this is a project that I have tried to start up a lot for the last year but have yet to have the suitable material to make any presentation to the people that might wish to jump onto it. Well, other than skeches, i still dont as it is very hard to communicate this stuff to others. the user interface doc will be used to describe this i hope as the game is really quite complex.

IM sure some of you have already heard of "Vedic Mirage".
this game plays in may ways a lot like soul reaver but in some is much more complex. The most prominent system in place is the "play human" system that will be put to use alover the game since you speak to people an awful lot.

the game plays from the third person but unlike a typical action oriented adventure, uses a fixed camera and prerendered backgrounds. This is one of the things that makes the project so hard to accomplish with verge as this game uses a virutal 3d engine that displays sprites in semi 3d space. it is also capable of displaying any other graphic on that layer in 3d as everything acts as its own object and uses its own behaviors. handy as there can be up to 6 objects on the character layer at any one time.
So, the camera is fixed and you move around as if it was a 3d world. .

the effect layers also have a variable transluceny property that works based on rgb settings. every rgb range has an alpha property and the closer to black you get, the more transparent you get. this is nice as we can have true enough 3d effects happening all in a 2d engine.

technicalities aside. lets talk gameplay.

Vedic mirage has 2 marjor systems and both work similtaniously depending on where you are or what you are doing. for most of the game, you are playing a human being . this is the action system and influences the way you interact with towns people. this is here because you are really a god who is all dead and stuff. you dont look anything but human untill you get into battles, which are real time.. so for most of dungeons, you are ... well, you.

the action system works ona few principles.

Learn, adapt, use.

Learn is a command that happens if you use the Learn command on people in town. You can learn almost anything that is an action or event.
ie, the text string, "i love you" is an action that can be learned and once you find it, you can use it.

how do you use actions?
well, this is combining the adapt and use sections.

in the menu, you have an action submenu. in here, there are 3 main sections.

greet, act and depart.
under greet, you would place any actions you have learned to actully meet people and say hi to them. this will make them more eager to talk to you or give information.

so obviously the action "say; fuck you" will not work well as a greet action. there are 3 slots for these ations wich can get some interesting conbinations. you oul walk up to comeone, say hi, kiss them, kick their butt and if they dont talk to you, walk away swearing at them.

the choice is all yours.

the 3 sub action catagories work the same and no action is limited to one slot, they can go anywhere you want, so you will actully have to plan your actions well or people will think you are a flake.

now, you have to set the action cluster or action script to activate on text activation. if you talk to someone and want them to see the actions, set to auto. otherwise you will need to open the action menu and select one yourself. this is used when filling in the text boxes with things you have learned. any text string can be learned and used anywhere. obviously, you have to use these strings where they belong.

battle is something else entirely.

you may play human in towns around people but when you fight, game mechanics change drastically. the action menu is replaced with the battle special command bar which has things like magic equips and other commands. since there is no item system in vedic mirage, the "Draw" command is that much more important.

you fight in real time just like a fighting game but you have to keep track of how much you hurt the enemy. the key, is to make them suffer as much as possible. this is tricky because hitting them for hideous damage isnt nessisarily good for this. sometimes, long slow pain is better and sometimes, unavoidable.
the draw command acts as a gauge to show how much the enemy suffers in the real world. you can absorb this suffering to replenish your hp and raise stats. this is imporants as you have no max hp or max stats. you raise yours stats by drawing suffering from the enemies. not doing this will cause them to lower themselves over time and you will naturally get weaker. in a sens,e there is a max number for stats but this is the level that they wont dip below. this is your base stat. the higher you raise them with draw, the higher the static level will go as well, so, if you go to an inn, your stats will only charge to that level but no lower.

this game is really complex, im not even going into magic and mana right now. there is too much but hopfully this is interesting enough for you guys. this project is planned for the gamebot advance but i need to test out some of its mechanics on the pc first. the game is too much to do if it wont work. actully, it might go ps 2 eventually but who knows. gba was the target as this looks very much like donkey kong country.

hope i sparked some interest.

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Conshape millennium: the fantasy edge

it im ambitious. quite. i wanted to do a verge demo of this first to test stuff out as i will not be developing the gba version over the net. thats gonna be an in house project.
as for the speach learning. you can pick up anything but certain strings are colored differently and will go onto a different window. your responses are limited to the topic at hand and you have a limited memory for taking notes. it is possible to forget things so keeping a reasonable amount of text strings will be a nice feature.

also, you can forget actions as well so any that are key to the story should be placed in a sub folder of your memory. these are the colored ones. also, there is a instant keyword look up. take a keyword from the text box and look for it in your menu. it will scour all the messages in your memory.

so there are a lot of possibilites in this one.

once again i will touch on the system.
the ps2 idea is sort of out now as i took a look at some other gba titles and needless to say, the system is more than cabable. the only thing that will limit this are programmers that can effectivly use the hardware to dhow off the art. this is the focal point. I am not willing to sacrafice much on this so it needs to be perfect.

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Conshape millennium: the fantasy edge