Pale Coins
Pale Coins is an Action RPG set in a fantasy world with challenging combat, open world exploration and a variety of items. Traverse old forests, dark caves, weathered ruins and unknown places, to find the Champion's Coin and fulfill your greatest wish.
- what is Pale Coins? -
Pale Coins is the sum of gameplay features I like in RPGs and games overall:
- Open World - Pretty much all of the world is accessible from the start. To avoid confusion and frustration, only a small part of the world is easily accessible. Other parts may be unlocked by spending gold to reparir a bridge, getting a permit for certain areas or getting stronger to not get one-shot by the enemies.
- "Old School" - Pale Coins does not hold your hand.
You want to know how to progress a quest? Talk to the NPCs, find clues yourself, explore the world... There are no quest markers. I want you to explore the world in your own pace and in your own way. - Item Variety - I always loved how in RPGs you find new equipment and immediately check if the new gear is better than the equipped one. There defintely is no lack of items in Pale Coins.
- Affixes / Unique Items - In order to increase the item variety, certain items have a chance to drop with a prefix and/or a suffix. Those affixes add random modifications such as poison damage over time, more physical damage, more fire resistance, better drop chances, and so on...
If you're super lucky, you would eventually end up finding an unique item. These have special modifications and skills assigned, which often are unique for that specific item. - Item Skills - Some items come with item skills, such as a dodge, a force wave, ...
These skills add more variety to the combat and are super fun to use. - Dungeons and Bosses - Pale Coins offers various dungeons and even more bosses to fight.
Usually, the bosses will get more difficult later in the game. In case you end up struggling with a difficult boss, you could always come back later with better equipment.
- start of a new journey -
I can't remember exactly how I came up with the idea of Pale Coins. After somewhat finishing my previous game Battle Soul Memories, I wanted to start something new. By that time I was really invested in Conan The Barbarian, Dark Souls, old fantasy RPGs (such as Gothic), etc. So I decided to try something like that.
After a few months of development something kept me from working on that title further and I wanted something different.
But what?
An RPG?
How should the combat look like?
Which art style?
Without any plans or a vision, I started with a rough proof of concept. It included basic movement, combat with a sword or greatsword, enemies and a single map. Also, an NPC was placed there as well.
From that, I started working on switching weapons and changing the armor. Unlike many other 2D games, I wanted the armor to change on the character as well.
I had so much fun with the combat and the visible armor that I wanted to improve on that. At that time I wrote a simple Game Design document with the first draft of the vision and the core mechanics.
Ultimately, the proof of concept turned into the Action-RPG Pale Coins.
- finishing words -
I want to cover more game dev related topics later on. This should be the introduction into a regular series to cover the development and other stuff around Pale Coins.
If the idea sparks your interest, a demo of Pale Coins is available at steam. Check out the game here: Store.steampowered.com
If you want to get notified as soon as Pale Coins releases, or simply want to support me, please add the game to your wishlist on Steam. Anyways, I'd really appreciate any kind of support or feedback.
Thank you for reading the article and have a great day,
Lukas
