The Prophecy of Kendo 2
The Prophecy of Kendo 2 is an unreleased sequel to TPOK: Prologue developed between 2007-2010 made in Flash. It continues the story where the previous one left off and has a completely different overworld, menu and battle system.
You can download the compiled game from its download page by using the password theunfinishedprophecy and run it by using Ruffle.
Story
Since as long as anyone can remember, everyone live united under one hegemony. Hover one night then theocrat which ruled over the people had a dream. This wasn’t a typical dream, it completely changed his perspective on the world. Since then, he put false accusations on innocent people using his vast army of super-warriors. Kendo is one of said warriors.
Disagreeing with the actions of the leader of state, he decided to escape from his training facility.
Kendo decided it was time to take action. All of a sudden, he killed several of his team members, as well as his mage superior. A strange old man who was there also encouraged his escape. After killing the last of his corrupt teammates, he escaped from the training facility by jumping out of a second-floor window.
The plot of TPOK2 starts immediately after the events of its predecessor. Kendo escapes from the castle and falls into a river that is flowing beside it. He’s dragged along by the current until he eventually washes up on a river bank where he’s confronted by two royal guards that have been searching for him. Having lost his weapon, he grabs a fish from the river and uses that as a replacement for his sword. Being outnumber he is joined by Herna, a local villager who uses her magic to help him fend off the guards.
That’s about all there is for the plot that I came up with. The idea was that Moriarti would work on the world building and storyline but not much came of it from this point onwards.
Overworld system
The game has a top-down perspective with a little bit of perspective and depth. It definitely looks less weird and distorted than the predecessor, and was inspired by many GBA games that had characters that could ‘obstruct’ those behind them. Buildings become transparent when you walk behind them to help you see what you’re doing.
Unlike in TPOK: Prologue, the collision detection system is predictive rather than reactive. There is an invisible ‘grid’ that determines which tiles are free, blocked or actions. Action tiles run custom functions that allow the player to speak to NPCs, enter/exit rooms and activate switches.
Each area would be loaded separately, an idea that was taken from Adventure Quest to reduce the amount of loading done on each playthrough since a player would only load the assets that they were going to be seeing.
In the overworld, you can talk to people and they can react to current quest status, items in your inventory, sell you things and more. The demo only has a few examples of this, like there is a simple quest where you need to find a book that allows the river lady to give you healing water.
Inventory and stats
The inventory system in The Prophecy of Kendo 2 is completely new in this version, though it’s not very sophisticated. Each character has nine slots and they can equip armour and weapons as well. Whatever they are wearing ends up changing their overworld and battle appearance.
Equipping, swapping and dropping items is very wonky since you need to select an item using a radio button and then press the action button. Most of the flash games of this era have a drag-and-drop system that lets you move items around easily but I couldn’t figure it out at the time.
Each character would have several stats:
- Health
- Stamina
- Attack
- Speed
- Fire
- Electric
- Wind
- Nature
- Light
- Dark
Every time you levelled up or or a specific type of armour/weapon, some stats would grow higher than others, making it into a game of whether you wanted to focus on specialising in one stat or create a balanced generalist.
Weapon types
The other major innovation would be weapon types. Herna would have only one type of weapon – staves, which do low damage but have high magical abilities. On the other hand, Kendo would have three options: Swords, daggers and spirits. Swords would have their damage affected by mostly strength (a fireball attack using the sword would use both strength and fire stats), daggers would focus on speed and spirits would have their damage measured on your various magic skills.
The idea was that each attack that you used would combine a different amount of each of these skills eg a sword attack would be 90% based on your strength and 10% on speed, while a knife attack would be 50/50. Magic attacks would work similarly; a fire attack would be 80% fire, 4% every other stat.
Each weapon would also unlock a different set of skills that can only be performed while that weapon equipped. For example, daggers can be thrown and pulled back by a rope, swords can be used like a bat to launch a fireball or spirits can cast magic spells.
Battle mode
The focus of the game’s challenge would be in its battles and balancing damage versus health management.
