Yup. Late report again. Though, this time, it’s a report for both Wednesday and Thursday, so today’s report is in sort of early! Sort of.

Anyways, I’ve implemented the graphics that my teammates made more or less completely now. There are two enemies spread out across two maps (a forest scene and tower scene), and all races and sexes respectively have a sprite representation in the world (though only if they’re the party leader, of course.)

Since only the first character can currently become the party leader, it is wise to put your favored character first. If you, for instance, like playing as dwarves, make sure to put him at the very top of the party. Keep in mind that he’ll be slightly slower in movement than humans and eleves though.

There’s not much else to report, other than the fact that the time for the project has come to an end. By the end of these two weeks, I expected I’d have a demo ready and playable. To some extent, I was right. It’s not as much of a complete demo as I’d wished, but it’s at least playable, with a couple of maps to explore and enemies to encounter. Although it may not be a very long demo, I am still proud of what I managed to achieve during the period code-wise. I ventured out into previously uncharted lands in terms of coding and program designing and actually did get something out of it. A system that is, to a great extent, very customizable and broad in terms of how it can be used.

For the next few days, I’ll consider releasing it on here. I’m hesitating to release it immediately as I might have a possible, alternate plan for the project. I’m consider finishing some last few things further and then releasing the source files, as a sort of open source, Game Maker based RPG engine. Although it may not be entirely complete even if I finish up some more stuff, it’ll be a helpful push in the right direction for someone who wants to make a game of a similar nature.

We’ll see how it goes. Eventually, there’ll be at least a project page up for it, with some screenshots and perhaps even a video. Whether or not it will be released as the short, short demo it is, or if I decide to release it as a (messy) source of help with building RPG systems in Game Maker, time will only tell.

Last but not least, I must repeat the words I uttered during the presentation of our game today. I mentioned that I’ve always respected Nobuo Uematsu and Yoshitaka Amano for the great artistic work they contributed with to the Final Fantasy games. After this project, I’ve found a lot of respect also for Nasir Gebelli, whom coded the first three Final Fantasy games. How he found the patience to program such complex systems is beyond me. Then again, I am an aspiring designer, not a programmer. Anyhow, kudos to Nasir for his contribution to the early FF-games. I’m impressed, to say the least!

That’s all for this post and for the project too, I guess. When I finally decide on what to do with the game, you might see another post about it on this blog.

Until next post; keep on gaming!

Marcus out.

Hey, we’re getting used to this “writing report the day after it’s meant to be written”-deal, aren’t we?
Well, it doesn’t matter that much. What matters is that all the 1075(!) lines of code are finally starting to become a game. Yay!

So, as you probably figured out, this is the progress report for Tuesday’s work. The battles more or less work completely now, with the exception of spellcasting, which I doubt I’ll be able to implement before we’re supposed to showcase the game tomorrow (thursday, that is.)

Characters (and only those that are actually alive) can attack and flee from the battle. The enemies can also carry out their commands, and because of how I decided to make the enemies, they can all have their individual battle logic. It can be as simple as attacking any random character in the party (which the current test enemy does), or you could have them seemingly intelligently choose the character with the lowest defense for their target. The only limitation is how much one’s willing to code, basically.

The battles can both be won, with the player characters being rewarded for their feat, but they can also be lost, resulting in a game over screen. Currently, the game over screen exits the game. This is because of how the whole system is constructed, so to say. All characters are persistent objects, which means that as the game goes between screens/rooms/maps, all their values follow with them. This presents a problem if you would return to the title screen (also implemented, nothing fancy though), as all the characters would immediately be dead if you’d start a new game.
It’s probably an easy issue to solve, as I have a few ideas on how it could be done. For now though, it’s not the highest priority.

Since the game has actually progressed a bit, I’d say that it’s time for a screenshot, yay! Keep in mind though, most of the stuff is still placeholder graphics, until I import the assets that my teammates have made.

The battle system in action, using lots of test stuff!

That’s it for today. Or, well, yesterday technically.
Marcus out.

You guessed it, it’s another one of those late progress reports! This ones for yesterday’s (monday’s) work.

Yesterday, things started finally coming together in regards to the battle system. I ran into a lot of issues that, by somewhere around six or seven in the evening, the pieces of the puzzle finally started coming together.

What works so far is that your party can attack the opponents physically, with their equipped weapons (so far, there’s just an ‘Unarmed’ weapon, but adding more will be easy.) The opponents actually lose health too, and can thus die. You can also choose to flee from the battle, which, through a nifty little formula, will calculate your chances of escaping based on the Dexterity-stat of the character trying to get the party to get the ‘eff out of there.

