October is going to go out with a bang! Lots of announcements and progress… and most importantly.
We hit 100%. There’s still a ton to do, but the originally “planned” feature set is now “complete.” Let’s dive in.
One of the first (and very important) changes I made was to add support for drag/drop (or repositioning) elements in the timelines we have for Animations, Action Sequence, Battler Transitions, and so forth. Prior, you would need to adjust the Starting Time, if there was one present — but now you can drag and move things around in a more “approachable” way.
The most obvious thing that was added… Battler Transition Logic! This handles how characters move around or animate into a map-based battle (and out of one).
I’ve been making a lot of progress on the user experience and redesign as well. You’ll note that a lot of margins and colors have been redesigned from the ground up. Don’t worry, they work with the Light theme as well. If you prefer the old look without the combined Menu and Toolbar, you can always toggle it to return it to the prior look and feel (see below in red).
I also added an “Expert Mode” which will unlock more of the Editor’s Settings that you might not normally want to play with. Right now, the only part that has been expanded to has been the “Gravity” in the Map Configuration mode of the Database. This has enabled adjusting gravity to be on a non-Y plane, such that a few users have made a 2D game that uses a positive “Z” gravity to design a sidescroller exactly as you would expect, and then leveraging the in-built “Jump” command tied to a Virtual Key.
Also, sliced lights have been added as well. Sliced lights are a subset (and rather, they’re processed in a more advanced method) of the spherical lights that we have at present, but allow you to change how they rotate, project, are constrained, and can support textures. This will allow you to do some cool things related to ambiance.
Let’s talk about 1.0, though. There are a number of things that still need to happen before 1.0 — of which I’ll list out here:
- Complete Documentation Website
- Add a “Blobber” or “Dungeon Crawler” Template and Sample Game (“Free DLC”)
- Complete the 1.0 Game
I have a couple of other features I’d really like to add as well… because even though we hit 1.0 “officially,” these will be useful to have. This is not an exhaustive list, but I think they’re the top priorities in the Discord at the moment:
- Dynamic Message Boxes (Message Bubbles for Characters)
- Statistics in Chart Format (with option to toggle between the existing Tabular format currently)
- Written Scripting/IntelliSense (with option to toggle between Visual Scripting format currently)
- Launch a Test Battle from the Editor
- Rework the “Splash Screen” to be more Wizard-like for Casual Developers
So, the big question — when is 1.0? I’ve made pretty significant strides in pushing us along, but there is still a lot of “data” work to be done (e.g. Documentation, Blobber Sample/Template, and 1.0 Game). The soonest we could hope to get there is in the first quarter of 2026. The longest is anyone’s guess. Ideally, I’d like to get it out “officially” in 2026, but you only get to “release” once.
Pragmatically speaking, most of the features I want to add are a couple of months, tops. The rest will be spent on building out the mandatory things, listed prior. I can get “community help” on everything (except for the 1.0 game) else. If I get some help with that, I think each of the prior topics will be a quarter of a year… which puts us potentially in Q3 or Q4 of 2026.
That said — we basically are already at 1.0, and if you’ve been following without purchasing RPG Architect, this is the ideal time to get in on the “early” pricing model — just watch out for the regular seasonal Steam sales, if you want a slight discount.
That’s it for October. Feels like the day that we hit 100% on the roadmap would never come… but here we are!
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!
