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TIGSource ForumsCommunityDevLogs<=|- Unnamed RPG -|=> (Experimenting with design and discipline)
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ProgramGamer
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« on: May 27, 2015, 05:41:02 PM »

PROJECT TITLE IS NOT FINALISED YET

    Hello all and welcome to this devlog! Before I begin, I'd like to say something about what this project is, where it's going and what to expect from it, so here it goes!

   A while ago, as you all know, Ludum Dare 32 happened. What you may not know however is that I, ProgramGamer, was part of it for the first serious time. And in just two days I made a game exponentially better than anything I'd done before, exceeding all of my expectations and going beyond my wildest dreams. It wasn't really an exceptional game even if you consider just an eighth of the other 3000 other entries, but to me it was almost magic, because I'd finally finished a project! I'd gotten to see what my true potential was, and it was shining brilliantly in my face because is was something I was proud of and willing to show to my friends and family. And they liked it! I brought a controller to school and made my friends try it out for fun, and we had a good time with it. This was a huge motivator for me as you can imagine, and I figured that now I'd finally be able to start and finish a project by myself, because now I had proof that I was able to do it and the motivation of creating something even better than my first game, which turned out to be pretty cool according to me.

    So I started plans for a little roguelike inspired by the platformer mechanics of my LD entry. I was drawing sketches, planning gameplay ideas and even starting to program a little prototype, which you might have seen glimpses of if you follow the beautiful fails thread. Point is I was making some progress, but motivation started to fade again. I was making less and less sketches and I was opening GM:S less and less often. I'd even started refining an idea I'd had for an RPG a couple of months ago, until I finally caught myself doing exactly what I thought I was freed from. Procrastinating due to lack of motivation. But instead of panicking like a headless chicken, I decided to collect myself and think. Something had gone wrong, or something that worked for me in LD was no longer having an effect on me. And from what I gathered, motivation fades naturally over time, and Ludum Dare worked because I had so little of it. So I decided to start anew and test out a few theories about things that might help circumvent this motivation decline.

    First: I must have a plan. It worked for my LD game, so it must work for other projects as well. Having a clear idea of what must be done next and a list of all the things that are going to be in the game is going to be vital, or at least very important to motivating myself to keep going.

    Second: I must have a schedule. I will work on the game a set amount of time per week every week until the project is done or unless the circumstances dictate it as impossible. This one requires a lot of self-discipline, and admittedly it is going to be the greatest hurdle to cross on my way to success, but if I'm ever going to make a career in this field I'm going to need to push myself beyond my limits constantly.

    Third: I must post about the game every weekend. This is kind of where you come in. I want to have a decent following so that I feel some pressure to keep going on the game, and I hope that it will keep me going in the harder times of making this game. It will also help whenever I want to release the game if I have a certain fan base from the get-go.

    So that's it. This project and devlog are here because I want to train myself to stay motivated and focused on a single project, and I want the help of the people reading this. If you're willing to give feedback or provide advice it's great, but if you just want to read it's perfectly fine as well. Ignoring this post entirely is also an option, albeit a less pleasant one for me. Anyways, back to the actual game now!  Grin


    So, what is this game and what is it even about? Let me answer that question right away because you just spent ten minutes reading a wall of text.

    (insert name of game here) is an RPG with flavors of strategy added to make the game more interesting and not just a boring turn based FF clone. I have no setting or theme set in stone yet, though I'm probably going to go for a "goofy medieval fantasy adventure" type of thing. It's gonna have light story elements, but I'm not expecting to write a whole script for the game, and the fiction will mostly serve as filler and context for the mechanics. The overworld segments are going to play like any old RPG, with towns and mountains and chocobos an arbitrary means of transportation. However, The combat segments are where the game will shine the brightest. Battles will be turn based with a group of enemies facing your party of fighters on a tiled grid. Each turn you will use either a cursor or the mouse to select units and tell them what to do. Each unit can only accomplish one action per turn, whether it be attacking, defending or moving. When the player's turn is over, the A.I. will make the enemies do their thing and end the turn again. Victory happens when all creatures on the opposite end of the screen are defeated. There will be some random battles, but they will be short at best and the game will have NPCs as a main method of presenting challenge. I also want the game to have a focus on minimalist, so your stats will start out as very basic, often 0 and 1, except for health, mana and luck, which will start as slightly higher, albeit still kind of lame numbers. I also want to eliminate leveling almost entirely, though I'd like to keep an XP meter as a metaphor for affinity, which would increase by percentage and would stop increasing at 100%, at which point the character gains some small but important stat bonus. Most equipment will also switch stats around instead of providing a strict benefit to a character.

    I have made a diagram of what I plan on putting in the game as a starting point for pre-production. You can view it bellow.


