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[Alkaliii]

itch.io | tumblr | discord | website

overworld

⊝ introduction

• So it’s been a while since I started this project. It’s kinda fleshed out so now I want to talk about it a bit more about it than just tidbits on Twitter. I’d like to present to you, the turn-based JRPG-inspired game, pearlessential.
  
  I’m not very consistent at all. So for now, I I’ll try and update this thread when big things happen.
  

⊝ current status

• Major Systems, Mechanics, Modes: Incomplete

|| Latest SMM: Quest System

• Major Art: Incomplete

|| Latest Art: Table Prop

• Major Areas: Incomplete

|| Latest Area: Periyah Waterworks

⊝ about

• pearlessential is an exploration game, you play with a team of seven ‘Divers’ tasked with deconstructing the ‘Domain’, Euphoria. To do this you need to find ‘Nodes’ and stabilise them using pearls. You can obtain pearls from fighting beasts. Beasts are confronted and fought in turn-based battles. That's pretty much the basics.
  

⊜ main mechanics

• In the game, you can equip the playable characters with a variety of techniques (skills), weapons, and equipment. All of which will be obtained by exploring Euphoria.
  

a mockup of character configuration

• No EXP or Character Levels. The incentive to battle is pearls, which you need to complete the game objective. This is my janky attempt to reduce the amount of apparent grind. I have a feeling I just transferred it to a different system but let's hope it goes well
  
  The battles really aren’t anything fancy, You choose a skill, choose who to use it on, and watch as numbers appear and a bar goes up or down. There is a slight bit of resource management but winning will give you some back to an extent. The age-old weakness and resistance system makes an appearance as well as other favourites like criticals, missing, status effects, environmental states, and a speed-based turn order… speaking of speed everything that bites has seven attributes, so do the player characters.
  

combat

• Attributes are the lifeblood of the game, the higher they are the better, and they influence a good chunk of things that occur in the game. The player can distribute points to four of the seven attributes (Speed, Strength, Defence, and Magoi), while the three ‘hidden’ attributes (Charisma, Luck, Accuracy) can be manipulated by equipment bonuses. Attribute Augmentation Points? They are obtained by reading books you find throughout the world, thanks to the player's computer assistant that converts data into the magical scientific means needed to augment your abilities quickly.
  
  I want some cool stuff to exist on the overworld but I’m still planning and deciding on it, I am aiming for something Zelda-like, but it’s been tough since I’m kind of out of my element. Fishing minigame is planned for sure.
  
  I guess I also have plans for a story but writing is super hard… so hard I’m kind of considering making engagement with the story optional.
  

⊝ technique

• I don’t think I employ any special techniques. Most of the code is really jank, and although it looks nice I feel like I brute force the art sometimes. You might be wondering about the unique palette that has splashes of colour here and there. No, this is not a game about restoring colour to the world. I just wanted to scratch that limited palette itch you get from Gameboy games.
  

⊝ tools

• Godot Engine
  VSCodium
  Vector Art Program that shall not be named
  XP-PEN Deco 01 v2
  

⊝ inspirations

• The game takes a bit of inspiration from Octopath Traveller as it was what initially spurred me on to make it. I also look to others in the genre like Final Fantasy (everything below 7) and Pokemon (gen 1-4). Outside of JRPGs/Turn-based games, I take inspiration from The Legend of Zelda (all of em are good) and a Short Hike.
  
  Some people also inspire me. Mostly indie devs that have achieved great success like Daisuke Amaya, Toby Fox, and Erix Barone. My goal is to get 1000 people to play my game, but I have to finish it first before even considering that haha.
  

contents:::

• Debut (this post)
• Devlog 1
• Devlog 2
• Devlog 3 (NEW!)

[Alkaliii]

Feburary, 2023

itch.io | tumblr | discord | website

a mockup of the overworld

• It has been a bit since I last posted here. Looking at it now, a lot of changes have happened, so here is an update. This is pretty long, and I do apologize. Maybe future me will be so kind as to update more frequently?
  

Small, Tedious Changes and Additions:

- Lots of UI art, Not much UI programming
- Trying to write the entire story
- Sort of refactored the entire battle system so the code was cleaner
- Made art for a crate
- Gave Player the ability to push crates
- Removed the ability to push crates
- Made art for some puzzle/environment interaction things
- More environmental art things
- Started main menu implementation

• More or less I was iterating a lot. Getting the story down has been difficult, The issue is more or less a problem arising from the fact I have so many characters (7 main characters, 6 antagonists) and I didn’t pay much attention to my English teacher in high school. I sort of have an idea of what I want and the themes, but structuring has been hard, especially since this isn’t a book. Considerations for the story have restricted player freedom a bit. It’s becoming more and more likely this will be a linear game, which kinda goes against my original idea but whatever, I’ll take whatever works.
  

