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General discussionComing soon: Whispers in the Moss(36 posts)(36 posts)
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This is my favourite topic
Posted May 28, 2024
Experience an epic story, a fun turn-based battle system, and a full custom soundtrack – all that and even more in Whispers in the Moss, coming soon on GOG!

Whispers in the Moss is a full-scale retro JRPG experience that embraces the nostalgic charm of 8-bit and 16-bit console classics. Embark on an epic journey with three young heroes from a tranquil fishing village, thrust into a world dominated by an empire seeking ultimate power and a banished prince determined to restore balance. As they traverse the world, our party uncovers an even more sinister secret – fiends of the underworld are stirring...

Wishlist it now!
Posted May 28, 2024
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UnculturedGames: Hi, and thanks for your comment. I have to disagree with you there, because I believe that new retro-style games can and definitely should incorporate new elements too. In my case, I've used a vintage graphics style in a way that hasn't been used in this scale in video games before. But I'd still stay the game is pretty retro.

I do get your point, but personally I believe that every new game (retro or not) should try to be "first" in at least something, because otherwise, what's the point?
I'm actually really enjoying this trend of RPGs that are retro in interesting ways.

You have:
* Nox Archaist, a WRPG that's made for an obsolete platform (Apple 2)
* Realms of Antiquity, a WRPG with some JRPG sensibilities make for an obscure obsolete platform (TI-99/4A)
and now
* Whispers in the Moss, a JRPG (or at least it looks like one) using a language that could be considered obsolete, and using text mode in an interesting way

Of course, there's also the old web game Candy Box 2 that has some nice ASCII art. (There is a few minutes long timewall at the start, however.)

Incidentally, I've decided to make a CRPG of my own, and for the overworld graphics, I'm currently going with just ASCII (or, rather, CP-437, which is a bit more than just ASCII), except that I'm using modern tools. (I'm thinking JRPG (albeit SaGa-like rather than conventional) with some WRPG sensibilities.)

And yes, I'm definitely looking forward to WitM.

By the way, you should see about getting Developer status on your account, which will allow you to post in orange.
Posted May 28, 2024
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Breja: I actually completely agree with you on this. I often make the point that devs who make "retro" games usually completely miss the fact that those beloved classics they are trying to emulate were more often than not forward thinking, their devs aimed at something new and inventive, so in making something purely nostalgic and backward thinking they are in fact making something fundamentally unlike those old games, no matter how similar it may look.
Well said. Many game developers probably start by trying to recreate something beautiful from their own gaming history, and there's nothing wrong with that. Creating a 1:1 tribute version of something that already exists may be good game dev practice, but other than that, it's pretty pointless.

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Breja: That said, I really do have to question the visual design of your game, not even on its aesthetic merits, but simply because even just looking at the screens is genuinely giving me a headache. And it's not a "it's so bad" hyperbole, I mean quite literally that I physically couldn't play it. Maybe it's just me, I'll readily admit ASCII graphics were never my thing, but I just have to believe there must have been a way to make things more clearly discernable and easier on the eyes.
No problem there. I urge everyone to stay away from any games that give them discomforting physical sensations.
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Wolfram_von_Thal: I really love this graphical approach and I find it extremely cool to create a whole RPG in QB64 and use ASCII-characters to draw everything. I'll definitely buy this game on release day.
Thanks for the positive comment!
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dtgreene: I'm actually really enjoying this trend of RPGs that are retro in interesting ways.

You have:
* Nox Archaist, a WRPG that's made for an obsolete platform (Apple 2)
* Realms of Antiquity, a WRPG with some JRPG sensibilities make for an obscure obsolete platform (TI-99/4A)
and now
* Whispers in the Moss, a JRPG (or at least it looks like one) using a language that could be considered obsolete, and using text mode in an interesting way

Of course, there's also the old web game Candy Box 2 that has some nice ASCII art. (There is a few minutes long timewall at the start, however.)
Yes, there's some very cool stuff happening! I just learned of another active QBASIC RPG project too, it's called TerraQuest: Tales of Aetheria.

