November has been busy. No update video this month, since we’ve had a bit of a change of line-up.
I think that opens up the stage for the first bit of news — everyone please wish Bert the best of luck as he begins to focus on his music and audio journey. He has been getting so busy (and maybe famous? time will tell!) lately, he just doesn’t have time for making videos anymore — so the responsibility has fallen on me to take over. If you have need for music or sound, definitely reach out to him (https://www.bitbybitsound.com/) — I’m sure he’ll be able to fit you into his schedule — you may just need to wait a little bit to fit into it (so start early). I know, already, that he has a couple of big projects coming up that I can’t discuss, and I’m very excited for them. One of them is a collaboration with someone else I’m excited to see the final product from (and that I’ve had the pleasure of reading the GDD of and making side-commentary about).
I introduced a new “series” on YouTube called “Blueprints,” which focuses on (ideally) quick tasks on what you can do in RPG Architect. Rather than a longer form, Blueprints will be shorter — ideally 2-3 minutes at most. I’m hoping to release a couple a week, generally covering concepts or features that were recently added.
November added a lot of features that have been asked for, for quite a long time. Since we’ve hit the 1.0 milestone in terms of features, I figured it was time to go after everything else.
The first big item is that user interfaces now support touch interaction, if you enable it. In the System \ General section of the Database, you’ll see that there is now an “Enable User Interface Mouse Support” option. Checking this will allow for mouse/touch support on interactable user interfaces. It’s that easy.
There were numerous bugs that got repaired as well. We had some issues related to filters in User Interfaces, data loading/saving (an edge case, but still relevant), and even more severely, some issues with “bones” in Models not being supported — and the engine not loading at all for many people. Let’s talk about some of that.
There is a “new” compatibility mode that was added for test play. Exactly two users have had an issue wherein they’re on an older operating system or have a video card that doesn’t play nicely with Vulkan, which is the default renderer for FNA/SDL3. I’ve added an override in the Editor Settings (Edit \ Editor Settings \ Edit Settings) circled above, which will force the old OpenGL drivers to be used instead.
We had an issue with Bones, which I was stuck on for three days, only to learn that the same issue above was the cause. Vulkan only supports uniform buffers of up to 4KB. OpenGL goes a bit higher. We supported 128 bones, originally, which sat somewhere around 6KB. OpenGL was happy. Vulkan? Not at all. After stepping thru (and learning how to) the shader code and output, I was finally able to figure out what the issue was. I’ve dropped us (temporarily) to 80 bones, which should still be more than sufficient for most cases. When it gets patched back up (the proposed limit will be 16KB), I’ll update the number of supported bones. This will effectively give us support for up to around 300 bones, potentially. I’ll update everyone as we proceed along.
Another big add — Text Entry! I’ve been thinking about this one for a LONG time. How do we get it RIGHT the first time? I think I’m pretty happy with what we ended up getting. There are some upcoming tutorials on Text Entry User Interfaces, which will show off how they work. Please look forward to them — but in the meantime, the feature is in and LIVE. Type in your text manually or select it via the virtual keyboard, that you can define. There are still some quirks — it needs a little bit of work on a few edge cases, but I feel pretty happy with what we have now.
There have been some quirks with Linux users that I’ve tried to make my way thru on cleaning. I’ve (mostly?) fixed them, especially the ability to open multiple windows (I can’t help with Test Play — that’s an OS call that starts another process).
Overall, the month has been focused on adding a few features that help usability — and that have helped people working on other projects. We have users going crazy with new ideas, like platformers — or insane customization that can only really be done with something like RPG Architect, without the need for scripting. So, I’ve felt the need to support their work to get them the last “bit” that they needed to make things work.
I want to highlight another game coming to Steam thru RPG Architect — r u n a w a y s.
I honestly don’t know a whole lot about it — it describes itself as a “top down visual novel.” To me, it reminds me a lot like an old point and click adventure, especially with the focus on narrative and story. The art is beautifully done and sets a definitive mood and ambiance married to solid audio tracks. I’m excited for it!
One last thing — I made a recent decision to change things a bit with the “1.0 Game.” Rather than giving you a new game sample, with one new template… I’m going to be trying to give you three. Seems like it would be three times the work, right? Not the case.
My goal is to remake three versions of the same game, in three different play-styles. I have a storyline mostly built out with some good characters that are near and dear to my heart. If it becomes popular, I could/might continue it, but this is very much a “Chapter 1 and 2” to a story that could go much longer.
The three styles will not be too unfamiliar. One will be a dungeon crawler, as previously decided. The next will be similar to an 8 or 16-bit RPG borrowing its stylings from “Dragon Warrior.” The last will be a 2.5D 16-bit RPG borrowing its stylings from “Breath of Fire 3” or other Playstation-era games.
There will be a lot of asset reuse. The storyline will be the same. How you interact with the world will be different. The dungeon crawler will be a standard “blobber” with pretty simple movement and mechanics. The dungeons and the like will be pretty straight-forward, and the world map will be pretty simple. the 8/16-bit RPG and the 2.5D RPG will be pretty similar, but there will be a lack of “dimension” and high-end rendering in the prior. It will look and behave like a 2D RPG with a fixed camera. The battle system may look fairly similar to the blobber (which I want in the stylings of Lufia, if possible). The 2.5D RPG will show off more “advanced” features of the engine, like lighting, 3D, and camera controls. It will probably be the “most different” of them, but I haven’t 100% settled on it. The non-dungeon-crawlers will have a more “developed” overworld, town, and the like.
My goal is to first get the dungeon crawler working, creating new branding, and then spend 1-3 months at most each on the other two versions. They all “build” on each other, with the dungeon crawler being the simplest (and something that users are really interested in).
This will give us “new branding” that will create a cohesive RPG Architect “1.0” product that will be capable of being shipped. It also gives me the opportunity to make three different games and effectively have to see how capable the engine and editor are in three variations.
The games will all be released on Steam/platforms for free, to show off what RPG Architect can do. If there are requests to take it “beyond” the initial concepts, I will need to consider if the “full” versions end up becoming paid games or just more free marketing material. Time will tell!
That’s it for November. Things are progressing along nicely.
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!