Interesting Changes and Additions:

✦ New Isosprites

Phoebe and Jordan stare at a fenced in Alice

what my artboards usually look like

• They weren't very hard to make since I have a pretty good base to work off of. I like the look of them, they are very cute? No promises, but I think it’s very unlikely I completely scrap them and redraw them all (stares awkwardly at combat sprites). I did tweak Alice’s sprite (black hair yellow eyes) since I made some tiny changes while drawing the new ones. All in all, I’m happy to have spent time on it.
  

✦ Discord Rich Presence

as it appears on discord

• This was bog simple to implement thanks to a plugin/addon made by someone else available for Godot Engine. Thank you  samsface, you are a quirked-up game developer goated with the sauce… I’m thinking about making a tiktok account for the game but the lingo may finally not be meshing with me anymore, have I finally become old?
  

✦ Dash Ability

https://i.imgur.com/3vnerrZ.mp4

embedding videos in the post is hard

• This is still kinda work in progress. It’s not bad but it could be better. Probably just needs some nicer VFX. The code behind it is kind of horrendous though. I wouldn’t be surprised if people find glitches.
  

✦ Lifting Objects

https://i.imgur.com/nfQbvmb.mp4

another video

• This is a really recent addition (like 3 days ago). I want the player to have things to do when they aren’t in combat. One of the things will be puzzles like in Zelda. I’ve been trying to find examples to analyze but maybe I should try and actually get passed the first dungeon in A Link to the Past instead of searching “Zelda Mechanics” on google every Friday thinking the answer will fall in my lap. I am happy with the box other than it’s behaviour when it’s put down, maybe the player should just place it in front of them but that’s more work on my part. Idk we will see. If you want to see how glitchy the pushable object implementation was, it’s somewhere on my discord server wink wink, please join.
  

✦ New cSprites

rough sketch

Alice, Jordan, and Phoebe cSprites

• I was surfing my twitter timeline and saw a cool tactics game with nice character sprites and the next thing I know I started redrawing mine… yeah.
  

• All in all, some good progress considering other things in my life. I want to get a new build out before the end of summer (August), so I'll be working towards that, I might make a video "devlog" for youtube to try and get more eyes on the project. This other indie game I'm following literally popped off on their first video, and I think I have enough content to try and do the same. Maybe by that time I'll have the story finished and have some new environments done. But uh yea, thank you for reading, see you next time!
  

[Sketchwhale]

I'm so glad you've started this log. Following your progress on Twitter has been good, but this level of detail is much more interesting. It's definitely a tough game you're making, but the ambition makes it worth following.

Since you mentioned "stuff to do in the overworld/zelda-like" let me suggest playing a couple of hours (2-3 maybe) of Lufia 2, if you haven't tried it. It's a very straightforward JRPG, but fast-paced in its interactions (even though it's turn-based), and has some good, non-intrusive, occasionally clever puzzles. The story is also a lot better than it initially seems, but that requires a lot more playtime.

[Alkaliii]

Thanks for the recommendation! I have not played Lufia 2 before, but I think I've heard of it on Youtube. Also thanks for replying to my thread! Your updates on Twitter for your game leading here convinced me to start my own! + The fact I've more or less stopped posting on Twitter made me realize I should still log new updates in a timely fashion somewhere while my Tumblr account catches up.

Also congrats on the demo and the convention booth!

[coleModelo]

I reallllly dig these graphics. Awesome work!

[Alkaliii]

I reallllly dig these graphics. Awesome work!

Thank you, they were inspired by work from an artist known as Dom2D

[submergedtapes]

Very cool! Just followed over on twitter, really love the artstyle and the monochromatic thing you have going on, super cool

[Sketchwhale]

Thanks for the recommendation! I have not played Lufia 2 before, but I think I've heard of it on Youtube. Also thanks for replying to my thread! Your updates on Twitter for your game leading here convinced me to start my own! + The fact I've more or less stopped posting on Twitter made me realize I should still log new updates in a timely fashion somewhere while my Tumblr account catches up.

Also congrats on the demo and the convention booth!

It's kinda flattering that my updates convinced you. And thank you! It was tiring and fun

[Alkaliii]

September, 2023

itch.io | tumblr | discord | website

a mockup of an interior

• Thanks for stopping by. It’s been 5 7 months since my last post. Since then a good amount of changes have occurred and I think it’s best if I just make a write-up instead of trying to squeeze in the last few features and pieces of art I want to have set up before I try making a YouTube video. Sorry again for the length haha. Hopefully future me is so kind to update a bit more frequently.
  

