Aquatis is a RPG project.

You can download the last demo from the games website:
aquatis.metallixcreations.de

Or if you are lazy:
Game files + Engine (Win)
Game files only


Development

Over the last years I was unable to continue the development of the game in a meaningful speed. Also being not sure how the future of Sphere will look like was a big issue for me and my motivation. Currently I think the upcoming TurboSphere would be the engine I should concentrate on. Mainly because it uses JavaScript. I am also thinking of making the game easy to port to HTML5 but I will focus on Sphere first. I learned a lot over the last years while having a job as game developer. I want to put my learnings into the games code and I will probably rewrite a lot.

History of Aquatis

The Idea of Aquatis is probably as old as the Sphere Engine is. But it was not connected to the Sphere engine in the beginning. The first version of Aquatis ever was a RPGMaker2000 Project. I could not write any line of code in these days and the game was not very special back then. With the time I learned programming in school and realized that RPGMaker was not the right tool to create my ideal RPG game. A broken hard drive solved that. All assets of the game were lost. I learned a bit later what a backup is. On my search for a better tool for creating games I found Sphere. I also learned JavaScript in Sphere before I used it in websites. Learning programming while creating a game at the same time, creates a lot of bad written code and I had to learn the hard way how to refactor code. Also because I am German you will find a lot of German code in some files. I learned later that it is easier for others to understand my scripts if I write them in English.

Some years later I finally was able to present my tech demo of the game called "Aquatis - Namidas Fighting Garden". It was a short mini game featuring a battle system, a dialog system, a map with enemies and treasures, and Namida. Namida is a main character of the game. I received a lot of good critics for the demo so I decided to continue development.

It took some more years until I managed to release a first demo that was coming closer to my ideal RPG. "Aquatis - Journey to Kiltos" had multiple maps, dynamic spawning of enemies, a deeper battle gameplay, a new character Aranix, and much more improvements. With that demo I learned how hard it is to work on this game in my free time while having a job as a developer.

After that demo I planned to clean things up a lot. I also tried to switch to newest experimental versions of Sphere but I think that was not a good idea. Now everything is a bit chaotic and I somehow want to create a new version of that game from scratch. I am playing around with different techniques and working on a solid foundation for a JavaScript game that runs on Sphere. That is the current state.


( I will probably put the history part in a proper wiki page and keep this thread head clean with newest updates only )

Alright! I'm glad you are taking the time to make this game appropriately! Managing old code can be a real pain the butt, and so sometimes a full rewrite - with the skills you have now picked up - will really help.

I'm totally looking forward to the next iteration of Aquatis! It's really a landmark game, right there with trial and error and other great games of Sphere's past.

Nice to see Aquatis again!

It would be nice if you could put a date on both the links and the filename. I kinda like having earlier/later versions of the same thing and seeing how much has changed between N time.

Nice to see Aquatis again!

It would be nice if you could put a date on both the links and the filename. I kinda like having earlier/later versions of the same thing and seeing how much has changed between N time.

Hmm, currently there is only one version. I plan to give every release a subtitle ( Journey to Kiltos ) and I won't release so many versions with only small changes, because it would somehow destroy the storytelling effect I want to have. There will be probably some tech demos under a different name. Maybe I use the date system there. For Aquatis the next version will introduce a new main character which design I already have finished since years. Her story will start in a different area of the world so you can finally expect something else than snow