The battle mode was again inspired heavily by Golden Sun with the characters placed at a 45 degree angle and turns where every character moved once per turn. Each battle would have the two protagonists face off against one or two opponents and the last team stand would be declared the winner. Typical RPG stuff.
The intention behind what made this game different from other RPGs is the asymmetry between the main characters. Other games that I played before I started work on Kendo 2 typically had characters that filled different roles but would still follow a similar structure. For example in Pokémon every character has 4 skills that they can learn from leveling, breeding or TM/HM; Golden Sun has basic attacks, psynergy, djinns and summons for all characters, and Final Fantasy Tactics had a job system where anyone could switch jobs and learn new skills.
The Prophecy of Kendo 2 would instead have a 3-weapon system where each weapon type would have specific skills associated to it, as well as common skills that are modified by the weapon type. Herna would behave as a more typical spellcasting mage with summons being learned from story events (like in Golden Sun 2). Each weapon would also have its own critical attack that is triggered randomly but the odds can be modified .
The game only has a few abilities in the playable demo, but I was planning on adding more skills that would synergise between the two characters. I later realised that this was already a thing in the Mario & Luigi series of RPGs.
Enemies would behave similarly to players. They’d have their own health, stamina and all the other stats plus a list of skills that they would do. At the start of every turn, they’d dish out the strongest attack that they can (or heal if they need it and have the ability to do so). Once they run out of stamina they’ll revert to using basic attacks or waiting to recover stamina.
Smaller miscellaneous features
Menu
There is an opening menu that includes a preloader, new game and load/start game screen. The style was achieved by taking a bunch of other assets and tracing over it with Flash’s brush tool in low-vector mode to give it the style of Japanese calligraphy.
One thing I’m not quite satisfied about (and that has proven confusing in play testing) is that you need to create a new game and then load it, rather than be put in the game right after making your save file.
Instructions
The menu area has some instructions on how to play the game.
Kendopedia
This section was inspired by the Civilization IV Civilopedia. It was intended to be a kind of wiki for the game. It contained the above instruction pages in case you wanted to access them in-game, but it also includes information about all the various enemies and the story up until that point.
I did come up with the idea of having this work as a living storybook that updates itself as you progress through the game. This isn’t something that I’ve seen done in games before making Kendo 2, but I have seen it being used in games like Octopath Traveller many years later.
Music
The music in Kendo 2 was composed by Brad Kubota and KaptainKewl. As you can tell it’s much better than the midi I composed for the first game.
Unused assets
There’s a bunch of unused art assets that I made for what could eventually be used in the game, here’s an unordered compilation.
Cancellation
The bulk of the work on Kendo 2 was done in 2008, but the final edits to the game were made sometime around 2009-2010. The last time I recompiled it was in 2016. These were the days before I learned to use Git, and even then flash files are binaries so they wouldn’t do too well at tracking changes.
There were a few reasons why I stopped working on this game.
The main of which was a lack of support. I really don’t want to sound too whiny, but the team and I got distanced to the point where we sopped talking so it was hard to keep motivation. It was pretty much just a bunch of kids online making something for no monetary gain.
Next is the technology falling out of favour. Even when I started working on this, Actionscript 3 had already been around for a year or two, so working in Actionscript 2 was a lot more dated, not to mention a lot slower. Not to mention that this is around the time when smartphones were really starting to make traction and there was a movement away from Flash and onto mobile game development.
Finally is the scope. The idea was to make the game modular so that I could just set up the main structure, and then all I’d have to do is add in new areas, enemies, scenes etc. Even to create the demo took me a couple of years to do, and there are other things that I wanted to add like changeable overworlds (think movable columns like Golden Sun) or some online leaderboards.
I did end up having to wear a lot of hats and would have liked if there was someone to take care of drawing the art assets and writing the plot since that did end up being very tedious and miserable. My art isn’t really that good anyway.
Overall I am quite proud of what I did. I presented it to a game dev company I worked at (I was working a business role there) and they offered me a job as a developer because of it, so I got that going for me, which is nice.