Small, Tedious Changes and Additions:

- Some Discord Server Stuff
- Math and Planning
- Writing and Planning
- Increased usage of Inheritance
- Preemptive Optimizing
- Combat Scene UI additions
- Opening Chests Awards Actual Items and Resources
- New Status Effect Icons
- Lots of UI art, not many implementations
- Tons of Hesitation
- Some more environmental art
- Scene Switching
- Poor Terrain Implementation
- Some Whiteboxing

...

Interesting Changes and Additions:

✦ Overworld Resource Counters

---

it moves around the screen contextually

• Feels like something I should’ve implemented earlier especially considering it’s importance for future interactions (shops, inns, accessing towns). I had to hold off on putting it in for a while since I planned to have money and the secondary resource pearls be stored in the player's inventory like normal items (but with higher stack limits). So once I decided to tackle the actual inventory system I got this set up quickly.
  

✦ Main Menu Implementation

• This was pretty fun implementing, getting the necessary data here from various places is always interesting to do, although it sorta highlighted how important it is for me to organize my various variables for accessibility throughout the game. It’s a bit annoying but the playtime counter doesn’t tick up when the game is paused unlike how it seems to in various games I’ve tried. I think I’ll try and get that sorted eventually but for now it sticks...
  

✦ Inventory and Inventory UI

---

A mockup

• The inventory back-end implementation wasn’t as hard as I thought it’d be. My setup isn’t too complicated I don’t think, but it’s super reliant on “Resources” a very slick data structure provided by the Godot Game engine that I can edit in the engine’s inspector. The UI design took a few rounds through the creative process (TM) and even now it’s missing some stuff that is slightly concerning like a picker for equipping and a contextual popup menu when an item is selected. I have a few ideas I just need to get on it haha. I think if I had the entire back-end setup it might be a little easier for me to design the UI in full and not partially all the time. Maybe I should change my implementation process…
  

✦ Branching Dialogue and Dialogue Choice

The main cast berating a sign after asking it for a joke

longer version

• So for this feature, I made some updates to my dialogue JSON setup to provide hints for my dialogue manager to jump to different parts of the file or display choices and other interesting features I want my dialogue box to have. The UI design isn’t nearly where I want it yet but I wanted to implement it to get a feel for how it should work. Looking at static mockups can quickly get misleading I feel… Although the whole setup works pretty well I think I can organize my JSON files a little better.
  

✦ New cSprites (again)

Phoebe Csprite

Alice Csprite, New and Old

• So I was surfing YouTube and found out this one gacha game called Princess Connect Re: Dive was shutting down (condolences to everyone who splurged on that one), More importantly, I realized that the character sprites in that game were the exact style I’ve been trying to uh emulate… So with better reference, I started redrawing mine… again… I reused the head shape but remade the bodies. This feels like what the final look should be like. I’m just worried about how I’ll tackle redrawing them in different poses for animating… I think my current plan is to go darkest dungeon style with stills for certain actions but even that seems like a hassle. I really need to practice character drawing more…
  

✦ Results Screen

Flee Result Screen

• From my multiple forays into the r/JRPG subreddit I’ve come to understand that battle speed is important. My own opinions on the matter also align now that I think about Octopath Traveller. Nevertheless, the results screen appears on the overworld instead of the battle scene and it doesn’t take control away from the player to force them to read it. I sorta like the implementation but I need to see it in action while actually progressing through a level to achieve an objective. It should mostly be out of the way and allocate more time to actually playing, but yeah. If anything I’m really happy with how it looks!
  

✦ Force

Alice slashing in a gray void of nothing

• So like I mentioned before regarding lifting, I want Zelda puzzly stuff to do in the overworld. I’ve spent some time thinking about the elements that would be involved and even created some art for switches and buttons. So what exactly is “Force”? It’s just a system to smack and interact with stuff, Think of it as a secondary way to interact. Depending on the lead party member it changes (single target, multitarget, short range, long range, etc), but I’ve been lagging behind on implementing it since I didn’t want to deal with drawing and animating VFX for it or setting up collision. (The Isometric perspective kinda makes it a bother…). I finally ended up getting a rough animation down for one version of it and getting it to mesh with my player state machine, but it doesn’t do much since nothing on the overworld is built to react to it. I think I need to set up a components system sigh…
  

✦ Rewriting Everything and Porting

Revamped Level Switching

Liftable Objects and Moving Platforms

WIP New Battle Scene

• Yeah I decided to rewrite the entire game, not because it’s a completely buggy mess or anything (okay maybe sorta because of that) but also because in the time since my last update, Godot 4 was released. It has a bunch of shiny new features and seemed pretty cool. While the game looks like a lot I wrote out a list of all the actual features I had implemented and found it wouldn’t be all too hard to rewrite, especially since I could just look at how I did it before and improve on it. So I opened a new project and got to it starting with the battle system.
  

