Developer: SillyCone.ch



Fenriven is planned to be a First-Person Action RPG für PC (Windows). It will be set on the fantastic continent Fenriven, based on a bunch of fantasy short stories (in German). Players will be able to explore parts of Fenriven, solve riddles, fight and get to the bottom of an exciting story. The game will first come out in German with a possible English version later on (or it might turn out the other way ... first an English version and then German ... or both at the same time, we will see ).



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Check out the Media section of the Fenriven website for the following:

* Fenriven Teaser *

* Fenriven Trailer 1 *

* Fenriven Music Theme *

* Pre-alpha Video *

* more pre-alpha screenshots *





Also check out the News for the latest information on the game.





Please note: I am aware that the quality of the pictures or even the project is not what others will be able to achieve with FPSC:Reloaded, but since there have been so few projects posted on the forums, I wanted to at least add another one to show the world that there ARE people working on games made with this awesome software and that even amateurs like myself will be able to create something worth their time!

Hmm. Just read that one sticky about this subforum being for actual WIP and not just some game ideas. This might explain why there have been so few projects posted yet. I must admit that my game currently rather has to be counted as "idea" so Mods, please feel free to remove my thread. I will post about it again when the whole plan has come to a stage where it's further developed.

In the meantime there is now a short video showing a first test location of Fenriven to get in the mood.

looks nice!

Alright. Here's a link to my glorious failed attempt at a first trailer. Been tempering around with some TextToSpeech voice and that didn't turn out so hot. Also the scenes and cutting is not really anything worth looking at. It's in fact so bad, that I don't want to put it up on the game's website. But I still wanted to show it to you guys.

After the fail above, there is now the



Fenriven Trailer 1



out. Found some royalty-free voice samples for trailers that now make it sound a lot better.

Listen to the Fenriven Music Theme:



Fenriven Music Theme



It's actually a royalty-free track I found that can be used by everyone and their grandmother. So it's not an original, unique soundtrack. But since my game will be non-profit, this will do nicely.



I now also stop spamming you guys with new posts until I actually have some gameplay to show or at least some story details or concepts to reveal.

Keep going on the updates, it's nice to see all the great ideas people are coming up with

Thanks. I know it will take some time until FPSC-Reloaded will be ready. But it's already loads of fun playing around with it and the things connected to making games in general!

Some background info on the plans for Fenriven:



The game will play on the Islands of the Western Sea, off the shore of the main continent of Fenriven. There will be 10 outdoor maps spread over the 7 smaller and bigger islands (the smallest three together being on one map and the biggest island taking up 4 connected outdoor maps).







Travel between the islands will be done by ships. Players will be able to buy passage on ships in a few of the small harbors around the islands or can travel in fishing boats (if they are able to find them ). There will be no actual sea travel but rather the option window to travel and then a loading screen. Every island will feature one to four dungeons, ruins, mines, lighthouses and the such for the players to explore. There will also be a handful of small villages spread over the islands where players will be able to buy equipment, repair their gear and get provisions.



The background story of the game is that a long lost evil stirrs on the islands of the west. There are reports of strange creatures menacing the small fishing villages around the islands and that the old stone circle on the island of Talishy has been seen to glow at night and strange sounds chasing away every living creature. Someone has to stand up and help the people and stop the rise of this age old evil. (who said "generic fantasy story"?? How dare you!! ).

The player will be tasked to find an ancient artifact called "The Dagger of the Elders". The prophecies say that this is the only weapon the rising darkness can be defeated with. Of course, the location of this dagger has been forgotten and nobody knows where or how to find it. But I am sure the player's hero will find a way, right?



The Fenriven short stories feature something called the "Red Veil", an ancient curse the old gods left before they returned to their domains behind the stars. This Red Veil is a mystery. It appears as some sort of red cloud and anyone who is cought in it is doomed. Sometimes it appears as a small mist and only kills a cat or a dog. Sometimes it appears as a huge cloud that kills entire villages.

It's something that works nicely in the short stories but is probably nothing that can be used as gameplay mechanic. Who wants to kill the players randomly and without any means for them to actually escape? So I'll see if and how the Red Veil might make it into the game.



Next step is now to create the base for the 10 outdoor levels. FPSCR is already in a state where I think I can create the shorelines, hills, mountains and roads. Maybe even the forests. Everything else (grass, plants, dungeons ...) will follow step by step when the engine provides means to actually create them.



I'll post some new screenshots soon.

Some of the enemies you might encounter during your adventure (screenshots taken in FPSC DX9 version ... FPSCR will look a lot better):







Warriors of Crobar

Tribal warriors hailing from their frozen villages in the north.

What are they doing here on these western islands, far away from home?





Soldiers of the Empire

There are only very few outposts of the Emperor on the Western Islands.

Why did he send a whole legion about a moon ago?





Lizard-Men

The villagers of the Western Islands report of attacks of strange scaled creatures on their settlements.

What drove them from their homes beneath the waves?





Cult of the Astrologers

The higher order of the mage cult of the astrologers has gained substantial influence

on the Western Islands during the past few moons. What is their goal here?





