The game is progressing quite well. Playable demo should be available before Christmas.
I would like to talk about gameplay a bit, there are still some things I need to decide about.
The overall direction is
simplicity, I would even say the mechanics being primitive.
I want to avoid all heavy & complex mechanics if possible.
The premise is like this:
You have a party of 6 on a quest (you can't hire/change the party in the middle). You kill monsters for gold and experience. You don't level up automaticly, you need to go to a trainer and pay for it (where the payment would be non trivial, I want in some cases/stages of the game to force the player to delay level up of some charactes due to financial reasons). Level affects mostly HP and MP. You don't make any skills allocation or anything like that. There are attributes (pretty standard, around 8), you can increase these by finding crystals in various dungeons (the party member that touches it gets an appropriate attribute boost). There are also resistances (fire, cold, etc) I'm not sure where you get these. There is also an option to temporarily boost attributes and resistances by drinking from wells/fountains, effect of these wears off after midnight (Cindirella syndrome
). As for skills you buy these from various NPCs. Spells are trickier, most classes can have some spells (except barbarian, knight, etc), you don't get these upon level up, you need to get them somehow. The one source would be NPCs (quest rewards) and books in dungeons. But I'm not sure if this would be enough... wonder if I should make some shops/guilds in cities selling spells.
As for items and inventory system I'm not sure yet.
World:
There is one "world map" around 96x96 tiles I guess. From there you would be able to access 4-5 cities (services providers) and ~26 dungeons/castles/towers/tombs/caves (each 16x16 tiles). Around the world (main map) there would be reasonably many random goodies (a hut in the middle of a nowhere with an old sage living there, a mad wizard selling rare spells and many other things completely not connected to the main storyline). The key intention is to make the player "wow, I stumbled upon this hut in the center of a wasteland and I got this small reward and a talk, it was so surprising and unexpected and so much fun!" I plan to include a total of 80 monster types if I manage (at least 40 are guaranteed to be implemented). You should be able to visit almost anything in any order, as long as you manage to survive the encounter with the monsters. The storyline will be limiting your movement in a very minimalistic way (maybe a few locations that need a key or something, but that would be uncommon). Generally, you would be able to finish the game by visiting locations in many different orders (monsters will NOT be adjusted to your level, you can skip the early locations and then go back and wipe out these punny monsters in one blow, generally I am willing to sacriface a lot of combat balance for the freedom of movement).