November didn’t go quite as planned, but we are making pretty steady progress. More feedback is coming in from folks who are accessing us in our early Early Access format, so a huge amount of stability has been addressed.
November has had a LOT of documentation go into the wiki. Commands and database segments are getting help icons as well as input hints to explain what is going on. Dialogue options have been added successfully (e.g. allowing a player to select a “response” from a list and handling it appropriately). Gauges have also been added as a user interface element, which are really useful in combat. They’re designed in such a way that they can overflow and adjust, so it would be very possible to make some expandable gauges that grow over time (e.g. health increases from leveling up) for other game styles. Shops are almost in, but as of the time of this writing, there are still a few components necessary to “glue” everything together. The amount of time left to complete the work is roughly a couple of days. Given that a lot of the wiki and documentation was going to happen in December and January, we’re still in a good place to meet our Early Access launch.
We’ve added a number of quality of life features and bug fixes, which are too numerous to mention. Copy/paste functionality has been expanded. Several of the commands user interfaces are being revisited to create cleaner/better margins. It’s all a work in progress to make the best possible engine/editor combination for the community.
As I stated above, we’ve had more and more people who are testing out the engine — and we’re getting to a point where I’m addressing (or attempting to) all of the issues as they come thru. A few folks have been working on playing with the battle system, and it looks a lot better than the sample I shared a while back! You can see an example of an ATB-styled battle as well as a Turn-based battle. These battles (and the one I originally shared) all take place as a “user interface based battle,” which is akin to games from the Super Nintendo era where you are transported to another screen. We also support map-based battles, which haven’t been demoed yet… but they will soon enough! My hope is that each RPG Architect game will be able to actually look different, rather than a cookie cutter templated version that is typical with other engines and makers.
I’ve spoken about resources in the past, but now I have some actual news I can share. Final Boss Blues has donated several Time Fantasy characters, tilesets, and other graphics, with a slight twist (recolored to match the Open RTP we are also leveraging), for use with RPG Architect. There are so many resources here that it blows my mind a bit. Not to mention, Jason Martin is also releasing several assets (you can see some of them in the video above) that will also allow for you to make a low resolution (think high-color GameBoy era) style game.
Bit by Bit Bert has graciously donated several 8-bit chiptunes as well to match with the low resolution style, in addition to the 30+ songs he already gave us. Further, he’s building out our sound effect library… which is full of roughly 100+ sound effects so far. The music is already included in the packaging for Steam, but the sound effects are not there yet — I’ll likely be getting to that next month.
We’re starting work on the “final” template that will be released, as well as a sample game with that template (the Low-Res Sci-Fi example above will be released as well).
I can’t stress enough how much I appreciate all of our early backers, especially those playing with the engine, offering feedback, and dealing with crashes (becoming rare) and bugs (not quite as rare, but getting there). While I’m trying to address those and code up features, they’re doing further validation work and pointing out holes or ambiguity in workflow. Without your support, RPG Architect would be a lot further behind than it is presently. Truly, you all are the unsung heroes of the RPG Architect community.
That’s all for November!
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!