Finally, the battles can also be won, and after getting your share of experience points and gold, you’ll be returned to where you were before. Technically, the party doesn’t yet receive the experience points and gold, but it’s an easy thing to fix.

I guess that’s all for this report. Hopefully, I’ll do today’s report on time. We’ll see how it goes…

Until then!
Marcus out.

Howdy! This’ll just be a quick lil’ update on the RPG.

After recoding what little battle logic I had so far for the third time, I finally got something working! Now, the hardest part seems to have been overcome, and what remains now is just a whole lot of coding different attacks and actions, and some attack logic for the enemies too, of course. Perhaps a working battle system by the end of the week isn’t such an impossible idea after all? Of course not, there’s always a solution!

Work it harder, make it better, do it faster, makes us stronger. That’s how the Daft Punk song goes. I think I’m gonna loop it for motivational purposes tomorrow.

For now though, I’m gonna play either some Dead Space 2, or either Final Fantasy VI or VII. We’ll see what I come to choose. Perhaps I’ll even decide to play Amnesia! I really should play through it, I should’ve played through it long ago, really.

Anyhow, that’ll have to do for today. Look out for more updates tomorrow, perhaps even a little something on Breakthru: Extended! *Excitement ensues*

Marcus out.

Mellow evening to you all! I bring forth another progress report on the 2D RPG work in progress!

Today, just like yesterday, consisted mostly of background coding. I can finally say though, that the battle system is actually underway now. For real!

The battle initiation code is now properly handled, and so far it processes the enemy type and the amount of that enemy to place in the battle scene. All these enemies are added to an array which I’ll later use to populate the list of available targets from which the player can choose his victim, given that the player party is alive and that it’s the players turn, of course.
That’s another thing added today; determining which side starts first and letting them take action.

I’ve also added a feedback box at the top of the battle screen, which will be used to present textual feedback for the things happening during battle. Nothing too complex, but very helpful in further setting the mood of the battle.

Presently, the player can alter between the three choices of commands; attack, magic and flee. Currently, they don’t do much, the cursor isn’t even moving yet, but it’s a small step on the way. It looks as if though a general battle command script is the best method of calling what kind of action is taken against whom, so hopefully the action itself in the battle won’t take too long to code.

Lastly, I’ve also added some basic equipment system for the characters. All characters can equip weapons and armors, but are limited to certain types of them both, depending on what proficiency type they can equip.

That’s all for today’s update, at least all the details I can think of. Hopefully I’ll have something a bit more visual to show before the week’s end.

Until next time!
Marcus out.

It’s that time again, belated-progress-report-time!

So, just like the last post, this is a progress report for what I did yesterday, since I forgot to write it then. I blame hard work for making me forget!

Anyhow, so yesterday consisted mostly of ‘background coding’, i.e. a lot of code that works behind the scenes but isn’t necessarily visible on screen. Most of this background code is related to the still in progress battle system, which is taking a whole lot longer to code than I initially estimated. Still though, the prolonged development of it shouldn’t present that much of a problem deadline-wise. So long as it works before the end of the week, It should be okay. Fingers crossed!

The battle initiation code works somewhat all right, but I might have to rethink my method of calling it. Currently, I call it through a script through which I can throw in the battle background, amount of monsters etc., but since the battle scene is in a separate room, it might be best to initiate the battle through the battle scenes creation code instead. I’ll keep the script though, to alter some global variables that I can access when the battle scene is created, to determine what scene and monsters you meet there instead.

Most of that might not’ve made much sense, but it’s good reference for me if I get lost in all the code and forget what I’m doing. It tends to happen every once in a while. I blame that on way too little caffeine!

Another thing which we did yesterday was testing out the template male character sprite in action, throwing him into the game and making him walk. He’s kinda bare since he’s a template character, but it looked great already! I can’t wait to see what it all looks like when we’ve got all the sprites for the characters working.
Unfortunately though, I can’t let you all in on a sneak peek just yet. I’m still using a placeholder tileset (containing borrowed graphics) for the test map. When we’ve got some basic tiles in there too, I’ll post a little peek at it.

So, in short, yesterday mostly consisted of making boring background code (like checking array sizes and a value representation lookup script) in preparation for the battle action, which I’ll tackle today. Best get started, there’s lots to do!

Until next time,
Marcus out.

Hello all. This is actually a delayed progress report for yesterday, so there’ll most likely be two posts today. Gasp!

Anyhow, what happened yesterday was trying out working from home. This particular time though, it didn’t work so well. Didn’t build up the proper motivation and inspiration until late in the evening, so that’s basically when I got things done proper.

