Initial Daydream is a Pulp RPG in the style of NES JRPGs, specifically the early Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy entries. Towns, dungeons, turn based battles, goofy plot and dialogue; you name it, we got it!
The game starts with The Choosed One (that’s you) helping the King of Ghoulliard deliver a gift to the King of Altantis for the yearly Royal Gift Exchange. This quest has you circumnavigating the world to all four kingdoms, and finishes at a lavish celebration. That is, unless some calamity should happen and ruin everything…
The battle system is fairly simple. The only stats are Attack, Health, and Healing (to be renamed, determines how many HP are restored by POZHNs and the HEAL ability). Instead of leveling up, you purchase upgrades at the town shops. Each shop has an ability for sale, and each dungeon has an ability to find, for a total of 8. As you purchase stat upgrades, the prices increase. However, each shop has their own prices, so once you make it to the next town you will be able to upgrade yourself fairly cheaply again.
I’m open to adding some complexity to the system, but I’ll probably wait until much later in the timeline for that. I'm also going to make different rooms for battles taking place on different terrain (eventually).
The current build is version 0.2. The game can be played from start to finish (probably about 2 hours total; my goal for the final version is somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 hours), though only the first kingdom and dungeon have any art worth looking at. As you can see in the screenshots, the first dungeon is modeled after the mansion from Life’s Too Short! With Ollie Coe’s blessing, of course.
The roadmap is as follows:
0.3 Ghoulliard art, music, dungeon (Vampire Mansion), and dialogue completed (nearly there!)
0.4 Altantis art, music, dungeon (Sunken Tunnel), and dialogue completed
0.5 Uiskei art, music, dungeon (Liquor Mines), and dialogue completed
0.6 Goo art, music, dungeon (Goo Slide), and dialogue completed
0.7 Final scenes and quest completed
0.8 Monster and boss designs finalized
0.9 Sound effects, title screen, saving, credits, other tweaks
I will be updating this devlog as I reach these milestones, or perhaps other significant steps in between. But if you want the day-to-day updates, I have a thread on Twitter that you can follow from the day I started this game up through every little improvement! You can find it here.
Thanks for checking out Initial Daydream! And please let me know if there are any other old school RPGs in the works for Playdate! I want to play em all. And I might make an early version of this available to test a little bit if anyone is interested!
