Dreams of the Immortal

Dreams of The Immortal was one of my single semester projects. The goal was to go from design concept to gold master status within that time. This included hitting regular milestones and two beta stages that were sent out to testers. In the end, the project was a success. This game is built in RPG Maker VX. Using this builder greatly expedited the process and allowed more time to be spent on designing and testing than if the game had been built from scratch. There were some issues that arose when using it, mostly because it was my first project with this version of RPG Maker. I had originally planned to make it in a previous version, RPG Maker XP, but learned of VX just in time to switch.

I designed and built every map within the game. I designed and balanced every character, enemy, and attack. After sending it to multiple testers, I corrected balance issues and fixed any bugs. Other than the feedback from the testers, I was the only one working on the game. All the art, animations, and sounds were included with the engine's original download.

In terms of the gameplay, Dreams of The Immortal is an RPG with turn based combat and free roaming. In order to ease meeting the goal of the project, the areas are rather small and linear. The entire game has about 60 to 90 minutes of play time: it is short, but truly complete.

There are no randomly generated encounters; every fight is brought up by dialogue and progresses the story forward.

The player jumps between the perspective of nine different Player Characters. There are four good guys, the police, and four bad guys, the drug lords. The ninth is the mysterious Immortal, who remains neutral and usually just observes the actions of the other characters, finding their behavior intriguing. The events of the game culminate in a final battle where the player chooses which side to fight as, the police or the drug lords. This is the only situation where the player has more than one character to control at once.

Most of the levels are straightforward. They have a clear start and a clear goal. However, in order to make the world appear more complete, some of the areas I made much larger than really necessary. This let me have some creative freedom and design interesting areas such as the drug lord's headquarters. It is pictured below in design view to show the overall layout and event triggers. The player's view is more zoomed in, and they would never see the entire area at once.

For information about the game, see the Users Manual which is included in the download.