Untitled RPG Project

[Hugues Ross]

I scrapped the whole idea of any kind of "editor" soon after realising I was spending considerably more time and energy on that, than the actual game

That's a wise call. I've had more than a couple projects die to that curse, which is why I held back for a couple years before I decided it was absolutely necessary.

[Hugues Ross]

This is gonna be a pretty short (Future me: "lmao") update, but things are going well. I finished the conversion of actors to the new type system and got them working in-game! At this point, I could make a video but it'd be the same thing I posted in August of...I'm sorry, 2022?!

Man. I need to get back to working on the game parts of the game, huh?

Progress In Screenshots
I don't have a fresh gameplay video today, but I do have screenshots of how the level editor has progressed:



First, another improvement over Tiled! Since the new level editor runs inside of the engine, it's easy to make actors render in the map we're editing. As you can see, it's still little glitchy--the editor rendering doesn't use a depth buffer, so objects render over tiles. There's room for improvement.

Eagle-eyed readers may have already noticed: There's a wall missing. I've been replaying old RPGs for inspiration lately, and wrapped up Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga (one of my childhood favorites) a couple weeks ago. While playing, I noticed how readable the environments were, depth-wise.

The devs used several tricks to improve clarity, but one of the simplest was removing the front wall in interior scenes. Instead, the room ends in a sort of cross-section view. It's a simple but effective detail, and I found it fixed some of my game's readability issues.

The illusion breaks when a map has many twists and turns...so the devs paired this by assembling their maps out of small rooms with simple footprints. This too makes a lot of sense! I started recreating my old map, but this time breaking it into small, simple pieces. So far, so good.



With that thoughtful talk about art direction & level structure out of the way, popups!



I spent yesterday overhauling the asset picker. I didn't do everything I had planned for it, but it looks much better than before. In particular, I spent quite a while making it behave as a proper dropdown rather than a button that opens a dialog. Making a control that always lives on top of the UI tree but remains connected to a control within the tree was more challenging than expected, but it worked out and I can re-use it in the game later.

But What's Up With The New Stuff In That Screenshot?
heheh...I didn't specify how long it took to convert the actors, did I?

It's time for another confession: I may have called the conversion of actors 'done' and started a 3rd rework of sorts. To be fair, the task was done this time! Still, it may be another couple months before we finish playing catch-up. And it's all because of the level structure changes.

While working on the vertical slice of the game in...2022...I implemented the puzzle mechanics in a very simple way: Each map in the game had a script associated with it for managing complex interactions between objects. In other words, the water level shifts had to be partially hard-coded, or at least 'hard-configured', per map.

The actor rework was the best opportunity to change this pattern, since I was already re-impementing those mechanics. I built a component system for maps, allowing mechanics to be added and configured in the level editor. Then, the level design changes exposed a problem: If a dungeon is broken into lots of small maps, rather than one big map per floor...how do we manage the state of a puzzle across that floor?

I could (ab)use quest flags for this, but I have bigger plans in store--a high level structure for in-game locations. I'm still in the process of designing it, but here's the gist of it:

Regions are locations in the world. A town or a dungeon is a region. They'll have a title card that pops up when the player enters the first time. They'll also hold map groups.

If a region is a dungeon, then a map group is a floor of that dungeon (or any other set of connected maps). This lets me section off puzzle mechanics to parts of a region, and even lets me see adjacent maps while doing level design work. It'll fit well with my new approach to map design!

I also plan to use the positions of maps within a group to make smoother transitions. It'd be nice if rooms felt like part of the same space, as they are in modern 3d games. We'll see how it goes.

EDIT: By the way, I tried a different approach to editing this post compared to previous ones. If you noticed a difference, let me know what you think.

[zingo]

It's wonderful to know this thing is still alive n' kickin

Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga is on my list of "to complete" games. Back in the day, (when I had an even shorter attention span than I do now), I'd often begin an RPG, and then...just sort of...lose all interest in it about halfway through (or sooner). At the moment, I'm playing the classic "Breath of Fire" series again, and am currently on the fourth title.

I like your concepts of "Regions" and "Map Groups". It kind of gives me an idea of how I may go about my own map/area designs (admittedly, I haven't yet given much thought to this...in fact, I've been rather distracted with real life as of late, and haven't had time for much else ).

It seems that you've really been plugging away on that editor...perhaps it would be a good idea to eventually work some more on the actual "game part" of the...game.