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dtgreene: Incidentally, I've decided to make a CRPG of my own, and for the overworld graphics, I'm currently going with just ASCII (or, rather, CP-437, which is a bit more than just ASCII), except that I'm using modern tools. (I'm thinking JRPG (albeit SaGa-like rather than conventional) with some WRPG sensibilities.)
That sounds interesting. Will it be possible to follow the development somewhere? Socials, devlog?

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dtgreene: By the way, you should see about getting Developer status on your account, which will allow you to post in orange.
Good point, will do.
Post edited May 28, 2024 by UnculturedGames
Posted May 29, 2024
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UnculturedGames: Nice, thank you! I'm on a mission to push textmode graphics to new levels, and hopefully to some extend succeeded too.
Well, you might uncover a real niche market for your games :)

Here is a screenshot of one of my games back then. Of course your's looks WAY more advanced :)
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000265.png (13 Kb)
Posted May 29, 2024
Oh, I remember playing an old DOS ASCII game. It was called "Caves of Thor" (shareware, part 1 of the Thor Trilogy, published 1990 by Apogee). The visuals were *very* simple, see screenshot attached. Your character was just a smiley symbol and you had to navigate caves and water streams, collect keys and gold, shoot monsters etc.

I like that Whispers in the Moss tries to give the game world more detail and structure. The perspective is a bit shifted, not quite isometric, more akin to SNES JRPGs like Secret of Mana. That's probably where the references to the 8-/16-bit era come from.

I agree that playing this game full-screen on a huge monitor (and with a close viewing distance) could very well be headache inducing. But watching the trailer video in a smaller viewing frame is manageable, such as GOG's preview on the game page. All in all, I'm looking forward to the official release!
Attachments:
caves_of_thor.jpg (54 Kb)
Post edited May 29, 2024 by g2222
Posted May 29, 2024
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dtgreene: Incidentally, I've decided to make a CRPG of my own, and for the overworld graphics, I'm currently going with just ASCII (or, rather, CP-437, which is a bit more than just ASCII), except that I'm using modern tools. (I'm thinking JRPG (albeit SaGa-like rather than conventional) with some WRPG sensibilities.)
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UnculturedGames: That sounds interesting. Will it be possible to follow the development somewhere? Socials, devlog?
Not at this time. Maybe once there's something to show I'll consider it.

At the moment, there isn't much. There's a menu with the choices "New Game", "Continue", "Options", and "Quit". Right now, only "Quit" works.
Posted May 29, 2024
I don't think I have ever played a game like before even if I have played my share of retro games.

And while I don't really hold anything against such graphics I have to pass on this one. Feels a bit too retro for me, if I'm honest.
Posted May 29, 2024
Hmm... In themselves, ASCII graphics may still be tolerable, and I played Materia Magica between 2003 and 2009 so have some experience with something of the sort that isn't from back in the dark ages, but it does work far, far better if the characters work like icons, a sort-of top-down view with each character representing a unit or object or tile. Still, the graphics part in itself seems less of a problem than when the party overview section appears alongside, the screenshots that include that just made me stare and shake my head and say I couldn't deal with that. Now maybe that's not entirely accurate if you play the game for a while, maybe you can get used to it, but at a glance at those screenshots, especially since there's also that... DOS-era "window" overlapping some of that text, it seems unmanageable.
Posted May 29, 2024
Just to be super pedantic, this isn't ASCII graphics. ASCII is mapped to characters 0-127 in UTF-8, which includes some non-printing control characters, upper/lowercase Latin letters, numerals, and some basic symbols. It's not even extended ASCII, which includes some simple graphic elements that this game uses. Besides that there are a number of other graphic characters that I don't recognize. Not sure if invented for the game, or taken from some retro character set (I can rule out the C64 character set though).
Posted May 29, 2024
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eric5h5: Just to be super pedantic, this isn't ASCII graphics. ASCII is mapped to characters 0-127 in UTF-8, which includes some non-printing control characters, upper/lowercase Latin letters, numerals, and some basic symbols. It's not even extended ASCII, which includes some simple graphic elements that this game uses. Besides that there are a number of other graphic characters that I don't recognize. Not sure if invented for the game, or taken from some retro character set (I can rule out the C64 character set though).
My guess is that it probably uses a MS-DOS character set. (I'm thinking something like CP437.)
Posted May 29, 2024
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eric5h5: Just to be super pedantic, this isn't ASCII graphics. ASCII is mapped to characters 0-127 in UTF-8, which includes some non-printing control characters, upper/lowercase Latin letters, numerals, and some basic symbols. It's not even extended ASCII, which includes some simple graphic elements that this game uses. Besides that there are a number of other graphic characters that I don't recognize. Not sure if invented for the game, or taken from some retro character set (I can rule out the C64 character set though).
Granted that I didn't look carefully to see whether anything was out of place, but at a glance it looks like the standard character set to me that's been around since the DOS days, what you still get with Alt codes. Now that I searched, seems to be called code page 437.
Posted May 29, 2024
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UnculturedGames: When it comes to the graphics, I'm well aware that we're not in the mainstream here. If it's not your thing, then no worries.
"Retro" for a JRPG would be graphics that are akin to something like Trails in the Sky or Chrono Trigger or Secret of Mana, or something like that.

