Towards A Roadmap!


I never, and I mean never, properly plan things out in advance. I don't blame my chronic inability to ever finish anything, ever, instead just endlessly creating new things when I get excited about new ideas, on this, but I can't be sure. This is a very tentative, very informal, very rough (MORE ADJECTIVES! MOAR ADJECTIVES!!) roadmap of the features I would like RECLAIMER to have by the time that it is in early access. This is all really vague by design and also doesn't explain a lot of things but might still be interesting to read!

  • Make Hyperborean and Mercurial characters ("races" or morphotypes as the game calls them) playable at game start.
    • Implement a New Game Plus+
    • Add Super-Secret-Sixth-Morphotype that is only playable in NG+
  • Implement Dark-Souls style "Cell Deposits" (like Bloodstains in Dark Souls) where when you die, any Cells you were carrying get left on the spot where you died and you can reclaim them by touching that spot. The code for this is in the game right now actually but it's been mostly disabled because it's not working right. Turns out this is a little tricky to do in RPG Maker MV!
  • Implement quotes into the post-battle report/"victory aftermath" screens. I am bursting with quotes, mainly song lyrics (but not ALL song lyrics) that have a Reclaimer 'mood' to me. Not all of them will fit in the "Scrawl", so battle aftermath dialogue is a good place for them!
  • Implement the Scrawl, a magical, sentient graffiti collage swarming with lambent quotations! I might work on this today. 
  • Enable In-Game Bestiary
    • Create Dossiers On Each Dragonflies/Terminaut/Qlipot enemy analyzing their stats/tactics/strengths/weaknesses, viewable from the VR Briefing Room on the Threadship after gathering.
    • Give the player a portable way of quickly accessing the VR Briefing Room from the field rather than needing to return to the Threadship and use the VR Briefing console.
      • Implement "Gene Lancets", craftable items that damage an enemy and scan it, adding the enemy's "gene scan" data to the player's inventory which can then be returned to upload into the VR Briefing room. This will be "aliased" as Yanfly's Steal/Snatch script, meaning you are effectively "stealing" the info on the monsters you're scanning as an item, and then feeding that item to the Archivist at the VR Briefing to gain access to the bestiary entry you just "stole"
  •   Enhance crafting system by adding the ability to dismantle objects?
  • Enemy levels? 
    • This is a big '???' up in the air right now because I'm not sure I have the graphics for enough "unique" enemies w/o doing a bunch of pallet swaps BUT ALSO I am very wary of anything along the lines of the Oblivion style "enemies level up as you level up so you never really feel like you're getting more powerful" level "treadmill", definitely don't want that. 
    • So, the PC only gains BOD (hp) and POW (mp) from leveling up directly. The PC spends Cells collected from the map and from dead enemies to increase their Strength, Toughness, Ego, Firewall, Quickness, and Gnosis each at a rate of diminishing returns: players are encouraged to hyper specialize if they want to but doing so quickly gets much more expensive than spreading the Cells around a bit. Players can also increase their Hit Rate, Evasion Rate, and Critical Rate directly using Cells, and Cells are also used to purchase new skills (Feats for Regulators, Gadgets for Technomancers, Psi Talents for Espers) and most skills have higher level versions that can be bought replacing the original, specifically skills have three levels (some will have only one).  
  • Implement Threadship Customization
    • Installing quality of life type conveniences into the Threadship like weapons/ammo lockers, an Aether SubNet terminal, 
    • Cosmetic stuff like different music/lighting options
    • Threadship defense systems, made relevant by at least one sequence (minigame?) where the Threadship is under attack.
  • Morphotype-Specific Sidequests.
    • My favorite idea is the one for the Mercurial starting as a "silent protagonist" but then flipping the script on that with an optional, difficult sidequest to acquire a voice module, after which he talks...perhaps too much?
    • In this vein, I want to add different dialogue in different scenes depending on the morphotype the character is playing (i.e. Mercurial is a robot, so would have unique dialogue options related to be a robot once he's implemented)
  • Add in graphical foreground layer (including perhaps Yanfly's Grid-Free Doodads plugin?) to several maps to increase visual depth.
    • Definitely to the Threadship map first/if no place else.
  • Implement Summons! 'Call Reinforcements' (Sentry Bot) for Regulator class, 'Deploy Drone' (Discomedusae Drone) for Technomancer class, and 'Summon Watcher Spirit' for Esper class have all been added but have yet to be tested as of writing this.
    • Some way of upgrading summons? They don't level up or gain new skills or earn Cells like the player character does but what if they could be updated some other way?
  • Alternative intro sequence featuring the wizard ("Cosmic Magus") Embelyron, his magic floating sky castle Pandelune, his vat-grown majordomo/subaltern/Girl Friday Trys and his struggle to play god/create life in his genewizard vats.
  • Endgame areas not making it into the Junebug Alpha: The Arcanum beneath the Catechasms, the Cavernous beneath the Arcanum beneath the Catechasms, the BBEG Lavagates Prison, and most importantly the Routes of Yggdrasil/Roots of Yggdrasil (the "bottom") themselves. And almost certainly more (definitely want to have a 'water dungeon' of some kind,  the Terminauts need to have a base/HQ, and oo! oo! what about a "Threadship Graveyard", that'd be cool!). Right now I have 43 Maps, I think my target goal is around 100-ish, maybe around 120 for the final release. I'm not going for an "epic" world size but I want the areas to interlink and overlap with each other in interesting and exciting ways, so lots of backtracking but it's a joy to do so 
    • Sky Castle Pandelune and Jormungandr Base need to be finished for the Junebug release, although I'm very uncertain how much of Pandelune will actually make it into the game with only four days left of dev time as of this writing.
    • While we're at it, the game still needs an actual ending! The Junebug Alpha rough release will end with you nuking the Hive at Jormungandr. 
    • Vertical cross-section "map" of the Spine of All World sshowing where these in-game areas are relative to one another from the 'top' (the lunar lagrange point) to the 'bottom' (roots of the World Tree/"Yggdrasil Routes")
  • DOGGO PUP SIDEKICK! Lil' Garm! I'm not sure it's the right thematic and tonal fit for this project, but I'd much rather shoehorn it in here than start yet another new project and I really want to make a game wherein you have a pet!

This feels unfinished but I'm trying to get a playable alpha release out in the next few days so this is going to have to do for now! Please hit me up with your questions if you're reading this!

Leave a comment

Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.