Thank you for the update, and I'm looking forward to the next one (fingers crossed for some video). Keep at it, and stay healthy

[Hugues Ross]

Thankfully, the game parts are getting there. I'm not quite done yet, but most of the map I had to throw away is back in working order--I'll definitely be working on new content before the end of the summer.

[Hugues Ross]

I’m already back, for two reasons: One, I’ve finished my initial work on regions. And second, because this is a convenient excuse to re-sync my posting schedule with the calendar month.

Let’s start off on the right foot–a (several months late ) demo video showing where we’re at with the editor! Here’s what I’ve got, warts and all!

Watch it here

Yeah, that’s a lotta warts. But I can work with what I’ve got today, and that’s what matters.

In the ‘game’ parts of the demo, you can also see some basic area titlecards. Those came courtesy of the new system as well, though they’re a tad underwhelming. Like the editor, they’ll improve with time.


What’s Left?
As you can see, a sizeable chunk of the stuff I broke has been put back in working order–and better than ever. But some broken pieces remain.

First on the list is the save system. It should come as no surprise that replacing all of the game’s low-level data structures and fundamentally restructuring ‘maps’ as a concept made it stop working, but at this point the game has stabilized enough to give it an update.

While I’m at it, I also plan to finish implementing the save feature. You might recall that "a while back" I mused about how to handle saving the game. I have some thoughts about this that I plan to put into action, in hopes of coming away with finished saving / loading process. Like the titlecards, this will be another little piece of real progress on the game.

After that…it’s mostly little things that are broken. I think the map skills need a fix-up pass, but I don’t expect them to change very much. I could try giving them more polish though–I’m certainly tempted. The maps from past demo videos are broken as well, but since I have a real map now I’m not sure if I really want to bother remaking them. Let’s call them a ‘maybe’.

And then? I think that’s it for broken stuff (bugs in my video notwithstanding ). I expect that even if saves take a while to nail down, we’ll be back to real progress well before the end of Autumn. Hell, if I’m lucky maybe I’ll have saves done before then! (Don’t count on it)

--

I still haven’t made much progress on the art front. My recovery has helped immensely with pushing buttons–hence getting back into playing RPGs as I mentioned last time–but stuff with more wrist movement such as mouse & tablet usage is still a bit rough. That’s not to say I’m unable to draw, I just can’t do it as often or as long as I’d like.

It’s slowing things down a lot, and making it especially hard to just…start working. I think some of it is in my head though, I need to get back in the mindset of starting bits of art throughout the day when I have the energy and just accepting that I won’t finish the piece in that session. It’s gradually becoming more of a priority though, so I need to keep de-rusting and start making forward progress or it may become a bigger roadblock as maps start coming together.

In the meantime, I may as well share some sketching from last month. Nothing major, but there’s no sense holding it back!

I wanted to play around with the style of leaves Golden Sun uses for deciduous trees, mixing colors with strong contrast together. I wound up with a different result, but a cool one nonetheless:

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This one was some environment sketching for the game, I'm not happy with the whole thing but I think the concentric circles are staying:



So yeah, finally sat down to make a vid. It's a little underwhelming, but I think it shows some of the progress I've been making. Ironically, I couldn't showcase cross-map puzzles (which do work), because some of my initial screwing around with the save system broke map transitions...and I'm far too lazy to stash my changes or switch off my feature branch

Until next month!

[Hugues Ross]

Well, summer's almost over and I'm still not done with all the tech bits...August was a bit of a mess all around irl, and as a result I didn't get the save system finished. I've made a little bit of progress on it though, so I'm gonna write a little about where I want to go with it.

Where Am I Now?
Let's start with what does work at this point. Saving & loading, on a technical level, is around 90% there. I'm not loading the state of actors when you enter a map at the moment, but I am recording it. To make that happen, I leveraged the type system pretty heavily: I can mark any property in a schema as 'persistent', and use that to produce a sparse deep copy of that schema. That means that even if an actor doesn't have any persistent data, a behavior or other component within it can still be saved & loaded without affecting the rest of its properties or requiring any special marker on its parent. And of course, I can do the same thing to region/group/map data as well--this part works just fine already!

The game now has a basic autosave. The game makes an autosave on every map transition, and maintains 3 save files for this purpose: One for the last map you entered, one for the last group, and one for the last region. The result is being able to load to not just the start of the current map, but also the start of a floor, or the whole dungeon, without making any manual saves yourself. To do that, I also had to implement the concept of a 'save file' that you load instead of just saving and loading to a hard-coded location

Of course, having multiple saves means needing to choose a save to load, so I also made a nice lil' menu for that:

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nil is my favorite map in the game

It's a WIP bit of UI that's largely comprised of placeholder assets, but it's functional and the overall layout of info is basically where I want it. Rough month aside, I still managed to make some pretty good progress. But it's not enough for me, oh no.

