From 2002 all the way into early 2005, a small board I was on had created a text-based RPG that most of the members were involved in, called Red Ground. It was the first time I had ever RP'd (in basically any sense) and I think the same was true for a lot of the others involved as well. Due to a lot of us being very inexperienced with this, we took great care not to do anything that might affect each others' characters without a lot of prior planning. There was never really any PVP, certainly not typical RPG PVP with dice rolls. All inter-character PVP was virtually "choreographed" beforehand. It really ended up being more of a collaborative story than anything, and eventually there was kind of a mutual loss of interest.
A few years ago, I started playing around with the idea of making real time strategy games after some discussions at work on the complexities of programming an RTS engine. We had been playing Age of Empires during lunch on occasion, and we had also considered more company games that would function well on mobile devices. I can't quite remember how I got to the idea of using the Red Ground settings and characters; I'd have to look up some chat logs or something. Anyway, I figured I'd kind of treat it like an unlicensed game since I wouldn't have been able to get into contact with most of the people about using their characters and also, I thought that was funny. So character names are shuffled slightly around and there are some notable differences. I was even considering calling the game "Crimson Earth" or something like that.
So anyway, I wanted to make something of smaller scale, "lite" RTS game with RPG elements. All of your available characters would be specialized heroes from the Red Ground RPG, and you'd have a maximum party size of 6 members. Each hero is unique and has their own stats, weapons (and accompanying attack types), and skills. The skills could be anything from an immediate area attack, a projectile spell, a team buff, or the like. I haven't settled on skills using MP or relying solely on cooldown yet. I don't quite want it to be a practice in making sure everyone's skills are always in cooldown, so I'm kind of leaning towards MP pools that regenerate slowly.
The entirety of the game can be played with the mouse, but there will also be keyboard shortcuts for selecting units, using skills, changing attack types, etc. Whatever character you have selected will be manually controlled. The remaining party members will be AI controlled until overridden by manual control. Their AI will be very limited, pretty much to the point of simply attacking any enemy that encroaches upon their small automated range and only with basic attacks of their currently equipped weapon. One or two of the available party members might have automated support modes though, if they're more focused on that sort of thing.
The game will almost certainly be mission-based, with each mission being separated by planning screens. You'll pick your party from the Tavern, which will expand as the game goes on, probably in the same order the characters entered in the original RPG. You'll also be able to upgrade party members on this screen as well, unlocking and upgrading skills. I might do a few different mission objective templates, but the most obvious one as of now is defeating all the enemies in the level. I don't want the stages to be too complex; not more than a few screen lengths horizontally, and there probably won't be any vertical scrolling at all. I want most of the focus to be on the combat; nothing in the way of exploring or resource gathering.
So I have a lot of the characters skills figured out, as well as how their stats will carry over into the game. Don't have too much of the engine done yet, just a very basic RTS point and click character controller, no pathfinding yet. Here's a picture of the basic preview with some preliminary artwork. I quite like the style though, I'll probably keep a lot of it. The field sprites at least, I think are perfect; not quite so happy with the faces. If this were a flash embed rather than an image, you'd be able to click around on the characters and play with their weapons and skills.
