Welcome to this month’s installment of “What’s going on with RPG Architect?” Let’s dig in.
First off, I’m ending the month doing a certification, so this has been written in advance of that, so you’re only probably going to have updates thru the 23rd posted. It continues into early May, so expect a few little setbacks there, but nothing significant.
This month we finally finished the documentation, and I’m very pleased to share that you can find it at: https://docs.rpg-architect.com/ I believe every command has documentation and examples, which you can copy/paste into RPGA. It is all generated from the codebase itself, so it’s living and breathing thru it. As things get updated there, I’ll update the documentation as well, it’ll just be a matter of me purging the docs site and rebuilding it (which takes a little bit of time, but it’s nothing too significant).
In other news, I’ve also made a significant update to how the 3D Map Transformation process works — and done a few things to streamline it. I updated the “Use Diagonal Edges” to more than just the Structure — it works on anything that has a “Terraforming” flag. The requirement, though, is that you now need to include an additional two rows for the [first row] NW, NE, [second row] SW, SE tiles that would be drawn on diagonal tops, underneath the “Terraforming” tiles. For Structural tiles, this is immediately underneath the “Ceiling” and above the “Walls.”
On top of that, there is now a “Density” and “Roughness” for walls, which allows for deformations to appear on tileset walls. This is useful in that it will let you make some spots look “rocky” or “jagged” and others not. In the video above, you’ll see a few combinations of what I’ve done. It works pretty well so far and I’m pretty happy with it!
These two features had been on my mind for a while, but it wasn’t until I had to work on the 1.0 game, that I realized how much time it was eating up trying to go thru and manually add edges, etc. And then changing the map’s layers, shapes, heights, and everything else became so cumbersome for something that should have been “simple.”
Speaking of the 1.0 project…
It might not look like much, but I have most of the writing done for it! I have a few points of interest/interactions necessary in Chapter 5 (the final chapter). I’m actually really loving the writing and direction of the game… I might end up making it go beyond a demo game. The world is rich enough and built to continue, if desired. I’ve given access to a few different folks for review — writers, friends, and other people who will give me good feedback — and every single one of them really enjoyed it so far. Unfortunately, they’re also spoiled for the storyline so far (sorry).
In order to do the above, I also had to map out UP TO the Station (final chapter). Just basic traversal to show off different “features” of the engine that I want to. I’m going to redo the Valley of Whispers and Aethercite Mine with the updates to mapping above. In the video, you can see I have a 2.0 of it. I’ll keep the old one around to try to capture the same feel I was going for originally. I wasn’t super happy with the Aethercite Mine — it captured what I wanted, but I felt it could’ve shown “more” off of the engine than I had originally intended. It will now.
I’m really excited for this project and looking forward to sharing it with the community as we approach the final push for an actual “1.0” release.
…but wait, that’s not all! You now have the ability to shape/edit your Statistics with GRAPHS instead of Tables. Tabular format is generally preferred and useful for some folks who have been doing Game Development for a while and enjoy a “spreadsheet” approach — but I know a lot of folks are coming from other engines that use graphs — so this should help the learning curve and “feel” significantly.
My plans for May are to continue working on the 1.0 Project. I may even have something worth “demoing” to our VIP’s and insiders by the end of the month.
Just as with this month, though, there will clearly be updates thrown in here to add functionality that hopefully serves the community. I have ~3-5 requests on our Discord tracker that I’d like to get in. They may be done before April ends and I just don’t update it, so pretend they came out next month instead!
I have a UX friend who will also be looking (hopefully?) some of how we handle modals in the Editor and maybe making some recommendations to make it cleaner/nicer. Expect that the “New Project” dialogue will be transformed into a Wizard, as will the “Splash Screen” to hopefully guide new users. This seems to have been a consistent issue for users and will be “fixed” before 1.0.
That’s it for April! We’re edging ever-so-closer! I can almost taste 1.0 — we’ll be there after six years of development.
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!