I fixed the party leader’s movement speed to get increased/decreased in accordance with the leader’s race (which means that Dwarves are slower in their movement, just like in D&D!)
I’ve also fixed up arrays for the party for making quick and easy alignment checks, ability checks, etc. I’m not a hundred percent sure just yet, but I think it could also be used for going through and storing all the participants’ battle commands. We’ll see how it turns out!

I actually did get started on the battle system yesterday,  mainly working on the layout of the system and trying out altering between characters, to simulate the battle-specific character stat display system progressing. All that’s been done works well so far, hopefully by the end of today, I’ll have an interesting first, rough version with a command queue working. Fingers crossed!

An empty display, though with a functional stat display system that can display all the battle-important stats. Also, blue arrow cursor! Zomg!

That’s all for this time. Peace, duders!

Marcus out.

Good evening, internets!

This is the first official progress report of the 2D RPG project I’ve mentioned earlier, temporarily referred to as “Dungeon Fantasy”, since it’s sort of a tribute game to both Dungeons & Dragons and Final Fantasy.

Last Friday, me and two of my classmates (from the Graphics group) joined forces, so the game is now a group project. Today, we’ve mostly been doing planning in relation to the games graphics and visual style. We’ve decided to go with a Gothic-inspired visual style for the game, while still retaining the originally planned fantasy setting. It sounded interesting in theory when we were discussing it and I’m confident it’ll be at least equally as interesting in reality. As the Duke himself said; let’s rock!

Code-wise, the party customization system (that’s right, featuring an entire party now!) is more or less finished. You can choose between the four characters and customize them to your liking, and it all works smoothly without any nasty bugs or disappearing values. Yay!

Visual evidence of the 4 character party alteration system in action. The bright bar on the left is a placeholder for where the characters' portraits will be.

Other than that, the Intelligence and Wisdom stats have been merged together into one stat instead, called Psyche. This both saves me some time when doing checks based on such things as spellcasting, since both the Wizard and Cleric classes now depend on the same stat instead of one each, and it also saves a bit of energy for the player, since it’s one value less to keep track of. Some might call it simplifying the system, but I call it a Flow Decision (an alteration in the games design based on enhancing the flow in the game slightly.)

The Charisma ability has been cut completely from the game, since we decided that the characters’ alignments will work more than well alone in its place. Such things as civilian characters’ disposition towards the player will be based upon general alignment checks instead of charisma checks. We’ve just discussed its possibilities so far, but we might go as far as have the party’s general alignment affect the outcome of the game entirely. Of course, we’re not revealing any details on that just yet, you’ll have to wait and see for yourselves, in-game!

That is all there is to say today. Tomorrow holds further coding work for me, hopefully I can get started on the battle system (finally!)

Now, I will enjoy the last sip of my compulsory 20th birthday beer. Cheers!

Marcus out.

Hey all!

The work in progress D&D/Final Fantasy-inspired RPG (system) is evolving fast, in terms of code. So far, it consists of 264 lines of code, and that’s just for customizing and altering the values of one character. The final game will feature a customizable party of four characters. Hopefully though, I’ll find a way for the customization script to work with all four of the future characters, to avoid copy/pasting a shitload of code unnecessarily.

It might not seem dramatically different from before, but a lot has happened "behind the scenes." Next up, the battle system!

After these four days of hard work with GML-coding, I decided that I deserve to take a break and try out the Bulletstorm and Crysis 2 demos on the 360. I’ll post my thoughts on them sometime later, be it in a couple of hours or in five days, I dunno. We’ll see.

That’s all for today, just a short and sweet post. Remember kids, keep on gaming!

Marcus out.

Hello all!

Just stopping by to inform you all that the 3D Art Mix-page under the Artwork-section has been updated with some new (old) stuff, go check it out!

Also, today I’ve been working on a prototype for a school project. It’s going to be a retro-styled, 2D top-down RPG, heavily influenced by Dungeons & Dragons and Final Fantasy (hence the mish-mash name; Dungeon Fantasy). There’s not much to it just yet, mainly just a test of the character customization system. Things are happening fast though and I’ve still got plentiful of inspiration for it, even after a full day’s worth of coding! I’ve got a good feeling about the project, hopefully you’ll all find it appealing as well. It should be interesting for anyone that likes D&D or Final Fantasy. Or both!

That’ll be it for today. To make things a bit more interesting though, here’s a screenshot of what I’ve got so far. It doesn’t look like much, but there’s a lot of code behind the scenes!

From within the character customization screen. Note that the ability values are from simulated diceroll tests. (Also, noble Sir Bob seems to be without genitalia! Mysterious!)

Keep on gaming!

Marcus out.