Shattered World: Beneath A Stone Sky

The Sky's The Limit!

An old, unfinished Tactics RPG I made for a competition a couple of years back under the course of 6 months. I learned a lot from working on Shattered World... sadly, most of them were things NOT to do, and the engine ended up being very hard to port once GameMaker:Studio came around, leaving this project in its current deprecated state. It's still playable, even moreso than Gun-Princess 1, so if you're into games like Disgaea and Fire Emblem, you could probably squeeze a few hours of fun out of this.

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A World Shattered By War

Shattered World takes place in a world inspired by ancient China; two floating continents in the sky separated by a great wall. On the west, the desert continents of the barbarians; on the east, the grass continent of the civilized world. An interim period of brief peace has put an end to the latest bunch of invasions, and all seems well. It all seems too well, in fact...

In the middle of the night, the sisters Luna and Artillery Novazarte get woken up by the thunderous sound of teleport magic; it's a letter by their classmate Lance telling them that their school is under attack by barbarians! Once at the school, they realize they're the only ones to stop this before someone gets hurt! Luna, Lance, Artillery and the resident dragon Sarhya picks up arms, not knowing how the events of this rainy night will spiral out of control, putting not only the school, but the whole world in line!

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Features!

• Experience jerky unresponsive 3-frame animations that are reused between almost all types of attacks!
• Enjoy a completely-MIDI soundtrack from when I'd just discovered that chords were a thing but before I learned about scales and harmony!
• Barely make out the position of your characters in a non-rotateable isometric world!
• Follow an unresolved plot about halfway to the end!
• Attempt to make sense out of an GUI where half the elements poke outside of their canvases!
• Equip items with slightly punny descriptions from a database with several hundred pieces of equipment!
• Over a dozen areas to explore, each with several unique scenarios!
• Highly customizable characters! Warriors using magic, witches using guns, dragons using human weapons... it's not always the best idea, but you CAN do anything you want with determination and grinding!
• Using the Essence system, you can permanently alter a character's stats and moveset by first charging up Essence, then absorb it to make it a permanent part of the character!
• Does the enemies look cool? You can sway any enemy into joining your party using Charisma, built up by killing other enemies! Converting enemies into allies doesn't reduce the "max number of units in battle" counter, letting you turn being outnumbered back into a balanced battle!
• Getting too many random weaklings by converting all the time? Fuse your characters together to boost one character and carry over new skills and aptitudes!

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How to play

• Z - Cancel
• X - Confirm
• Enter - Open the main menu
• Esc - Open the system menu

The first three stages of Invaded Greatwall Academy cover the gameplay basics.

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Known Bugs

• The Name Entry screen is laggy as HECK. This is due to a bug in the drawing code causing it to render everything over 100 times more than necessary. Just try to cope with it, you'll only need to name your savefile once.
• There's no pause/titlescreen menu option to quit the game. Use the System Menu instead (press Esc, then the indicated 'close game' key).
• The stuff in the Novazarte kitchen lets you go 'behind' them (technically) even though the graphics still appear on the bottom, resulting in visual bugs.
• Under certain rare circumstances I've yet to figure out, unit IDs of corpses can be overwritten by living characters, causing a buggy 'clone' to appear. All copies of the same character share the same variables, so the character only ever get to act once per turn, but the AI gets very bugged out when this happens since attacks against dead targets are invalid. The cloning only affects battle data, so it will not damage your savefile or your other characters' data.

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If you feel like you'd want the source file to this game for one reason or another, you can buy it!

Licensing rules for the source file:

• Can be used for free or commercial games, this also applies to all resources that are included in the file such as graphics and music; EXCEPT the 'created by Yal' logo and any other graphical resource which contains the name "Yal". In other words, you can use all the sprites and music for your own projects as well, not just the code.
• Credit appreciated but not necessary.
• You can only share derivative works made using the source code or the included resources in a non-editable form; AKA you can not sell or give away sprites, music or the source file, only games you make using them.