I wasn’t sure if this question should be posted in the “Design” forum or here, but I apologize if this is the wrong place. I chose this because I don’t have an active project going at the moment.
At any rate, I’ve tried making an RPG sometime back in 2009 with RPG Maker 2003, but my PC crashed and I lost it all (I didn’t like the front view battle system anyway). Luckily I was only 5 or 6 hours into it. I’m only just now making the attempt to get back into this, and through the use of another forum, was referred to Unity3D. I just thought that I’d assess my options on this forum, where I could presumably attain a direct answer to my questions:
1.) I’d like to have a “Star Ocean” style battle system, where traveling the world map or any dungeons which have random encounters results in being brought to a zone where you can freely move around to battle the enemies. I understand that this is likely a tall order, but I thought I’d ask nonetheless. A second preference would be a turn based style, like older Final Fantasy games. I’d imagine that this is much more practical.
2.) I’d also like for the end of my game to have a secret dungeon, but only after beating the game. By this I mean that, say… after defeating the story’s final boss, you watch the ending and then its over. Upon restarting the game however, a previously blocked path would now be open, which would be where the secret dungeon exists. Another option for this could be a choice which is made at the end, where one ends the game, and the other allows travel to the secret zone. I have no idea which of these is more practical than the other, or if either of them can be done at all.
I’m willing to drop some money into this engine if I can attain these goals. I have the free version of the engine downloaded, so I’d also be curious to know how much more simple it is to make a game with a paid version. The appeal to the RPG Maker series was that it was basically drag and drop style. I know I won’t have that with this software, but my options seem far more vast.