Demons

The reports of horned, flying demonic creatures that haunt the center of Talishy were dismissed by

the Imperial court as the "illusioned dreams of fishermen" during the session of the recent moon.

looks really amazing!

Looks awesome .

Good , very , good luck ;D

Two examples of possible travel between the islands (as shortly described in one of the posts above):





Fishing boats to travel to the next island. They are often hidden and need to be found. But using them is free of charge.





Ships are available in every town (there will be seven small and medium towns). Players can buy passages to other islands on these ships. Easy to find but passages cost a few gold coins.

Replaced the 'concept' screenshots in the first post with actual pre-alpha shots now. There will be more soon.

Happy New Year everyone!



Starting the year with some short info on an idea for the Fenriven game. I plan to have different armor available to the players (at least leather and chain, maybe more if the scripting will allow for an easy way to have different armors). Armor will protect the player but will also be damaged and will have to be reparied at blacksmiths in villages and towns. Below you see a first example of how leather armor and chain armor might look.

Been working a bit on the shorelines, hills and mountains of the islands. Also started to build the first few settlements and gather assets for the imperial fort (pallisades, towers, tents). Below you see the first version of the town in southern Vesen with the light tower. It's where the player will arrive in the beginning of the game and head out on his/her adventure.

cool

Yeah just watched the trailers and checked the screens.

Keep it up, looks like you have a good story, and good setting going on.

Well done!

Picture i found on google and i made a logo and inserted it (: this would be a cool logo for your game.

Thanks for your comments, guys. Appreciate it.



Also thanks for the great picture, drewtaylorr! Really looking good.

Problem is though that I can not use it without the consent of the owner of the picture. But it gives me an idea of what sort of picture to look for.



Not much to share currently on the progress of Fenriven. I have been working on some Flash gimmicks that I plan to use on the game's upcoming website. Nothing fancy. I am aware that there will not be more than a handful of hits on that website per month, but as mentioned before, it is a ton of fun playing around with all the different aspects of making a game.

I was just using it as an example for a cool poster(:

Ah. Understood.



I am indeed looking around for a good royalty free character render or concept currently that I might use for the cover or website. Not really easy to find but I'll keep on it.

Hah! Fiddled around with a concept that suits my needs which I found on a site where indy game devs can find free resources for their games! Put together a pic that can serve as title header for the time being (also updated the first post with that now).

Been working on some new cutscene idea. Various of the more important NPCs should have a conversation cutscene. When the player meets these NPCs, they should provide some useful information and give the player a hint or just throw a text line at them (like for example when the player approaches the imperial fort but has not yet the necessary means to enter the fort to meet an important NPC - the guard would let the player know by such a cutscene that he/she is not allowed to enter the fort ... yet).



The video below shows the first few tests with these discussion cutscenes. The models are actual in-game characters (the examples are from the fantasy character pack available for FPSC which I also plan to use for Fenriven). Text is lip-sync mostly but the voice samples are just random test samples not really connected to the game.





Fenriven Conversation Cutscene Demo Video



I doubt I will be able to provide actual discussions (like the player will be able to chose an answer to really have a talk with the NPC) but at least the NPCs will be able to talk to the player.

Whats the website where you found the royalty free pictures??

You mean the concept art of the character used in the Fenriven header, right?



http://opengameart.org/



There's mostly 3D and 2D game models. But they also have a couple of concept art. The content is under GPL which means that you can use it for free and open source games. "Free" is a tricky topic though because if you release a free game that is not open source, there might be conflicts with the GPL. But the game code and game media are separate entities and do not need to be released under the same license.



For more information on that topic I suggest to check their FAQ as well.

Lookin nice and it is featured in the latest news post of fpscr



I do wonder how you plan on doing the skin types/ like for the gloves and armor stuff.



But who knows what sweet stuff we will get once the lua implementation gets some new scripts.



Keep it up!

Yeah. I honestly also am not quite sure if or how I will be able to pull off that "different armor" idea yet. But we will see.



In the meantime the brand new Fenriven website has been put live now. There is not a lot of new information available yet but it does look a little better than the previous website and news and new media can be put up a little easier to find now.

Been thinking about that a little more and I think it should be possible. What I will try is create different versions of the same weapon but with different armor skins on the player's arms.



Sword with leather armor (ID 1)

Sword with chain armor (ID2)

Sword with plate armor (ID3)

...

Same for Bow, Axe, Dagger etc.



Over scripting it should be possible to switch the ID's of the weapons the player has depending on what armor the player bought and equipped. So instead of switching the textures of the player's arm, I will just swap the weapons and with that also the armor skin.



Not sure if that will fly but it's the approach I have in mind currently.

Its a start but you might be able to use the scale/hide limb feature of reloaded



That would mean -

you have all arm models in one file and depending on the limb you set

the others would get hidden.



This way you could have all the different types of armor in one file and swap those ingame.



I do believe that this approach is less performance hungry since hiding limbs is/ should automaticly not render them = no impact

I like the vid of convo's

That sounds like a good idea to follow up! Thanks for the hint. I'll look into that as well as the other approach and see which one might work.





Thanks.



