I've begun working on what will hopefully be completed at some point in the future. It is a sequel to Series 1, and will be made on RPGM3 as well. It's going to be an arena combat game (seeing as how a strat-rpg is impossible to do with RPGM3) with nods to Gladius and FFT Advance. I've eliminated random battles (they do get tedious in short order), and in their place put scripted arena battles (but you will still fight against monsters). I hope to place some puzzle-filled dungeons in the game as side quests, and want the story to involve political intrigue. I'm still hazy on the details of the story though. There will be a unique leveling-up system, though. Each of the four characters is well-versed in one attribute (DEF, STR, MAG, and AGI). In order to level up, you need to raise each character's primary attribute to a certain value before you level up. How do you raise these stats, you ask? Simple. Each battle will reward you with one or more stat increases. And each battle will involve 1, 2 ,3 or all four characters. So for an example, if a battle is for 2 characters, and you gain 20 STR for winning the battle, will you put the character in who needs a high STR to level up? Or will you put in a lower STR character who needs to raise his (or her) STR in order to stay competitive in the battles? I'm trying to give you some choices in who you pick for each battle, and am leaving it up to you in terms of how you build your characters.

I might possibly make a branching path type of game as well (it depends on how much work the rest of this is going to be), meaning when the game begins, it'll ask you if you played as good or evil in Series 1 (assuming you played it, of course). Depending on your answer, the storyline will change, and different people will expect different things out of you. There quite possibly would be different side quests as well. But most of this is a long way off, as I just started working on the rudimentary basics of the game. Foremost in creating this type of game on RPGM3 was whether or not the scripting for a character select would go over 50 lines. Luckily, for the player to choose 2 characters to battle with, mode 1 and mode 2 both use exactly 50 lines of scripting. I think a 3 person select would take up too many lines, but a 1 person select would probably work. I'm also planning on making certain battles contingent on what a particular stat is. For example, in order to fight a particular battle, a character has to have an AGI stat of 50 or greater. However, thinking about how that will be done, it will probably be a one character battle, as more characters would probably use more lines in a mode than the 50 you have available to use.

So that's the plan for now. I hope to continue working on this, and hope I do not have to leave too many things out due to the 50 lines per mode restriction. Anyway, thanks for keeping up with my progress, and thanks to those who have downloaded (and hopefully played) Series 1.

Update (5-24-06):
I haven't been working on the game much this past week. I just got a Nintendo DS, and I've been playing that quite a bit. Also, as you cannot copy events, it's going to make what I want to do that much more time-consuming. After every battle, I want the same basic thing to happen (requiring probably three or more modes with 30-50 lines each). I just want to be able to change the details relating to each battle. So it looks like I'm gonna have to painstakingly repeat the same code info probably about 40 times, as that is how many "arena battles" I plan on having. It's going to get really tedious, really quickly. Right now, I'm not sure if it's even worth continuing. It just seems like too much hassle for so little payoff. Well, we'll see what happens.

Update (6-23-06):
I explain a bit more of my levelling up system in the following thread:
http://www.pavilionboards.com/forum...6187#post136187