April ended up being a pretty big month for stability. I didn’t quite make the progress I had hoped for, but progress was made nonetheless.
The battle system has been getting some much-needed love. Success Formulas for skills, items, and such now are actually being acknowledged and are used to calculate if using any of the above are actually successful. In the event that they are not, you can declare the “Failure” message. Escaping from a battle is now possible with a script and “special” skill type that can be used. My goal was to get the battle system honoring everything necessary for on-map battles, but it’s not quite there yet. A number of bugs came up during this monthly iteration and got a lot of focus… As well as a much-requested new feature that wasn’t planned to come soon…
Entity spawning, persistence, and removal is here and ready to rock and roll. Several folks have been playing with simulation-style games (e.g. harvesting/farming, like Harvest Moon, Stardew Valley, etc), and really wanted/needed the ability to spawn/persist entities for crops, etc. So, that was moved up so those workflows were not blocked. This is a very frequently requested feature for other engines that is usually solved with plugins or hacking the engine… but not with RPG Architect — it’s native. The only requirement is that the entity you want to spawn is an Entity Definition in the database. I’m really curious to see how folks will utilize this for things, such as building towns, customizing “houses,” and so forth. It’s going to open up a ton of opportunities for users, I hope.
There were numerous bugs involving rendering of doodads, actors, as well as solutions added for easily locating entities from the prior workflow. The language editor had a few bugs cleaned up as well. Rendering improvements were also extended to tiles and maps, which have had a small, but appreciable difference in rendering (about 5% improvement).
Unfortunately, most of this does not lend itself well to screenshots — and even this is a little last minute with all of the changes I’ve been working on. Apologies. I have an intention to create a video devlog to show off new features, as well as how to build a project, but it takes time away from me actually building RPG Architect. When life slows down a little, my goal is to get on this.
In addition, I was hoping to have our 2.5D sample in by this month, but the folks working on it had some real-world hiccups as well, which slowed us down. We should be on track for getting that sample out sometime in May, along with (hopefully) addressing the remaining issues necessary in the battle system that were planned for the current month (mostly with setting up the camera/resetting the camera between scenes). It’s likely that a caterpillar system (which was planned for this month) will make it in this coming month. Annotations will likely be coming shortly after, and then… projections.
Projections have been a “big” requested item, which will be coming hopefully towards the end of the month. With that, the “adventure” battle systems that people want to make will be as finished I had planned, subject to any requests from the community.
That’s a big point too — become involved with us! Originally, Entity spawning had not been planned for quite some time, but with all of the requests from the community, it got bumped up significantly and prioritized. The party/caterpillar system has been requested frequently as well this iteration, so it’ll be moving up in priority too. That helps me know where and when things need to happen.
We have our first game jam planned, starting May 1st (tomorrow): https://itch.io/jam/rpg-architect-spring-jam — the theme is “unlimited” or “unbound.” Make a five minute game or demo showing off something that can be done easier (or only be done) in RPG Architect. There will be prizes based on the number of entries.
If you’ve been on the fence regarding RPG Architect, tomorrow (one day only, dependent on Steam’s timing) will offer a discount similar to our Early Access launch discount. It will never be this price again, so get it while you can!
That’s it for April!
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!