On the topic of LUA scripting various different parts of the game ... I have not looked into LUA too much yet but what I have seen so far does resemble Flash ActionScript quite a bit. If that is the case, I think I should get a hang of LUA in decent time cause ActionScript is something I am fairly familiar with.



But first things first. Still am in the process of gathering all the needed graphical assets and models and still have to tweak the terrain of the islands. I am waiting for the next version of FPSCR with that though as there should be some improvements to terrain editing included as well. I hope to have some new Fenriven screenshots available too soon after.



Oh, and I checked my new website today in InternetExplorer. Only made sure it shows correctly in FireFox, Chrome, Opera and Safari yet. All fine there. Also no problem with mobile browsers (minus the fact that Flash content is not shown on some of course).

But only in IE it shows wrong and out of place. Means I have to check my style sheets and see what needs to be tweaked that also IE will show it as intended (*shakes fist and curses IE*).

Fantastic work I really like the style already. Don't doubt yourself when it comes if the player will be able to make choices after a conversation as I believe this may actually be something we'll have the ability to create using LUA in the future.



Did you create the map yourself? Looks quite nice. Illustrator?

Thanks for your comments!



I made the map with assets coming from a tool called "CampaignCartographer III". I bought the software years ago for creating pen and paper RPG maps but the assets were very useful for the Fenriven map as well of course. The map itself was made in GIMP.

hi, looks cool can't wait

Hello, I will like to make you some character concept art for you. If you like it, I will make some more art in the future.

Hi Deliveredmean. Thanks a lot for the offer! There's indeed one or two concepts that would be very helpful to have. But please be aware that Fenriven will be a free game so there is no option for payment (just so we both are on the same page about this ). If you are still interested, please send me a message over the contact form on SillyCone.ch and we can discuss this further. Thanks!

Good luck with this. Looks very promising!

I sent you a message, did you receive it?

Thanks! I know it's been quiet about any news on Fenriven lately. But there will hopefully be some new stuff that I can share soon.







Yes, I did. Thank you!! Sent the answer just a moment ago. Sorry for the delay there.

Deliveredmean42 provided the very first fanart for Fenriven!







Also check out his DeviantArt profile with even more concepts for various of the enemies the players will encounter in Fenriven. Cool stuff indeed.! Thanks a ton, deliveredmean42!

Quite some time since the last update on Fenriven. I had some issues running the FPSCR 1.005 Beta until I couldn't get it to run at all 2 weeks ago. Might be because my rig is getting too old to handle FPSCR but right now I am eagerly awaiting the next beta version and hope it will run better (or at all) again.



Been working on the setup of questlines. On paper. Meaning I put together discussion flows combined with NPCs involved, locations and items for those quests. Still working on the main quest and will tackle the side quests later down the line.



I also thinking about a concept of letting players have a say in how the story of Fenriven might evolve after they finished the game. The idea is to gather data about which of the possible different outcomes most players decided to go for when they finished the game and try to incorporate that into new short stories and as well a possible Fenriven 2 game. Sounds cryptic? Here's an example:

Players will be able to alter the outcome of the game by taking certain decisions during gameplay. One player might decide to use a certain artefact to his own advantage, risking war between different factions. Another player might decide to be the knight in shining armor and utterly destroy said artefact so nobody can take advantage. A third player might even decide to try and take the position of the evil that is rising on the Western Islands which could have disastrous consequences on the world of Fenriven.

Now depending on how many players chose which path, it will be what the future stories set in Fenriven will have to deal with. So the ending most players will chose, will have an impact on both future short-stories as well as a possible second part of the Fenriven game. Players will actively decide the future of Fenriven, basically.



It's currently just an idea but I laid down some plans and concepts for it and I think it might work. It of course depends on how many players will actually want to play and finish Fenriven and if I will find a way to gather the number of outcomes. But even if it's only a handful results that might come out of it, it would still be possible to follow that plan.



Anywas. As soon as I get FPSCR running again, I hope I will be able to post some new screens. So hang in tight.

The creating of the game itself is not proceeding too much at the moment. So I thought it's at least time to come up with a new video. So I proudly present the Fenriven Teaser!

(Click on the image below to go to the Fenriven news page where you can watch the teaser video)

hey cool little vid there man, how you do that lol was awesome to watch, even if alittle short.

The teaser is just a combination of different video-intro templates that you can find on the web. You can customize them for your own needs with your own pictures and text and then just have to cut them together in the video-editing software of your choice.

Hiya.



Looking pretty sweet.



One suggestion (not sure if you've had this one or not, but anyway...). You may want to talk to your 3D guy and dial down the "whiteness" of things "white". Specifically, NPC's eyes and teeth. White is almost never 'white'. But 255 255 255 is pure white in a computer. And, as far as I know, FPSCR doesn't have any sort of Radiosity/Global Illumination, so the artist has to manually do it himself. For eyes and teeth, adding a little bit of yellow/pink works well. Other than that little tip/suggestion, keep it up! Looking forward to the end result!



^_^



Paul L. Ming

Thanks for the hints! For the conversation-cutscenes, I'll make sure I'll make those eyes and teeth look a bit more "appropriate" to the setting. Good idea.

Nice Game Looking Good Keep Up The Good Work