Welcome to another monthly RPG Architect report — The 1.0 game made a lot of progress this month, but I also managed to get some engine work done as well!
One of the biggest adds are Behavioral Status Effects. Status effects have been able to do quite a bit up until now, but we couldn’t really do anything like Berserk, Confused, Paralyze, and others. Essentially, we allow you to potentially have Status Effects that control whether or not your action succeeds, as well as extend/alter the targeting of a skill that is used. This opens the prior up, but I’m sure folks will figure out a bunch of other “cool” ideas to do. We’ll add more, so don’t worry about that!
I also added the ability to use Template Lists within Template Lists — but they’ll never be selectable. This will allow you to do cool things like show Status Effects (is there an echo in here?) on Status Menus, Battle Overlays, etc. It’s almost like I was trying to make sure I could do something in the 1.0 game… Speaking of, you can bind against Status Effects in your User Interfaces now, as well!
Sorting is another paradigm that was added into User Interfaces! You’re now able to sort contexts and all the like with a UI similar to the Filters… which also got a little bit of a face lift. While I was working it, I add a Variable Manipulator that lets you simulate adding/removing equipment as well.
I spent a lot of time working on the 1.0 game, because I want to get a hopeful “playable” iteration early on in November (maybe October, but don’t hold me to it). The biggest hurdle right now are resources, which folks are working on extremely diligently. We’re getting some new animations from Seraph Circle as a result of this, for “physical” attacks that will be coming very soon.
As far as the 1.0 game, I managed to get to what Claude estimates is about 45% of the way through. I’ve built out pretty much every menu (hence the updates on UI-related things above). I’m working on animations right now, as well as battle poses, to make the “battle” look better. Skills are all built out, but they’re only about as useful as their animations (in battle). I have plenty of dialogue written (see prior updates on this) and effectively have two game design documents running in parallel. My artistic side of things is built into a OneNote that has dialogue, themes, art, etc. In Claude, I have a parallel branch that is looking at statistics, validating battle formulas, watching enemies skillsets, equipment, etc — making sure that the “numbers” add up appropriately. The funny thing is that I think this is a pretty accurate summary of how my mind works in some ways — creative and detailed in some ways, but calculating and reasoning in others. But both are kind of compartmentalized to themselves. We have almost all of the “first” dungeon’s enemies drawn and programmed. I’ll need to start working on decorating and enhancing the maps later this month, likely. Hopefully, I will start adding in the actual dialogue (already written, but still needs to be translated into game format) as soon as I get some more standardization on the portraits, etc.
The 1.0 game, purely from a technical standpoint, is shaping up very nicely. I will probably release each of them as they finish development into the main repository/release for Steam, so please look forward to them!
October will have more focused work on the 1.0 game, hopefully getting a “game loop” finished. It will by hit or miss as far as “what” is finished, and I imagine there will be a bit of “polish” needed on everything before it’s “complete.” But then… we’ll be at 1.0. And that’s something worth celebrating. We should hopefully be getting the Seraph Circle animations added to the engine in October. There will likely be a few “small” features that I need/want to add, probably focused on enhanced map editing (I want a “random” doodad dropper that paints things randomly, based on a type, e.g. random “grass” elements that stick up, etc), and potentially “instanced” prefabs (or really the ability to update a mesh’s UV coordinates [or the “sides”] of a building in real time in the Map Editor). It’s all coming up — and likely very soon.
That’s it for September! Not a lot of visible things, but we’re getting to a pretty “mature” point in development while things slow down for me to improve the engine by actually using it. We’re getting closer, Architects!
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!
