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[Feenicks]

Demo link: [here]
Steam/itch.io pages will be put here when I make them.
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Update 0: A general overview

So I've been working on a new game for a while, and while making a devlog sometime earlier in the process might have been a better idea, now's better than never.

After finishing up False Skies, I was itching to get out of the restrictions the OHR's default battle system has, both graphically and mechanically, and also wanted to do something that wasn't quite so color-restricted. One thing led to another, and now I'm at this point:




So what special stuff am I doing here? A list:

First, moves are chosen right before a party member or enemy acts, as opposed to being set up at the start of a turn. This allows both for more immediate actions to be made and for enemies to avoid the problem where they have attacks they use when weak that'd realistically never show up.
Second, enemy HP and statuses are shown above their sprite, so as to be a bit better at showing their current status in battle. I'm also showing a bit more stuff in general - the turn order is there in the top-left, and the power/target of a skill shows up in the attack detail box there while being selected.
Third, I can actually have a wide variety of statuses, as well as buffs/debuffs that have a lifespan and don't need checks to make sure they stay within reasonable bounds.


Fourth, party members can move around while in battle. This is done through attacks [most of which move the character forward], or being attacked [most of which move the character backward]. Where a character is in relation to everyone else affects how much damage they can do/take from most attacks, as well as how often they're targeted. The tankier characters generally have attacks that move them a healthily far way right, while the mages and archer of the eventual party don't move much at all, or even move back when using certain skills.

You can see just how far right [or left] a character will move based on the Move value in the top right of the attack detail box.
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In terms of general progression, there's your usual RPG staples of leveling up and equipment:

I'd show the equipment being selected, but there's currently a string used for some other purpose popping up here, thanks to me moving around some stuff a while back and not updating the string here yet. I'll get to talking about that stuff another time.

...but in addition to that, there's also the ability to learn new ways of modifying skills to make them more capable in various ways:

You'll gain these customization options both through leveling up and through events of various sorts. There's a currency used to upgrade these skills, obtained in chests and through fighting certain types of enemies, but it's all refundable. Some types of customization options aren't going to be compatible with others, and for that and some other reasons locking you into choices you make in the moment isn't something I want to do with this particular system.

As for the out of battle stuff:

Don't worry, the pause here isn't in-game; it's just due to how the gif recorded or something. In fact, this game runs at 60fps, but the OHR records gifs at 30 so that's not showing up here.

Enemies appear on the field, and while some wander around aimlessly or follow a set path others path towards the player. I currently don't have mechanics related to how they approach you or you approach them, but maybe I'll throw in preemptive attacks or ambushes based on that. No promises.



As for other mechanical stuff: I've set up a few terrain features. The translucent grass overlay known to anyone who's messed around with RPG Maker is here, and some other map features - short flat ledges you can hop over and icy floors, to name two types I'll probably use more than is healthy.

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And that's the initial overview done. There's a lot of other stuff I've set up, but I'll talk about them and show them off here another time. I'll probably talk about how things are set up behind the scenes at some point as well, but that's a bit much for a first post, you know?
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The current planned structure of the game is that of four large areas you can tackle in any order, plus an intro and conclusion area to set up and wrap things up respectively. I've worked on this for about a year and two months so far, and while I only have the intro dungeon completely done I have a lot of assets for other areas drawn up and general systems scripted out. I feel that further areas will get done a lot faster, seeing how part of the reason why things were going so slow in the first place was how I was running into new things I needed to get done constantly.

Whether I poke away at all four areas at once or focus on one at a time is still up in the air. One lets me focus a bit better, but the other lets me make sure each is at roughly the same level. I'll see how it goes.

I'm also not going to put an ETA on this right now. It won't come out this year, that's for sure, but hopefully it won't be like False Skies where I get to the end and somehow have another year of development to deal with.

[Alkaliii]

This looks great! I'm really digging the look of everything, keep it up!

[Bones]

Oh wow  this looks spectacular! The GUI certainly needs some work but the graphical style is fantastic. Kudos to your pixel artist. 

[Feenicks]

@Alkaliii: Thanks!
@Bones: The UI's something that I'm going to give another go-around once I'm further along in development, as it's something that's very easy to get dragged into the weeds by. As for who my pixel artist is... it's me :>.

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Update 1: March 2024, or a bunch of miscellaneous graphical and gameplay things I did in the past month



The normal OHR fadein/fadeout does a smooth blend into the fadeout color. That's not what I want, so I went and made my own that adds/subtracts RBG values from each palette entry until hitting the desired color. It feels more appropriate for the look I'm going for, and as a bonus has the player character stay in their walking animation while going through doors, which is fun.



The background clouds take four and a half minutes to loop so you're not getting a clean loop for this. Also: secret bonus debugging-related image

The cliffside dungeon battle background required a bunch of animation, due to 1) having the sea in the background and 2) having only part of the background animate while the rest stayed still felt a bit odd. There's ultimately three sections of the background, each which animates differently:
1: The clouds, which simply scroll by at a slow rate.
2: The sea, which does some line-by-line scrolling at slightly different rates, but loops reasonably quickly.
3: The grass, the parts of which that animate doing so by having two separate sets of moving grass, each separated out into three moveable layers, slightly moving back and forth at a fairly quick rate.

