Happy new year, Architects! January was a little slow, mostly with a lot of fine-tuning and several bug fixes. As we get more eyes on RPG Architect and get closer to 1.0, this is pretty par for the course. The goal going forward is stability and clarity — so you’ll be seeing more documentation and bug fixes than actual features… but that said, I still added a few!
There are no pretty images/screenshots for this update, because we’re getting towards that glorious “stabilization” phase where there are a lot of things that are improving behind the scenes, but aren’t necessarily something that can be seen.
There were roughly 80 bug fixes this month, which vary anywhere from how localized sounds (which are used in messages for voice acting) worked, to how plugins load, to how projections work, as well as how facing directions/movement works relative to positions. It’s all over the place, but again, that’s par for the course at this stage of development.
A few things that did get added, since everyone wants to know about NEW features!
User Interfaces now support Templates with nested values. One of our users requested this, with an idea to show number of Kills of an Enemy by setting a Global Variable to be tagged to the Enemy. The idea is that when an Enemy is killed, a variable is updated as part of the Battle Reward. The user wanted to then specify the Global Variable in a Data Entry for the Enemy, in the Tags. This essentially led to being able to bind to Data Entries and a Tag with a Global Variable, in the format of: “Global[Tags[kill_count]]” Some folks will understand what I’m talking about, and a few, this will go over your heads. It’s OK! It just means that RPG Architect is becoming more versatile.
I also added the ability to visualize Projections’ Bounding Boxes, similar to how you can see them for Entities, Vehicles, and Doodads. This will help with debugging things — and was primarily made for users working on the ARPG Game Jam ending at the end of the month. Projections needed a little work and now honor their timing as well for being active — and we even got a Projection Data Source, so you can potentially track Entities that get spawned as PART of the Projection. Complex, but useful!
Item Margins were added to Compass Lists and Lists, similar to how they were present on Template Lists.
There was a major refactor for how the “Battle Preview” inside the editor looks. In prior, there were some manual flags that were available in the actual Battle Rendering components, which were… ugly and violated a ton of rules. Needless to say, I decided to leverage Annotations since they’re already present, and throw in some dummy characters/enemies, which makes it MUCH cleaner and better long-run.
A few of our users have asked about Plugins — and I took major strides in getting a system setup/repaired for it. At some point, the Plugins system got broken, so I spent some time improving the process and refining it. The end result is that one of our users was able to successfully make a brand new command and load it up. I’ll definitely be sharing information about “Plugins” for RPG Architect in the future. I still, also, stand by the point that Plugins should not be necessary and anything that is common enough should be a “first party” feature. Plugins should really only be reserved for incredibly specialized features (e.g. connecting to a web service, interacting with a special kind of hardware, adding a scene that is otherwise not included in an RPG, etc).
Per usual, good help is sometimes hard or fickle to find. The help I did have fizzled out rather quickly, so we didn’t make as much progress on Documentation as I’d have liked to. On top of that, our copy editor took another job and is busy transitioning to that, so many articles are waiting on a “once over” to clarify any broken English/Programmer-ese that I may have interjected. That said, there have still been some significant developments in documentation, and we’re moving forward. I’ve been adding features to the parser to extract more/better information and it is already paying off. It’s just going to take a bit longer. I am still optimistic we’re going to be “documentation complete” by the end of March. It may take a month longer, depending on if anything pressing comes up.
I’ve not worked on the 1.0 projects, more than brainstorming ideas and working on a GDD. I have roughly 50% of the Dungeon Crawler/Blobber planned out. The script will largely be the same between the three games, so that’s a big plus. The Dungeon Crawler map/details will not be the same for the others, but the events/dialogues should all still be present, so it will speed up development.
Next month is going to be much of the same, but more focus on getting documentation to the finish line. If I get about 3/4 of the way there, I’ll likely share the new URL in my next post. When we’re at 100%, I’ll make a major change to the Editor and redirect the help to the new documentation site (and/or potentially support a physical document — we’ll see).
That’s it for January! We’re moving forward!
As always:
Thank you so much for your support so far. I’m looking forward to building this community further and giving you the engine you may not have known you always wanted!