Please make a JRPG with that type of graphics. If you do, and if it's good, then I'm sure it will get you lots of sales.

What you are actually making, though, now, is way below the threshold of "Retro," and in a very bad way.

Not many people are going to buy this, because the graphics are way too awful and will therefore make this product unplayble, other than, perhaps, for a very, very, very tiny niche of a few gamers, at most.
Posted May 29, 2024
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UnculturedGames: Nice, thank you! I'm on a mission to push textmode graphics to new levels, and hopefully to some extend succeeded too.
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Atreyu666: Well, you might uncover a real niche market for your games :)

Here is a screenshot of one of my games back then. Of course your's looks WAY more advanced :)
Looks cool, very ZZT-like.
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g2222: Oh, I remember playing an old DOS ASCII game. It was called "Caves of Thor" (shareware, part 1 of the Thor Trilogy, published 1990 by Apogee). The visuals were *very* simple, see screenshot attached. Your character was just a smiley symbol and you had to navigate caves and water streams, collect keys and gold, shoot monsters etc.

I like that Whispers in the Moss tries to give the game world more detail and structure. The perspective is a bit shifted, not quite isometric, more akin to SNES JRPGs like Secret of Mana. That's probably where the references to the 8-/16-bit era come from.

I agree that playing this game full-screen on a huge monitor (and with a close viewing distance) could very well be headache inducing. But watching the trailer video in a smaller viewing frame is manageable, such as GOG's preview on the game page. All in all, I'm looking forward to the official release!
Ah, Caves of Thor is a legend!

Yes, I'm using oblique/isometric projection, just like the SNES era JRPGs, and I don't believe any or at least many textmode games have been created with this angle before. In the typical top-down view of ASCII games, the ASCII glyphs work as more like symbols. I have a very different approach, where I'm actually trying to draw graphics with the text glyphs. This has been done in some rare ZZT games before, but it's a very rare approach.

By the way, you can press Alt+Enter to switch between different screen modes, so playing the game in a smaller window is definitely possible.

Thanks for the comment, I appreciate it!
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UnculturedGames: That sounds interesting. Will it be possible to follow the development somewhere? Socials, devlog?
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dtgreene: Not at this time. Maybe once there's something to show I'll consider it.