    Anyways, I think I'm about done talking about this for tonight. I'll post some more whenever I have something new I want to talk about, like maybe what the hell I'm talking about with my retarder battle system. And thank you for reading this post all the way through, because if you actually did, you deserve a cookie! Not that I have one to give out though...  Sad

    If you have feedback to provide or want to ask a question, don't hesitate and post away, I will almost always answer within, like, a month or so (but seriously I'm always on the forum so it should be less than that). Goodnight!
« Last Edit: June 24, 2015, 04:38:11 PM by ProgramGamer » Logged

Joh
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« Reply #1 on: May 28, 2015, 07:37:57 AM »

Well, Ill admit im still not sure what you're making, well at the very least Im not sure I understand your battle system. But you seem to be trying bold things, looking foward to see where it goes. Good luck!

Quote
So that's it. This project and devlog are here because I want to train myself to stay motivated and focused on a single project, and I want the help of the people reading this. If you're willing to give feedback or provide advice it's great, but if you just want to read it's perfectly fine as well. Ignoring this post entirely is also an option, albeit a less pleasant one for me. Anyways, back to the actual game now!  Grin

Going through a project myself and having had support, it really helps. I hope this helps you too. You'll still need much discipline though, we (me for now) can't save you from the harsh reality coding can be.
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ProgramGamer
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« Reply #2 on: May 28, 2015, 08:57:16 AM »

Yeah, I wrote this whole thing last night and I was a little tired. I'll clear things up later and I'll post some mockups to show how the battle system actually works.

Also thanks, I'll check your devlog and see what it's all about!
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ProgramGamer
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« Reply #3 on: May 29, 2015, 06:19:52 PM »

    Alright, here's the blog post to explain what the actual chocolate fudge I'm talking about with my battle system.

    Basically, you and your enemies each get a 3x4 grid of tiles for the purpose of positioning your units/characters. You each take turns doing things like attacking, defending, moving or using items. When it's your turn, you need to order your party members to act individually. Each character gets one action per turn, and once you've done something with everyone, the turn ends, and your enemies get to do things as well!


    As you can see, it kind of works like Scrolls, but each unit attacks when you want, and not in a predetermined order.

    Now, I'd like to talk about stats and how I'm going to try and make them as basic and minimal as possible.

    Basically, each character will start out with very low stats, and they're not going to go up much throughout the game. The meat of change in statistics will be pieces of equipment that switch stats around. For an example, you might have a ring that cuts all of your Mana in favor of giving you the ability to attack multiple times. Or, you could have a piece of armor that cuts your health but gives you crazy defense, making you invincible against certain enemies, but super brittle against other ones. This replaces your traditional and boring leveling system with something that forces you to explore gameplay elements when entering new areas full of goons you've never battled before. I'll also try to make the story as non-linear as possible, so as to keep exploration a big part of the world building and to make it so that you're not just being fed gameplay mechanics each town.

    You'll also notice that I've included an XP stat in that doodle down there. It's expressed in percentage, and it doesn't reset when you get to 100%. This is kind of a metaphor for that character being accustomed to your other party members and learning to fight more efficiently among them. I only plan on giving a small buff upon reaching 100%, but I could do it a little more laddered with some boosts appearing at each 20 or 50 percent.


    So that's it for tonight's update. Hope that clears up some of the confusion of the first post and that you had fun reading! See you in the next one, where I'll probably talk a bit more about the technical aspect of things, aka programming babble.
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b∀ kkusa
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« Reply #4 on: May 29, 2015, 08:02:17 PM »

Is it Tintin Objectif Lune?
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ProgramGamer
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« Reply #5 on: May 30, 2015, 04:06:29 AM »

Is it Tintin Objectif Lune?

It sure is! I'm using the book as a support for my paper when I draw.
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ProgramGamer
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« Reply #6 on: June 02, 2015, 07:47:40 AM »

Bump for prime time visibility since I update this at night. Hope you don't mind Smiley
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« Reply #7 on: June 22, 2015, 09:49:48 AM »

I'm updating this soon with live gameplay footage from a crappy pre-alpha prototype.
This is how indies generate #Hype right?
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« Reply #8 on: June 24, 2015, 03:13:49 PM »


I wasn't lying now was I Smiley

First off, I'd like to talk about the technical aspect of this whole thing cause it's not as simple as it looks to make an rpg with game maker. You have to mess with instance activates/deactivates and it's pretty messy and ugly, but it works well enough that I'm using it.

So the way that this is setup is pretty simple. Normal gameplay features the player/party leader walking around and doing stuff. When an enemy is encountered, it creates an instance of obj_battle, which deactivates everything except the most basic and necessary objects (like the camera and controller instances). It then creates all the battle instances (allies, enemies and cursor) at their appropriate place. And when that battle instance gets deleted, it deletes all the active objects again and reactivates the overworld objects, effectively creating a state machine that isolates the two main gameplay phases.

Now, the way that battles actually work is relatively simple and intuitive. On your turn you can either move your character or attack, but since the enemy does nothing it acts as if you can do whatever you want anytime. However, what I discovered while implementing this is that finding instances is unexpectedly tough with game maker, so I had to make a few dedicated function and instances to find enemy instances that are facing you. It works for now, but I'm going to re-write everything later because it looks like a tornado aftermath in my code right now and I'm not dealing with that longer than I have to. Also, they need to be usable by both sides of the board, which right now they don't allow.