Where Are We Heading?
When I first implemented saves, I basically just put an option in the menu to save wherever because it was the easiest way to do it. That was never my long-term plan, though.

Originally, the goal was something almost entirely driven by autosaves, but after some thinking I've decided on something that mixes an aggressive autosave with regular ol' save points.

Making a 'Pit Stop' in the Dungeon
Why did I warm up on save points? Honestly, I'm not entirely sure myself. But I think my current attraction comes from a couple of disconnected thoughts. First off, I think there's a certain feeling of 'solidity' that comes from a manual save. It's mostly psychological, but thinking "Yes, I have created a save file. My data is fine" offers a sense of comfort that a little floppy disk icon in the corner doesn't. If I don't want the player to save anywhere though, that means save points--or some other restriction on when & where saving is allowed.

The other relates to another piece of design that I've been planning. I have some interesting combat abilities planned for later in the game, but frankly they're just too good. And due to their nature, that goodness can't really be changed--so instead I've decided to let some abilities have limited charges. I'm not fully jumping on the FF1/FF3/early D&D 'limited spellcasts per day' train, but I think giving some really cool moves a limit on uses will let me make some really busted stuff without it being the only thing a player would ever pick--it becomes a choice of raw power vs reliability. But that kind of system requires regular access to 'refills', usually via resting in an inn. That brought to mind the tents from the early Final Fantasy games, which allow the player to rest on the world map or at a save point. Then I got a little carried away and mashed the concepts into an amalgamation: Resting is a save point

By visiting an inn, or camping out in certain designated spots, the player gets access to an alternate menu with access to some options that would be removed from the main menu--mainly job/ability switching and saving. This turns campsites into not just a heal, but an opportunity to experiment with your party build or prepare for an upcoming boss fight. With a built-in save point and a free heal, there's no worries related to switching between jobs with different hp/mp caps either--you'll always walk away at full power. And if the new setup is bad and you die? You have the option to reload right back into the customization menu. On paper, I think it sounds pretty nice.

This also gives an opportunity for the player to get to know the characters a little better. I'm thinking it would be nice to have a little scene of the characters eating, talking, chilling out, etc at each resting spot. It offers a little window into the hobbies, personalities, and relationships of the characters that might not come up as often in the script.

I'm not planning to fully implement this part, but I would like the menu to work at least.

What Happens When You Fail?
Currently, when you die you go back to the title screen. And when you softlock a puzzle? Whoops, guess you gotta close and reopen the game! I want to fix both of these issues while I'm on the topic of saves.

The latter is super easy--with the new dungeon structure full of tiny maps, it should be pretty easy to add a button that reloads the last autosave and drops you back at the entrance of the room. That choice keeps paying dividends!

For the former, I'm still thinking about exactly what I want to offer the player--reloading is an obvious one, but I'm also considering a button to retry the fight as well. It should be pretty easy to do, I just need to actually do it. Beyond that, I'm considering offering some options for making the fight easier if you've failed it enough times. That requires some tracking across saves to work properly though, so I'm still thinking about how to handle that. I'll probably skip that last option for now, but keep it in mind for the future.

Finally, 'Save Slots'
Here's another part I don't plan on implementing in this pass. The main issue with the system above is that managing multiple playthroughs is going to be nasty. For that reason, I intend to have a higher-level set of 'profiles' the player can use for each playthrough. When they start a new game, they pick a profile they're not using (or delete an existing one) and the game will use that to organize their saves. It's not super important in the short term though, that's more the kind of thing I would probably do once I have a finished demo.

Anyway, that's all for now. I need to get back to finishing this stuff!

[Hugues Ross]

Real quick one this time, since last month's update basically covered all of the save stuff and I spent most of last month wrapping that up. Instead, here are a couple of small-ish visual improvements I've been working on!

First, I finally bit the bullet and decoupled the UI resolution from the game resolution. This will make the old-school purists mad, but a higher-res UI makes it easier to support a wider variety of fonts and improve the readability of the text. That also means there's a new font in town:

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The rendering ain't perfect (I'm not doing any adjustments to pixel alignment when rendering my UI, because I'm too lazy to implement it yet. It'll happen), but it's a pretty big change if you compare with the screenshot in the last post!