• Rewriting the game provided an interesting opportunity for me regarding the overworld. To be honest I’ve spent a good chunk of my summer up here in Canada ripping my hair out trying to get the player sprite to stand behind but also on top of juts in the terrain. In 2D it really seems as if you can only achieve one or the other without writing your own implementation for rendering and collision. I spent a lot of time writing rules and trying to get it to work but in the end I wasn’t happy with it at all. This lead to the coolest part of the rewrite, now the overworld will be a 3D environment rendered through an orthographic camera instead of being purely 2D. For now, it has been working pretty well, Although now I need to pick up some 3D modelling skills… If I make the structures in the game 3 dimensional instead of billboarding my drawings on 3D collision boxes the player could jump on them and stuff, which sounds like it could invite some interesting possibilities to exploration in the game. But for now, we will see, I need to finish rewriting the rest of the old features…
  

• And that’s all the stuff I’ve done in the last bit. Progress has been pretty slow but it’s getting somewhere I think. Thanks for reading, see you next time.
  

[BestFriendStudio]

I love these warm gray tones you've chosen for the main palette, as well as the blur effects around the edges of the screen. It's an instant eye catcher.

UI is very important in these kind of games, and based on examples it feels very tight and very high quality. Nothing is overworked and it's clear to read. All my compliments.

Would you share what was the thought process while developing it?

[Alkaliii]

Would you share what was the thought process while developing it?

Thanks for the compliments on the style, it is probably my favourite part of my game! As for the UI thought process, I don't usually go through the standard pipeline that begins with UX and ends with styling it, although I really should. For most of my UIs, I consider the information that should be available to the player when they are interacting with it and try to condense it. Other pieces of information that complement the information provided in an element should probably be assessable from the element also although I haven't heavily gotten into that it's something I keep reminding myself when working on the Inventory UI. gameuidatabase has been a great help in figuring out the general style of my UI elements. One game I keep referencing is Bravely Default on the Nintendo DS although the two screen shenanigans make me wish I was developing for that hardware sometimes haha. All in all, I sorta go by feel and think about what I would want to see if I was in the player's shoes. I also like to ask some friends or members of some discord servers what they think and go from there.

[BestFriendStudio]

gameuidatabase has been a great help in figuring out the general style of my UI elements.

Thanks for sharing, I didn't know this website exist.

Condensing the information and choosing the best way to represent it, considering size and placement is quite important, and you did the great job.

And yes, second screen would provide even more room for fun interactions with the game. 

[Alkaliii]

March, 2024

itch.io | tumblr | discord | website

A chest you can pick up?

• Hello again, it’s been 6 months since my last devlog. Since then I’ve worked on a few things but have been mostly figuring out environmental and level design. I still have yet to make a YouTube video, but I did release some shorts that went nowhere (I need to learn a bit more about making short-form content). For now, let's go over some of the things I’ve added to the game.
  

Small, Tedious Changes and Additions:

- Small tweaks to the battle system and a lot of back and forth on ideas
- Dialogue Writing Tool that's a bit tedious to work with…
- A bunch of House models I plan on trashing
- Sorta have the new battle camera working
- Loot Table System
- Janky Checkpoint System
- Reimplement Force
- Figure out what I want Force to do and some of the other basic systems the overworld should have
- Hitflash Shader
- Hazard Body Knockback
- Camera Zones
- Really bad 3D auto tiling
- High-Level Level Planning
- Fences (now in 3D)
- Premature Optimizing

...

Interesting Changes and Additions:

✦ Chests (now in 3D)

a 3D chest

• This is one of the first things I modelled for the game, I am quite satisfied with it although getting the materials to fit the look I wanted was a bit of a hassle. I created the model in Blender but ended up creating the open and close animation in Godot using tweens. I have a lot to learn when it comes to Blender since now a whole bunch of objects in my game will be 3 dimensional, I hope it goes well.
  

