Camp Scenes- Put the CRPG in the JRPG

Home base. Back at camp. If anyone needs you, You'll be in your bunk. 

This is a staple of CRPG & TTRPGs - A place the party calls home. It could be a castle, cave, town, tower... It might even be a boat or airship! But whatever fortress your party calls home, It's yours. And it's usually an interesting place for both game mechanics and story.

But when I think back to the classics of my childhood, the great 8-bit and 16-bit legendary RPGs... They really didn't use this idea. Sure, there's a few examples - Final Fantasy had a habit of making the Airship your "place", I think both FF4 and FF6 did this. But FF5 didn't need to, since instead of having a large cast of party members, it just had a job change system. Chrono Trigger sort of had it in "The End of Time" which was tied to the Epoch ship. But even these examples are just scratching the surface.

Then, think of something like Baldur's Gate 3. The Camp Scene is a critical part of the game. Tons of story and dialogue, Random encounters, even a number of game systems live there too. Withers for respecs, Party roster management, storage, and of course, resting for the day (sometimes, even with your romanced companion!) 

Asqueria seeks to marry these concepts and mix them into something new. It's called The Dreamcamp (shown in picture!). 

It's a small map with a LOT of events and scripting - It evolves as new party members join, and as the story develops. It's where you manage your party roster, and can access the in-game journal to review information about monsters, items, skills, even books and music you've encountered. Altho the party approval/relationship stuff is NYI, I have a feeling a lot will be tied to camp events too. Finally, I've got some ideas for "camp benefits" that certain party members might bring once they join, we'll see if they pan out.

The Dreamcamp can be accessed via the consumable item, "Dreamrune: Insula", which acts similar to a tent/cottage type item in other games. It can be triggered anywhere saving is available (the overworld or save points). On the topic of save points I could say a lot; perhaps that's the next post... I like the old school ways.

Well, this ended up a bit longer post today, but The Dreamcamp was really a "Flagship item" of this demo -- You can't just download a plugin to add this to your RPGMaker project, It's not an out-of-the-box solution.. It's a hand-crafted bundle of janky event scripts and even more janky pixel edits made by yours truly.

I hope you'll love it as much as I do, warts and all.