But more importantly, the water looks a little bit different:

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Video here if you want to see it in motion

This took a while, and it's not 100% 'finished' in my opinion, but it's a massive improvement from the old water in my opinion. Honestly, I've been getting pretty tired of saying "everything is placeholders" over and over again--I wanted something actually close to shippable, and I think the new water fits that bill nicely. I had to refactor the tilemap rendering to make it work though, which means I still need to update a couple of the more advanced features still (animated tiles & tile-attached FX).

That'll take a little while, but once they're working it's full steam ahead on this dungeon! Very excited to be finally getting back to the game-y bits of the game after this extended detour.

[zingo]

Whew, that's a lot to unpack. Looks like you're really going full throttle now. I've tinkered a bit with some data serializing libraries, but haven't given a lot of real consideration to a full-fledged save system... yet. I agree there's something to be said for traditional "save points"/"save rooms"/"save items". It's a very clear representation for the player that they've made it somewhere in the adventure, and that whatever comes next, there's a lot of comfort in knowing one can always return to some specific, previous state (that is, unless one forgot/didn't bother to save, and then... well, that's why it's also very nice having "quick saves" and "auto saves").

For the moment, progress on my own project has all but halted. However, looking at your water, I've given much thought as to whether or not I'm going to use some sort of "distortion" shader for any liquid FX, or simply utilize animated tiles/graphics (or some combination). There's so many "post processing" FX that I want to add, but I'm afraid shaders are still a complete mystery to me. All I've ever managed to do is slightly modify what others have already made, and doing so sort of makes the whole thing feel kind of... "disingenuous", perhaps is the word.

Anyhow... thank you so much for sharing these updates It's fantastic knowing that you're still at it. Although, there is one burning question that still remains (and not to press the issue or anything), but when will you be revealing the actual title? To be honest, I've been seeing this as "Untitled RPG" for so long now, it's almost become the "official" title in my mind.

Have a wonderful day, and keep up the great work. Looking forward to whatever you're up to next.

[Hugues Ross]

However, looking at your water, I've given much thought as to whether or not I'm going to use some sort of "distortion" shader for any liquid FX, or simply utilize animated tiles/graphics (or some combination). There's so many "post processing" FX that I want to add, but I'm afraid shaders are still a complete mystery to me. All I've ever managed to do is slightly modify what others have already made, and doing so sort of makes the whole thing feel kind of... "disingenuous", perhaps is the word.

In the even that you decide to go the shaders route (which is by no means necessary), one thing that can help for prototyping is...Blender, of all things. If you know your way around the program, you can make a 'mockup' version of the shader you want using material nodes, which are much quicker & easier to mess around with than raw GLSL code. That's basically what I did for the water--I spent a few days making a mockup in blender and tweaking the math until it did what I wanted, then rewrote it as a GLSL shader for use in game.

It wasn't a perfect conversion, but it worked pretty well.

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As far as the name is concerned, I've been questioning the current title lately but I will try to reveal more about the project, including a working title, soonish. I'd like to get that all done before the end of the year, but with 2 months left on the calendar I'm not sure if it'll happen on time.

[zingo]

In the even that you decide to go the shaders route (which is by no means necessary), one thing that can help for prototyping is...Blender, of all things. If you know your way around the program, you can make a 'mockup' version of the shader you want using material nodes, which are much quicker & easier to mess around with than raw GLSL code. That's basically what I did for the water--I spent a few days making a mockup in blender and tweaking the math until it did what I wanted, then rewrote it as a GLSL shader for use in game.

It wasn't a perfect conversion, but it worked pretty well.

I've messed about with Blender some... which I believe uses Python. In fact, I may eventually create my sprites in Blender. It's not so much that I don't have a general idea of what I'd like the final visual result to be... more so, that I'm just rubbish at maths, and in particular vectors, matrices, and trignometry (which are kind of important for shaders). I had an honest and determined go at attempting to improve my skills in these areas... but didn't have much success My mind just isn't "oriented" that way (one could say my brain is "right-dominant"... mostly). That said, I've played plenty of games that may not have been much to look at far as more advanced visual FX, but were still very engaging and memorable.

...but I digress. It's good to see a bit of concept art from you as well, and a glance at what I presume is some sort of dungeon. Also, it looks like "legs" is still in action there. Thank you for taking the time to respond to my ramblings, as well. Maybe, if you're up for it, you could provide a short video to show off the water (or any other nifty FX)

Strange to think that this year is almost gone by. Doesn't seem like it, really. Take care for now, and thanks again.