✦ Terrain (now in 3D)

---

You can stand on top of it easily now

• This was the main reason for the switch, and I’m happy to say it’s been working out for the most part. Modeling 3D tilesets is quite difficult and texturing is also its own set of problems, but I think I prefer this new 3D-based workflow for the environment in my game since I’m not very good at drawing complex things. I especially prefer this new set of troubles over getting terrain to work in 2D. I use the gridmap node in Godot to place all the tiles properly, but I had to write my own script for auto-tiling, I wrote the script with help from this resource (https://web.archive.org/web/20150906102436/http://www.saltgames.com/2010/a-bitwise-method-for-applying-tilemaps/)
  

autotiling

✦ UI revamps (Battle, Menu, Dialogue, Loot, Results)

Battle UI

Menu UI closeup

Results Screen - Defeat

• I did slight refreshing for some of the UI. The loot display has seen the least changes while battle and main menu were slightly remade. I have this cool magic circle motif I want to continue through parts of the game, although it’s hard remembering its inclusion when I’m working on designs. The only problem I have now is speed menuing can break things so easily. I need to make them a tiny bit more robust since some combinations of inputs definitely breaks them…
  

✦ Battle Transition

very crunchy

• I have been spending a lot more time with shaders since the transition to 3D, they are incredibly useful, too bad I barely understand a speck of GLSL. This battle transition is a fancy dissolve shader based on noise, some fisheye and some chromatic aberration. It works pretty well and I haven’t had too many issues with it, although testing has been pretty light. If you’re like me and suck at shader witchcraft I found helpful advice that applies aptly to Godot here (https://www.youtube.com/@onetupthree) Although I believe the techniques are somewhat universal.
  

✦ Shaders (Xray Shader, Snow Shader, Grass Shader, Miasma/Misma Shader)

Xray effect

Snow Shader on mesh

Badly placed grass

Miasma looms

• The X-ray shader is necessary since my game has “perfect depth” and the player really can hide behind things. I set it up by having a raycast pointed towards the camera control a shader on the player sprite that doesn’t depth sort and sets the whole thing to a single color. It impresses me a lot since I quite literally thought it was impossible at my skill level… I also set up a variant of this effect I can put on objects hidden behind stuff, which might add an interesting element to exploration.
  

• The snow shader was stolen from GodotShaders and I haven’t done much with it yet since I don’t have assets for my cold area ready yet. The grass shader was also stolen although I think I might try recreating it since I’m having issues with how it’s colored.
  

• The Miasma shader is a mix of polarized noise, harsh alpha scissoring (I think), and panning the texture for movement. I plan to use it for the most common hazard in the game, although it can be sometimes difficult to tell how close you can get to it before it will harm you. But otherwise, it’s pretty alright.
  

✦ Scattering Tool (Disperse)

side by side, trees placed and the image used to place them.

• So while 3D environments are pretty nifty, putting them together is not. I now understand the love for PCG. I don’t have plans to procedurally create everything but I have been building tools to shortcut some of the more tedious parts of the handcrafted process. “Disperse” is the name of one of my tools which takes a tiny image as a guide and places assets in the environment according to what parts of the image are colored. It’s how I placed all the trees and the terrain. It’s alright for a tool although It could use some improvements. Or maybe my utilization of it could use improvements? Anyway, it’s much better than placing down hundreds of trees by hand. Before I wrote up my own tool, I was using ProtonScatter, sadly it did not like what I was trying to get it to do much and I ended up ditching it. I guess if you haven’t been made aware yet the rough side to 3D development in Godot is the availability of asset placing and level designing tools. It has basics but they really are basics, anything nice you’ve gotten used to in other engines isn’t in Godot 3 or 4 unless someone built a plugin for it or you want to. It seems daunting but writing a tool script is pretty easy I think, just matters what you’re trying to implement.
  

✦ Support Gimmick

• I am still tweaking my battle system here and there, and while I was working on getting the overworld setup, I ended up adding a new action for the player to perform while in battle. It’s called ‘Support’ for now and it boils down to banking an action to be used simultaneously with another action later. As for why you would do this instead of performing the action on the turn, support actions don’t spend AP or degrade an action (another system I’ve been playing around with). It’s still sorta in the works haha. I still need to add the ability for the player to use items in battle but I’m getting there…
  

✦ Quest System

• It’s a bit janky but I have set up the backend for my quest system. It’s built with 6 basic objectives in mind, ESCORT (I plan to have special escort missions), PROCEED, OBTAIN, DEFEAT, MEET, and INTERACT. But those 6 really boil down to GO, KILL, GET, and INTERACT. It’s really messy but it’s built using Godot’s resources, although I still feel like it could be improved and I haven’t really gotten down how I’ll have the game world notify objective completion for interact yet. Maybe I should simplify it? If you guys have any tips on how a quest system should work I’d love to hear them.
  

• Progress has been slow, but it’s progress. I really want to add fishing but maybe I should work on NPCs first. Anyway, that’s about all I have to share for now. Thanks for reading, until next time!