October has been an interesting month. Originally, I was planning on hitting Steam Early Access today, but after reviewing the feedback other engines are receiving, it made sense to postpone and try to learn the lessons necessary from others. That said, I think we’re roughly where I had hoped to be, but with several other adjustments.
Much like the last month’s update, a lot of time has been spent on tightening up features and ironing out bugs. If you’ve hit your Patreon minimum and have a Steam key, you’ve likely seen all of the fixes that have gone in via release notes (I update roughly every other day at minimum). There are several people playing with different workflows overall, so many areas have been hit. The bugs are so spread out and varying, but mostly pertain to added stability, making small UI rendering tweaks in the engine (as well as the editor), physics solidification, and so forth. Stability has been a BIG focus going forward.
One of the big enhancements this month was adding multi-layered sky spheres. Above, you can see three sky spheres being rendered (the mountains block out part of the cloud in between the “guidelines” sky sphere) — a background guide, clouds, and mountains. The layering works about the same as what you would expect for image editing software with the highest layer being the last to render.
Status effects are another big enhancement this month — they work now! There are still a few little kinks to address in the battle system with them rendering, but they absolutely occur and are being acknowledged. You can even define custom patterns to happen in maps (e.g. having a character “flash” a color when poisoned and/or displaying the damage dealt) based on status effects.
The battle system is getting “closer” with a few different people playing with making their own at the moment.
Battle programming has been added to the editor for Enemies. It’s pretty simplistic so far, but it’ll allow for a battle loop to occur. In time, there will be a ton more options in each.
If you’re paying attention, that screenshot has another hint of something new… there’s a help icon next to “Enemies.”
I’ve been working with a few other contributors to build our wiki out and document everything as much as possible. It’s still a work in progress, but if you check the wiki links on our site, you’ll notice that it has grown substantially. There are a number of articles that need to be written still, but it’s getting filled out pretty quickly. In time, it should be a great point of information for learning how to work with RPG Architect. This includes the commands and scripting.
One of the other changes added — the new project dialog has a lot more properties available to it. Previously, you would have to go into Video Configuration after setting up a new project, but this should help you get started immediately.
This month has been pretty intense. A lot has been done, but we still have a ways to go. The current plan is to publish to Early Access “officially” on January 20th, 2023. Hopefully a majority of the bugs will be worked out and some of the “features” a new user would expect are all taken care of by then.
One more note…
I’ve spoken with a few more contributors and our included resources will be growing significantly… it may be one of the most extensive ever. We have a few different styles prepared by some veterans of the community. We’ve had some discussions — if RPG Architect is successful enough, we will be getting regular resource updates, in addition to the coding work I’ll be doing to expand features.
That’s it for October!
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!