At the moment, there isn't much. There's a menu with the choices "New Game", "Continue", "Options", and "Quit". Right now, only "Quit" works.
Heh, you gotta start somewhere. Good luck with your project!
Post edited May 29, 2024 by UnculturedGames
Posted May 29, 2024
There were early JRPGs that used text-based graphics. Like this one: http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/ken-to-mahou-sword-sorcery-dark-age-of-jrpgs/ It's just that they're pretty obscure, weren't 8- or 16-bit console games, and weren't called Final Fantasy.
Posted May 29, 2024
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Cavalary: Hmm... In themselves, ASCII graphics may still be tolerable, and I played Materia Magica between 2003 and 2009 so have some experience with something of the sort that isn't from back in the dark ages, but it does work far, far better if the characters work like icons, a sort-of top-down view with each character representing a unit or object or tile. Still, the graphics part in itself seems less of a problem than when the party overview section appears alongside, the screenshots that include that just made me stare and shake my head and say I couldn't deal with that. Now maybe that's not entirely accurate if you play the game for a while, maybe you can get used to it, but at a glance at those screenshots, especially since there's also that... DOS-era "window" overlapping some of that text, it seems unmanageable.
I'm approaching textmode art in a different way than ASCII games generally do. In the typical top-down perspective ASCII game (roguelikes et cetera), the glyphs indeed have a more symbolic nature. I'm using a different perspective (oblique, isometric, or whatever you want to call it), and this allows me to draw with the glyphs instead of just using them as symbols.

As for the DOS-era window, the game is indeed a textmode game and marketed as such from the start. Without trying to sound passive aggressive, I have to point out the obvious: the game's target audience isn't people who find DOS-era aesthetics unmanageable, quite the contrary.

Thanks for the feedback anyway, I appreciate it.
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eric5h5: Just to be super pedantic, this isn't ASCII graphics. ASCII is mapped to characters 0-127 in UTF-8, which includes some non-printing control characters, upper/lowercase Latin letters, numerals, and some basic symbols. It's not even extended ASCII, which includes some simple graphic elements that this game uses. Besides that there are a number of other graphic characters that I don't recognize. Not sure if invented for the game, or taken from some retro character set (I can rule out the C64 character set though).
You're right, and it's a good shout. The graphics used in this game are essentially ANSI graphics, although created without ANSI escape codes. Or the extended ASCII set (256 characters) with foreground and background color. However, I don't think many people have even heard the word ANSI, while ASCII gives some instant context to everyone.

The game uses standard DOS-style textmode graphics (QBASIC's SCREEN 0), with the old DOS font and 16 colors.
Post edited May 29, 2024 by UnculturedGames
Posted May 29, 2024
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Ancient-Red-Dragon: "Retro" for a JRPG would be graphics that are akin to something like Trails in the Sky or Chrono Trigger or Secret of Mana, or something like that.

Please make a JRPG with that type of graphics. If you do, and if it's good, then I'm sure it will get you lots of sales.
Thanks for the feedback. Overall, I don't think the word "retro" can be reserved to only mean games from some very narrow timeframe in the past. I think of it as a general word, referring to a game made to look and feel like old video games from the past.

Textmode graphics indeed don't have their roots in JRPG history. They've been more common in old RPGs made in the west, roguelikes, et cetera. But I'm still drawing all of my visual inspiration from the NES/SNES era JRPGs and using a similar perspective than those games instead of the typical top-down ASCII approach. The difference is that I'm using an archaic and very limited medium to convey the graphics.

Also, the gameplay, story, worldbuilding, mechanics et cetera are all deeply inspired by the classic JRPGs. So overall, the inspiration is all JRPG, while the execution is (at least graphics-wise) closer to the history of some other genres.
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VanishedOne: There were early JRPGs that used text-based graphics. Like this one: http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/ken-to-mahou-sword-sorcery-dark-age-of-jrpgs/ It's just that they're pretty obscure, weren't 8- or 16-bit console games, and weren't called Final Fantasy.
Drawing inspiration from somewhere doesn't mean that the game has to match the source visually, which is only one aspect of video games. Pretty much 100 % of the inspiration drawn to Whispers in the Moss comes from the 8-bit and 16-bit era JRPG classics. The fact that the game uses a very different approach to graphics than those games, will not change that one bit.

I've played some really good text-based interactive fiction games, that were completely inspired by Final Fantasy. These games didn't even have graphics.

Ken to Mahou is a good shout, though.
Post edited May 29, 2024 by UnculturedGames
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This is my favourite topic
Community
General discussionComing soon: Whispers in the Moss(36 posts)(36 posts)
(36 posts)