mild socket
Hey everyone, here is another lil retro project I've been working on. My goal is to make a party based zelda-like that plays like Secret of Mana with artwork inspired by Final Fantasy 2/3 and Zelda 1. I'm using this project as an avenue to experiment with procedural map and story generation. I currently have generic towns and forest combat areas generating as well as dungeons with lock-key dependency trees.
Here's a lil video of the game in action
mild socket
Something I added today was the ability to show the world map from the popup menu. Here is an example of a randomly generated world with 8 dungeons and 8 towns. The white square blinks to show your location. The world will have fog of war over it and will reveal squares that you've been. Each square is a screen size map.
mild socket
Hey everyone, here is a little gif I put together to show off the player popup-menu, this is inspired by games like Shining Force to give you quick access to items, stats, world/zone map, spells, and equipment. Menus selection is controlled using movement buttons / joystick.
mild socket
here's a little gif of the status bar in action. it's designed to cause an attack cooldown like in secret of mana, where if you wait for the bar to refill you'll hit much harder
it's animated using 4x16 pixel tiles which allow it to expand with more digits and still have a nice animated gradient effect
rapid niche
here's a little gif of the status bar in action. it's designed to cause an attac...
Nice!
Do you plan to release a build?
mild socket
Thanks! I do, once I have at least one dungeon staffed and beatable.
mild socket
Recently put together a machine learning out-painting algorithm for help with map editing, it learns from your other maps for what tiles go next to each other. You can generate multiple options and commit to the one that fits your intent the most.
also mocking up ideas for on-map active-time battle a la Chrono Trigger
proven whale
This looks great :)
What crates are you using?
mild socket
out for a stroll
mild socket
It's been a while since I've worked on this, but I added in room transitions and have all maps done for this cave zone now.
mild socket
also added the ability to open chests and show loot notification
mild socket
bugs in motion
mild socket
added in leveling up, experience ramps, strength, hit, weapon strength, speed, and stamina stats and effects on attack and damage, as well as added in enemy attack rate and defense ratio
did some minor tuning on the zone staffing in the caves to account for what level the player should be at in different sections
zone is really coming together
mild socket
cleaning up my door entrances, added a locked door type and a second chest type for important items
mild socket
stats window now working in game
mild socket
progress on equip system
gloomy crescent
Great
You have played FFMQ, correct?
gloomy crescent
I find it interesting that you still have love for that game 🙂
The process of drawing these monsters is also interesting. You consciously do this process (leaving the progress from silhouette to shading) for purposes other than sharing your progress here, don't you?
mild socket
Yup, that's my sprite drawing process. I'll either do it as separate tiles or as separate layers. I like to keep backups in case I want to explore different options.
Full spriting steps, from a tutorial I made a few years back.
gloomy crescent
Full spriting steps, from a tutorial I made a few years back.
That's nice. I can tell you are enjoying each step of the process.
mild socket
Updating my immediate mode gui to be more persistent / lazy updated so it's less of a resource hog, also working on making a custom content editor
mild socket
added icon bars and starting to narrow in on editor layout
mild socket
also added row highlight and icon highlight
mild socket
mild socket
now have real-time interaction and redrawing, added parent-child container hierarchy with VAO/VBO double buffering of batched geometry that allows small localized widgets to get added/refreshed and pushed to the gpu without rebuilding the entire tree per frame and without flickering.
mild socket
little more progress this week, added event reporting and icon toggling
gloomy crescent
Updating my immediate mode gui to be more persistent / lazy updated so it's less...
Good. When you create that content editor, do you identify as many possible requirements as possible in advance before implementing it? Or do you have any content editors that you refer to?
mild socket
@gloomy crescent , I try to identify what are the bare minimum requirements to enable the work that I need to do on the game, while keeping an eye on extensibility and maintainability. For me the editor needs to be good enough to replace my existing content pipeline (Tiled, Notepad++) and reduce friction to scaling the content. The feature completeness is more of a function of what I need for the game and my personal projects, not really what would make it a good editor in relation to other ones out there.
if i was doing this for work (professionally), then yes i'd try to identify as many requirements as possible and think really critically about architecture and user stories
i really only have 4-8 hours per week that i can work on this game so i have to make tradeoffs in where i spend the time
@gloomy crescent are there any editors that you've used that you particularly enjoyed or features that were really helpful?
mild socket
project tree now fully responsive and dynamic
gloomy crescent
<@473391999416795138> , I try to identify what are the bare minimum requirements...
