Standing out in a crowd

Games developed using RPG maker are a dime a dozen, and many of them are of poor quality. This is not to say that people don't try to make something worth playing. A lot of things go into making a game unique. It's story, characters, art style, sound, and gameplay mechanics all contribute to the overall uniqueness of the finished product. With Chronicles of Uneskia we choose to focus on a story centered around two brothers who journey together to stop a mad wizard. Simple enough but along the way we can sprinkle in concepts that make our game's story different from the traditional. An example would be the difficult topic of refugees and terrorism.

An anime art style invokes a sense of emotion that I personally find non existent in other art forms. An anime inspired art style can present a higher degree of happiness or anger than what might normally be possible and so we went with that.

A constructive clash between traditional fantasy tunes and guitar work seemed appropriate as our world is a mixture of a traditional fantasy world that is coming into an industrial revolution.

Game play is what a game is truly all about, otherwise its just a movie. Take away the cut scenes and dialogue, this is what you will spend most of your time doing. Mess this up and people will be hard pressed to play your game to the end. I envisioned a kind of gameplay inspired by games like dark souls and the persona series where every combat encounter was a chance to do something different and could always have the chance, no matter how small to send you straight to the dreaded game over screen.

We got rid of traditional rpg shops, these are great but players expect to come to a town and have at their disposal a shop for weapons, armor, and items. They unload all their junk and low tier gear and resupply. In CoU there are only marketplaces. These sell a limited amount of ready made items and as such are sold at higher values. Instead players are tasked with buying materials and using our crafting system create their own items to use while out on adventures.

Our crafting system is based on combining three different items to get a new item. For example a popular snack and medicinal item in CoU, the slime pie is crafted using slime paste, fuscha leaves, and a water skin. This item is only sold in select cafes (food shops) and is normally crafted by the player. Crafting itself can only be done at crafting stations which aren't readily available.

Players can craft consumables, weapons, armor, and offensive items such as bombs, provided they have the recipe.

During combat there are two important things to keep in mind: Skill weaves and serious enemies. A skill weave is simply a skill that based on certain factors can trigger an additional skill. This is incredibly useful as the player is normally outnumberd by strong opponents. These skills can apply additional buffs, debuffs, heal, or even deal damage. Just rememeber that enemies can use skill weaves too!

After a certain amount of time has passed during a battle, enemies can "get serious" this essentially swaps out the regular version of said enemy for its "serious" counterpart. Not only do these versions have more health and more powerful attacks, they gain a exhaust skill that applies the exhaust state on the player which lowers all their stats by 30%! Defeating "serious" enemies nets higher rewards but at great risk.

We believe these additions to our game will help set us apart from the crowd.