The animations themselves were easy enough, but I had to hack a lot of alarms in there to make it work, and I don't know how I'd make them behave otherwise. I'll work on that though, and I know I'll find a solution.

So that concludes this little half ass'd post about an early build of my game. Criticism is always welcome, especially on my post writing. I have no idea how to structure these things...
« Last Edit: March 27, 2016, 02:48:05 PM by ProgramGamer » Logged

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« Reply #9 on: June 25, 2015, 10:41:12 AM »

Your post writing is just fine, but the motion for the player looks really stiff.
I forget what it's called, but I use this thing for speed that makes stuff move really smooth like, since I can't put it to words i'll just show you:
Code:
Xspeed += (targetXspeed - Xspeed)/10
x += Xspeed
What this does is every step it makes the current speed move a tenth of it's distance to the target speed, making it slow down near the end. Instead of this:
Code:
x += 5
Which would just make the speed constant and stiff
Hope I explained that good enough...
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Chris MacAdam
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« Reply #10 on: June 25, 2015, 10:54:27 AM »

The battle system looks like it can be pretty cool once you have some more work done with it. It reminds me of megaman battle network, I always liked the way they did the fighting in those games. You might consider having a range with the melee weapons then? Also consider having weapons that would do AOE damage.
Good luck though, 'simple' RPG's can get out of hand quick. Looking forward to any progress!
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« Reply #11 on: June 25, 2015, 11:03:04 AM »

Looks interisting.. keep it up!
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ProgramGamer
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« Reply #12 on: June 25, 2015, 12:50:03 PM »

@Canned Turkey
Yeah, the movement is stiff, but it's because I'm not accelerating using variables, I'm interpolating between two locations represented by a vector. I could make it accelerate towards max velocity on that vector, but for now it travels whatever distance it wants in a set time interval of 20 frames. Twice that, because back and forth.

@Chris MacAdam
Thanks! Surprisingly, I never played the Battle Network games, so any resemblance is coincidental actually. And don't worry, there's going to be plenty of variety between weapons and abilities, I have many ides stockpiled in my brain!

@Dr.Electro
Thanks, I definitely will! :D
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ProgramGamer
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« Reply #13 on: July 24, 2015, 05:34:51 PM »

Hey guys, long time no see! Now's the time for a little update!  Waaagh!

So, in the last few weeks, I haven't worked a whole lot on the game itself. I've mostly been at my actual day job making money for uni, but I've also started taking the necessary steps to start up a business! This of course will involve a lot (A LOT.) of paperwork, but the end result of "being able to publish games yourself" obviously trumps that. I also have a lot of support locally to do that, which is even better!  Grin

So, about the game. In the last few month (?) I've mostly just implemented easing functions, but even just that helps a whole lot with the "stiffness" of the game. Movements look much smoother, and the functions I'm using are so versatile that I could use them for a literal plethora of things. I'll admit right now that I don't know what a literal plethora looks like. But basically, instead of jerking to a start and stop, objects can now follow a nice little curved acceleration/deceleration cycle to interpolate between two locations. Let me illustrate:

Before:


After:


Also, I've made a doodle of what the main villain might look like. I'm still brainstorming story and theme ideas, so this may change at any time, but I just wanted to give you guys a little teaser Grin



Anyways, see you next time for the next real update: Text boxes!!!
« Last Edit: August 08, 2015, 05:18:17 AM by ProgramGamer » Logged

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« Reply #14 on: August 08, 2015, 07:07:51 AM »

I refined the character a bit more, and I'm pretty happy with the results! I'm also thinking about porting everything to C++ with SDL2. I think that would take a lot of time though, so tell me what you think.
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« Reply #15 on: August 08, 2015, 03:30:36 PM »

pretty cute for a villain.
I like that you are not going for a standard leveling system, forcing the player to think about his options.
I don't understand the grid based combat, have you made a protoype of it yet? is it fun?
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« Reply #16 on: August 08, 2015, 04:27:39 PM »

Thanks, I really wanted to strike that balance between cute and evil looking. I spent quite a while making out exactly what made her look good that way. It was a great artist's exercise!

And yeah, I'm really going for something different and not like other RPGs' out there. I don't really have a prototype, but I could try setting something up with my friends like a pen and paper kind of thing. And I admit that it would probably be a good idea to test out mechanics that way before actually spending the time to put them in the game Tongue
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« Reply #17 on: August 10, 2015, 12:09:20 PM »

That moment when you find a similar game to yours in development at the same time...
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pauldrongames/pauldron-shield-of-the-king
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« Reply #18 on: August 10, 2015, 12:16:43 PM »

That moment when you find a similar game to yours in development at the same time...
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pauldrongames/pauldron-shield-of-the-king
Sad

Don't worry about other projects that might have similarities. Just work on your own game. Create and build what YOU want to play. If you put your heart into it, it will be fun and others will like it too.
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« Reply #19 on: August 27, 2015, 05:21:08 AM »

I can only agree. It might be similar, but it won't be your game. don't give up! just by continuing, you will have tons of new ideas that will make your game unique.
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