I see. This is important to me as well.
gloomy crescent
<@473391999416795138> are there any editors that you've used that you particular...
I've never worked on RPG level design to the point of completing a game (I'm working on it right now), so my opinion won't be very helpful.
I don't have much software, not just content or level editors, that I like that I feel is really well done for me (maybe only vi/vim).
Maybe an editor I would like is software that allows me to completely forget about its existence and immerse myself in editing content. (Maybe this is the palace you refer to)
I know of such a thing to some extent if it is a real tool.
However, in terms of specific functionality, I feel that I need both a view that allows us to manipulate the connections between levels of the overall game and a view that allows us to edit the details of each level, such as the view seen in LDtk that allows us to manipulate the connections between levels.
I am in the process of implementing such a thing in my own level editor.
Perhaps if I were an experienced RPG level designer, I could work without the need for something like a world view, but I am not.
mild socket
good points
yea, i usually make a block diagram manually
zone maps from one of my RPGs
all made in powerpoint
i've never had a good editor view for making map jumps or drawing the zone layout via meta data
hope to do something like that with this editor in the future though
this is a map from one of my games that shows the map jump locations and map numbers, but i did it in photoshop
gloomy crescent
Very nice!
mild socket
hmmm, i think i'll make a worldmap and zonemap tab so that you can click on a location on the worldmap to jump to it in the editor and have the zonemap draw a graph of your rooms in the zone, then clicking on a map would jump to it in the tile editor
this would be a visual way to navigate the project tree
thanks for the comments, i think that would work out really well for navigating around the game assets quickly
gloomy crescent
hmmm, i think i'll make a worldmap and zonemap tab so that you can click on a location on the worldmap to jump to it in the editor and have the zonemap draw a graph of your rooms in the zone, then clicking on a map would jump to it in the tile editor
this would be a visual way to navigate the project tree
The feature completeness is more of a function of what I need for the game and my personal projects, not really what would make it a good editor in relation to other ones out there.
I personally feel that if you implement that feature, your editor will be a good enough editor compared to other editors 😄 (My definition of a superior editor does not mean feature-rich)
mild socket
cool
mockup of zonemap navigation
mockup of worldmap navigation
yea, that would be cool
this way you can click on a zone from the worldmap and dive into the zonemap view, then click on a room and dive into the room view
mild socket
This is the WIP gui code for the main window and the start of the project panel. It uses a recursive grid splitting pattern for layout, and a builder pattern when constructing widgets to add to the widget tree
and here is what event message processing looks like currently
the library is setup such that you can clear and rebuild the entire interface immediate mode style, or build and wait for an event, make change to the current gui tree and force a refresh (which only updates the section that changed)
on the backend any gui element that acts as a container of other elements gets its own gpu objects (vao, vbo) and double buffers so they can be edited and refreshed independently from the others
gloomy crescent
This is the WIP gui code for the main window and the start of the project panel....
Do you implement your own UI framework instead of using an existing UI framework because you think it is more maintainable afterwards?
mild socket
nah, i do it completely for fun XD
gloomy crescent
mild socket
all ui elements are drawn using the 9-slice pattern
this is the current sprite sheet for the entire gui
all 4x4 pixel tiles
i'll never achieve the code quality and feature set of other big gui libraries and i'm ok with that
mild socket
added tab switching plus worldmap/zonemap/blueprint tabs
lil bit of flicker i need to hunt down and fix, but otherwise satisfied
gloomy crescent
How many rejected diagrams did you create during the phase of making those block diagrams?
mild socket
I did a bunch of gestural drawings for the overall flow of the zones, then created intensity ramps for the relative location along the zone I wanted high and low intensity areas
I then placed combat rooms at those relative locations and puzzle rooms at more calm locations in the ramp
Added in some connecting rooms to make things interesting, and tried to have a little bit of nonlinear flow
Experience showed that around 20 rooms per major section was a good number for complexity and gameplay length
Most important rooms have an idiom attached to it to guide gameplay design, such as "unleash the beast", "caught in the spider's web", "born again"
gloomy crescent
Thanks. Very interesting
mild socket
@novel knot thanks! sorry for the late reply, no playable links yet
i've been working on some random world generation recently. thinking about making the game more procedurally generated
some screenshots of the random world map generation in stages
some screenshots of the map filled in with tiles
these are all procedurally generated maps
hoary flax
one of the best retro-like graphics I've ever seen
novel knot
A bit too 'grainy' and blurry for my eyes. Can we have sharper edges?
