Welcome to July’s wrap-up. We had a lot more feature-adds than I was intending, mostly because people keep asking — and because some of it was needed (eventually) for the 1.0 game.
One of the most “useful” and recent adds was fences. A lot of folks have been asking for this for a while. It will work well with those who just want to make Parallax maps only and never use tiles. Previously, you’d need to have a tile with “collisions” on it or use shapes in conjunction with those, to create some semblance of map boundaries. Not anymore. Fences allow you to draw literal fences on a layer, circumventing the need for tiles or other collisions in any way. They work exactly as you’d expect — draw a fence and a player cannot cross it.
I also added Prefabricated Entities — or Prefabs for short. They allow you to make 3D (or 2D) models that render in-engine. They’re very simple, but useful for things like buildings, etc. In my mind, they fill the gap of “I want to have a ‘flat tile’ of a complete house and draw it in a few spots,” but for 3D. In 2D, they function as a “stamp” more or less — you can do the same kind of thing! There are still a few little things I want to do with them, so expect some minor updates in the next month.
I also added (FINALLY!) Outline and Glow properties to ALL text. The technology was “mostly” caught up, but I had to put in several patches to make it work the way that I wanted — and performant. That said, these two options are not available to you.
There’s also the curious case of the above… I started work on Minimaps. This video is old, so it is not reflective of all of the options that have been added, or how it even works. They’re still a work in progress, but I suspect that they’ll be “feature complete” in early August. You’ll have tons of options in these and hopefully the most common (and even a few edge) cases will be covered.
As far as 1.0 goes, I’ve been trundling forward (slowly) with the 1.0 project. I have the Stats and Skills systems built out, as well as part of the main menu. I’ve been using a mix of Claude/AI on some of the items (just to ensure that pathway works), as well as manually creating it — which was the point of the 1.0 game — make sure that the individual workflows “work” great on their own. I’m working on the battle system at present and am hoping to have that component “more or less” finished by the end of August.
After that, I’ll be focused on building the Enemies out (which should be quick) and making sure everything plays well. By the end of September, I’m really hoping to have at least “something” playable in terms of it as a demo. If that all plays well, then I suspect it’ll be another month to finish out what I had “planned.” I have more planned if people enjoy it — and maybe I’ll write it out. I have several concepts that all draw from the same world-building that can coalesce into something bigger and deeper.
That puts it as “1.0 game done in October.” But that’s only one part of the story. There are two others planned, right? The maps will largely and likely be shared between the two “3D” style games. The 2D variant will require a lot of rework. The “systems” should all be pretty solidified though, so that should hopefully make it such that the other versions shouldn’t be as difficult to build.
I hate to move the date from Q4 of 2026 to Q1 of 2027, but it may happen. If life allowed me to focus on RPG Architect alone, rather than family, actual job, and so forth, there’s a very good chance it’d happen. I promise there will be a 1.0 “game” (at least one of them!) by the end of the year. I haven’t allocated any time to “does this play well?” or “are there scripting bugs on my behalf in the game itself?” which may be a little unrealistic/unpragmatic.
We’ll see what happens. It’s progressing in the right direction and I have enough prework done that I shouldn’t be blocked too significantly in terms of what I need to do (I do have a real concern for needing portrait/sprite work). We’ll cross the bridge when we get there, though — plenty of spots in the proverbial worksheet to be filled out first before we go playing with the color of the marker.
That’s it for July! In August, I’ll be wrapping up work on the things I wrote about above. There are some “updates” I need to make to Status Effects/Character/Enemy “AI” and likely Stat/Reward dispensing, so that’ll probably trickle in. I’m sure there will be other things that people ask for that I can’t help but add! And bug fixes. Always, the bug fixes.
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!
