In Development Anima Waker

“In a world where humans coexist with ethereal spirits known as Anima, resides Camille Moulin, a young girl who lives in the suburbs of the sprawling Hajimari City. Over a hundred years ago Celeste Moulin, Camille’s ancestor, sealed an Apocalyptic Anima underneath the Gora Monastery. However, due to the seal weakening over time, Celeste’s descendants must strengthen it from time to time. Since Camille has recently had her eighteenth birthday she now is next in line to complete this seal-reinforcing ritual.

Needless to say that this simple quest ends up being more than Camille bargained for and so she embarks on an adventure to obtain the Twenty Elemental Blessings and unveil the mysteries behind the enigmatic organization known as the Thirteenth Requiem.”

Anima Waker is effectively a total conversion of Essentials. This has been a pet project of mine for quite a while with the goal of basically creating something completely new with the engine while still falling under the monster tamer genre, with the end result being a game reminiscent of late 90’s/early turn of the millennium monster taming RPGs. The gameplay while still following the core Pokemon/Temtem/Coromon formula where it features a six-on-six turn-based combat has been completely revamped and very little of the kit remains untouched.

Features and Changes​

• Freeze, Paralyze, and Sleep have been reworked. Freeze works similar to PLA’s Frostbite where instead of the afflicted missing their turns they will instead have a penalty to their Special Attack and slowly take damage over time. Paralyze, now renamed Shock, had its RNG turn skip removed in favour of the afflicted taking x1.5 damage from incoming attacks, while Sleep is set to a fixed 3 turn but will be broken with any direct sources of damage. See more below.
• In addition to Paralyze’s RNG, other egregious cases of RNG being too influential in the game has been removed. Confusion does not exist anymore and all attacks will always hit provided that the opponent is not untargetable or protected, two status that are greatly expanded in Anima Waker. Point is that the excessive amount of RNG causes frustration so less missing or attacking yourself should make playthroughs far less frustrating.
• Types are now renamed Elements and a total of twenty of them exist. For the sake of not requiring the player to learn a completely new effectiveness chart, there will be plenty of overlap between the old Type Chart and Anima Waker’s Element Chart. Some types were renamed to fit a better theme such as Poison to Miasma being that the Miasma element aside from covering venoms and toxins also is based around diseases.
• Rather than reusing the moves in Essentials, Anima Waker will have 600-700 new skills. Most of them are effectively the current moves but with tweaks applied however plenty of them such as Riot Blade, Dirty Bomb, and Mass Collapse have completely new effects. Much of the new designs have been designed to make all of them as useful as possible.
• IVs has been reworked into the Potential System. Each Anima is generated with 0-100% Potential in each of their stats and after each battle there is a slight chance of each of these Potentials increasing. Defeating Oversoul Anima, optional bosses that are found across the world of Marihold, will raise the Anima’s potentials by 5% each stat. Obviously, the cap is at 100% Potential.
• EVs have been reworked into the Awakening System. Rather than earning points by KO’ing a specific species of Anima, Anima will instead gain a Stat Point after every fight that can be invested into stats provided that you pay a Mystic.
• PP System is more in-line with Temtem rather than Pokemon being that you can use moves at 0 Stamina, but they will consume LP when used.
• Abilities have been reworked into Innates. Each Anima family has their own Innate and they’re all tailored and designed around the Anima itself to complement its weaknesses or supplement its strength.
• Learning Skills, the equivalent to moves in Anima Waker, hasn’t really changed from the base version of Essentials. I feel like the current system is optional since it encourages exploration over mindless grinding or RNG.
• Projected to have at least 600 Anima by the time the game is done. Currently there are 330 Anima designed and in the game Anima are split into either Regular Anima or Apocalyptic Anima. Regular Anima all have three stages and at their final stage their BST will be equal to 500-600 while Apocalyptic Anima have only a single stage and their BST will be equal to 600-700. Due to design choices all Anima will have two Elements at their final stage.
• Should be self-evident, but the endgame plan is to make all Anima viable rather than making the ones found at endgame better than the ones found at the start of the game. I want the game to be a “choose whichever team you like best” rather than “choose the strongest mon available.”
• Swapped the HM system with clothing. Need to dive underwater? Just get the diving suit. Need to cross through a biohazardous abandoned city? Just get the HAZMAT suit.
• The goal of the game is to have a hardcore and a casual mode in order to accommodate player difficulty. However be warned that the only way to get the game’s True Ending is through the Hardcore Mode.
• Storyline and presentation is more in-line with a JRPG than a Monster Tamer. Rather than having a self-insertable silent protagonist, Camille already has a pre-defined personality.
• 100% All-original artwork by me. Originally I wanted to try a mock Gen II game but I felt like the palette limits were too much of a restrictor so I’ve basically gone with a 16x16 style with infinite colors.

Clarifications and Extra​

• FWIW, rather than using back-sprites I’m using mirrored front sprites. I may have made a mistake in using Statciturn here for the battle screen demo since the Statciturn line have their sprites turned back towards the foe.

Credits​

Spriting, Tiling, Mapping, Overworlds, Monster Design, Battle UI

• Alice

RPG Maker XP Engine

• Enterbrain

Essentials Engine

• Maruno, Flameguru, and Poccil
• Contributions from AvatarMonkeyKirby, Marin, Boushy, MiDas, Mike, Brother1440, Near Fantastica, FL., PinkMan, Genzai Kawakami, Popper, Golisopod, User, Rataime, help-14, Savordez, IceGod64, SoundSpawn, Jacob O. Wobbrock, the__end, KitsuneKouta, Venom12, Lisa Anthony, Wachunga, Luka S.J
• "mkxp-z" Roza, based on "mkxp" by Ancurio et al.

Fog Image

• Victor Sant

Font

• Kongtext

 

[Alice V]

For those interested, I'm using itch.io as a devlog. I won't post much of the non-major updates on RC since I tend to write a lot and don't want to clog up this thread.

 

[Alice V]

Bumping and posting a link to my progress report.