Your Game's Title

Abstract
Game Name:	Conflict Arcanum
Development Team Members:	Dan Chieffallo DongHa Lee
Game Genre:	Isometric Turn-based Tactics RPG
Brief Description:	Our game was mainly inspired by Final Fantasy Tactics, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, and Disgaea (which is also where our game sprites come from). Like these games, Conflict Arcanum allows players to control several characters, with different jobs, different abilities to fight against enemy units in battle. Players follow the story of the main hero "Daxle" to lead him to victory against the evil forces that are appearing in the game world. The game is still at an early stage of development, with much more to be developed in order to be a complete RPG. The demo game, is entirely a demo of its battle system, level loader, character classes, inventory system, etc.
Overview
Game Story / Objective:	In abstract terms, the story is set in a fantasy world, involving dark wizards in lust for power, and our main hero character to fight against these forces and bring peace to the world. The objective of the game is to control/train your band of units to achieve victory in battle, earn money, gain experience, and get through the storyline to defeat the evil wizard. (However, in our demo game, features like money, experience, and storyline are yet to be implemented).
Game Mechanics + Controls:	The game works around a fairly easy to use UI involving a neat menu system. Only a few keys are used: (The arrow keys) - moves the cursor around (D key) - is like the confirm key, also brings up the main battle menu if the cursor is on top of characters (C key) - is like the cancel key, moves back out of the menu, and if you press the C key while your cursor is not on the character you are controlling, it resets the position of the cursor back to where your character is. (Q key) - is to quit
Technology:	Since the genre of this game was a 2D sprite based RPG, our game does not involve many high graphical technical features. So far, in our demo game, we could not implement animations and special effects for spells and skills, so we had less chance to use any graphical technologies. As for the level loader, we used similar format to the level loader from previous labs of this course. However, instead of each "floor" representing floors in our level, they represent the different layers of our game. For instance, floor 0 would be the ground of our level, representing the ground tiles that are drawn, while floor 1 would represent where each character or other obstacle objects are located in the tile map, and floor 2 would be a search buffer that helps us perform searches as well as draw the result of searches, and so forth. AI involves a lot of Breadth First Search, because in the game most of the questions asked for the search are "find all the blocks a character can move to within length = 5 blocks", or "Find characters who are within 5 block distance away from me," etc.
Aesthetics:	Since we didn't have an artist, we used sprites from isometric games: Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, Disgaea, and Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories. So all artist rights and credits should go to the respective game companies and artists. However, there was still a lot of cleaning up process to do such that we could make the sprites fit into our game. One major drawback from using sprites from different games, were that the level of detail, art style are all different, so in some aspects they don't work perfectly together. For future development, we may want to consider getting a dedicated artist for consistency. As for level designing, unfortunately, for our demo game we did not get to go to deep in this aspect, because we could not implement levels with different height levels and obstacles to achieve interesting level designs. For sound, we got background music to work, and we do have sound FX functions inside, but finding all the different sound clips for different situations and implementing the sound effects was going to take time, and with our deadline coming so fast, we could not quite get the sounds in time.
Reflections
Three Greatest Challenges:	- Getting all the UI system, battle system working smoothly was probably our biggest challenge. Building an RPG system from basically scratch, took a lot of time to get all the pieces together. (Especially with a limited time frame.) - Prioritizing all the features, and deciding what to work on first was another challenge. With the not so long development time, we had to decide what features were necessary for the game, and what features were optional to our game. - Art work was not to be underestimated. Getting all the sprites and art work ready for our game was not an easy task. In the end, we just wished we had an artist : p
Three things that went right:	- For our first attempt on building this genre of game, we are satisfied at how the game feels, looks, plays so far. - We learned a lot. Programming wise, game developing process wise, working together as a team (using subversion), and other stuff. - We had fun. And I think that's what's important, right?
Three things that went wrong:	-Obviously, we wanted to implement more, but just couldn't with the limited time, but we probably could have organized differently to get more things done quicker...well...I guess that's a "learn from your mistakes" type of deal.. -Programs behaving differently on different computers...man...what a pain.. -Really didn't want to do any other class work with this around ^^a scratches
Lessons learned and/or things that you would have done differently:	I think the next time around: -We'll be better at organizing our tasks -Have a better idea and concepts of making RPG genres (and a source code to start out/reference to) -Better at working together as a team
Media
Screenshots:
(Optional) Download:	If you would like to make this game available to download / open source then you can feel free to link to it here. Note that this is not required for the project report. Also, you can update this after the course is done.