This took a fair amount of time and a few iterations to set up, but now that I've done it once I know what to do in advance when drawing the background.



Ignore those numbers.

Pitfalls! I'd originally set these up in a very brute-force method that didn't look right in a few instances and required specific mapping to hide the downsides to the implementation, so I ultimately went and changed it around.
The first iteration involved moving the map layer that held the hero/NPC graphics to right in front of whatever layer the pitfall layer was on. This worked, but in cases where there's not much space to work with [like in the gif] the illusion broke and I resorted to making the hero sprite invisible.
The second iteration works differently. It copies the hero sprite, splits it in two vertically, hides the original hero sprite, and moves the copied sprite parts onto the required layers as needed. There's probably some cases where it falls apart, but I haven't hit those yet.



I'll try not to abuse this too much.

So in the OHR there's three different types of activatable NPCs: ones that you walk up to and press the use key next to to activate, ones that activate when you walk into them/they walk into you, and ones that activate when you walk over them. I've got those three set up, but there's a fourth type that isn't represented: one that you can walk over, but need to press the use key next to in order to activate. There's probably some non-hidden item use cases for this, but for now that's what I'm using it for.




You'd think this is just a temple - and, well, it is. However, setting it up properly also required me to write a bit of script so as to bump sprites off of the default 20x20 grid for those pillars partially to the left and right. [note: it's generally easier to use NPCs as opposed to multiple tile layers for smaller objects you want to be able to walk in front of and behind, as those are automatically sorted by Y position].


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And that's that. I'll probably be finishing off this cliffside dungeon in the next week or two, but no promises.

[Tangleworm]

This looks really cool! You've really nailed the colourful fantasy aesthetic. I'll give the demo a shot later!

[Feenicks]

@Tangleworm: Thanks! The demo's pretty old at this point [and has a different, smaller resolution], but it does give a good overview of the battle mechanics.

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Update 2: April 2024, or what putting off setting up NPCs does


The palace, and a definitely not palatial interior. Need to put shadows in that second map; remind me to do that.

I've finally started setting up the main town, which involved drawing a few more exterior tiles and a bunch more interior decoration tiles. I could definitely draw a lot more decorative stuff, but I have a good few more townlike areas to make, and spreading out the decor-drawing work and putting stuff back in as needed feels better than doing that all in one go.

The town is mostly incidental areas and flavor, but seeing as the first area is a pretty linear and structured tutorial zone the ability to wander around for a bit feels warranted.



Speaking of those other towns, I've started drawing things [as much as filling out most of 5 16x10 tilesets can be considered 'starting'] for a second one, a sleepy fishing village. There's tiles for both the built-up and seaside areas, as well as ones for the rockier cliff areas further out, the latter of which I've already reused for another exterior area.

This is also the area that got me to stop dithering and set up the scripting needed for half walls, which are now being used in a bunch of places.



I also went and set up stairs that can cross both flat ground and other stairs. The first was pretty reasonable to set up; the second, not so much. There won't be too many places where stairs will be crossing over like this, but having the option on hand will definitely be useful.





One of the structural parts of the game is that the four main areas can be tackled in whatever order you want. While setting up enemies of different strength for each area is easy enough, just doing that feels a bit boring.

Thus, one of the other things I'm doing is having areas change up based on when you do them. For instance, if you do the area this ice cave is in first or second it will be a fairly short affair; if you do it third or fourth, the stairs in the first picture won't be there, and instead a more circuitous route has to be taken. How I do this sort of thing will change based on the area in question - for instance, the cliff area I've shown images of in the past sticks an interim map in between the first and second ones if you save it for the back half of the game - and is definitely a case-by-case thing.




I've had a map system in place for a while now, but one of the things I've been putting off was a way to flip between floors. Well, now there's one! The intro dungeon takes place over a few floors, but it's more a decorative element; later areas will have areas overlaid on top of one another, and this way things are kept a bit more manageable.



Two last battle things:
1: I set up another background animation type, a sort of heat haze thing. The actual effect I was aiming for [an interlaced sinusoidal-ish one] is something I'm going to go back and try again, but that can wait, and there's a few hot areas I might find use for this in.
2: In the effort to slowly improve the battle UI's look, I'm keeping the boxes each party member's HP is displayed in at a set width. It looks a bit more standard, has the potential to show more of the background, and obscures the fact that I'm going to have 9-character battles a few times; all good things.

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I've also done a few other things - drew a few more NPCs, actually set up a few NPCs, made something to visualize all the frames a party member has in battle so as to fix weapon positioning errors, mostly finished up that cliffside dungeon, found a few bugs to fix - but this post is already getting a bit long, so maybe I'll find another time to show those off.

[Pineapple]

This is looking really nice! And got me curious about False Skies, too. I might have to play that sometime.

I'm especially a fan of your character sprites here and how they're animated. What are you using this time instead of OHRRPGCE? Or are you using it still but extending it with new things?

[Feenicks]

@Pineapple: It's still the OHRRPGCE, though unlike False Skies I'm not using its default battle system or restricting myself to GBC-appropriate color limits. It's less an extension and more me using parts of the engine I'd put to the side for that game.

I'm still having to deal with some other limits of the engine, such as field/battle sprites only having 8 frames to work with, but splitting up the animation frames between multiple spritesets isn't the worst: