in fantasy, and magic is rare. Despite that, you will encounter some creatures coming straight from mythology, but giant rats and slimes have been evicted from this universe.
In the game you take control of a small group of unique charactes, each with their own backstory, personality and ambitions. As you progress through the world, they may join or leave you and they do interact with each other, giving you clues and directions on your quests and help you unfold the intricate story.
1990’s Old School Look
Call of Saregnar features a 1990’s inspired 2D + low-poly 3D look and VGA resolution so you can get immersed into what’s most important: the story and gameplay. Let your immagination do the heavy lifting!
Freedom to Explore
Despite being a story-driven game, the world is always open for exploration, so there is nothing stopping you from exploring the whole map in the very first chapter!
Tactical Turn-based Combat
Combat is turn-based from a top-down perspective, where each opposing party starts roughly at the opposite side of a grid-based battlefield. The party that has the initiative, starts first, moving all of its characters. After one side has moved all of its characters, the opposing party gets to move.
Detailed Party Management
The characters you play are alive, so it means that they get thirsty and hungry, they feel cold and heat, they can also fall ill and must be taken care of. Fortunately for you, micromanagement is not completely manual as characters will feed automatically, as long as they have the food in their inventories. When you're traveling through snow, it is best to have heavy clothes in your inventory or your characters will fall ill or worse. You'll also need to heal their illnesses manually, for example. Talking about clothing, boots do wear out, so be sure to watch the condition else your characters might end up walking barefoot. You should also regularly take care of your weapons - oiling the bowstrings and swords, repairing armor, etc… – as they get damaged.
Character Development
While your characters’ attributes rarely change, their skills advance on a per-use basis. Skills can also be learned from a trainer or by reading a book.
Encounters
In a land as rich as Merrentar, you can expect to run into a variety of events that will affect your journey. These events may go from falling into enemy ambushes, discovering particular interesting spots and places, meeting traveling merchants or bandits, perhaps wild creatures, wounded travelers, a neat trove of herbs, a set of game tracks... all of these events are greatly affected by the various party skills.
Unique Magic System
To gain divine favor from the gods, pray and give offerings in the form of money, food or other valuables. Divine favor is you magical pool from which you can cast unique highly-strategic spells.
Items
Although the game has fewer weapons and armors than the average RPG, each item is that much more detailed and fleshed out. Finding new equipment brings significant benefits as the difference between the old and new is now actually noticeable.
Grey Matters
CoS challenges you to think and pay close attention to everything you read, because often that's the only way to complete sidequests or even main objectives. There are no quest markers or objectives, only a quest log with your past conversations for reference.
