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TacticalRPG Engine

Started by HowDoGameDev, August 06, 2015, 08:45:17 pm


HowDoGameDev


Recorded another Berserk vs Tactician fight with the new Mushroom unit. Nothing too spectacular, but all of the skills for the slime now have skill event settings for them. There's another video of me playing poorly against Tactician on my channel, but it's a bit long winded and I win by being cheap.

Updates

  • Tactician - I fixed a few bugs that were really limiting what skill possibilities Tactician could choose from. It's now a bit more effective, but could certainly use more work.

  • Mushroom - All required animations are complete except for the "casting" animation. It's combat ready, but I'm short on ideas for skills.

  • Scenes - Settings within a scene can now alter a unit's texture and portrait. Adding "Name" changes and other stat changes will be trivial.



Current Focus
The Mantis texturing and animations are next up on the todo list. Once I'm finished with that, on to the humans. Alongside that I hope to work more on the Overworld. With the changes I've made to the scene class, I should be able to randomly generate fights. Just need to get a basic party structure and it'll be good to go.

As always, let me know if you have any questions.

Guru

It's looking really good man! So I'm assuming tactician is basically the AI in your engine?

I really want to see that mantis in action lol. Can't remember the last cool mantis I saw in a game. Only one that comes to mind is phantasy star back in the day. Which is still one of my favorite games (PSIV rocks!!).

If you need to bounce some ideas around for skills(or anything really) I'm sure many people here would be happy to give some thoughts, myself included! You could probably even post in the recruitment section. There has been a couple similar threads created in there, bouncing skill ideas around, and had pretty good results. I don't think it's limited to just FFT projects, so I don't think Elric and co. would mind  :mrgreen:

One skill comes to mind with the mushroom would be a spore attack. Now if you make different species of mushrooms it would work out cool too because you could have each one's spore attack inflict a different status. For example one that causes hallucinations which would inflict confusion, another that would cause sleep, one that inflicts poison and etc.

*edit* just had a neat idea for the spore attack too! You could even have one of the spore attacks turn the character into a mushroom, like as a tribute to Super Mario rpg  ;)

HowDoGameDev

February 27, 2016, 02:05:12 am #63 Last Edit: March 01, 2016, 10:56:16 am by HowDoGameDev
Thanks, and yes, Tactician is the name of the AI. It generates a list of all possible actions in a turn, removes all the absolutely negative ones (Kill ally, etc), puts the positive actions into a weighted list and then randomly picks one. The eventual plan is to implement personality for a unit, so a more violent character might be more likely to pick an action that kills an enemy, even if it means hurting an ally.


I've got the texturing for the mantis about as far as I want to take it for now. Also changed some of the coloring a bit on the default textures for the other units. Rigging the bones for animation is also complete and I've started working on the idle animation.

The Scatter Spore skill is actually one of the few I've come up with so far. I don't have the graphics figured out for it yet though. I'll probably work on it more after the mantis. Turning an enemy character into a mushroom could be fun, but it reminds me of "Malboro Spores", which is one of the most infuriating skills I've come across.

Brief Update: Victory conditions now exist! As long as a battle scene defines victory, the game will exit and return to stage select. Nothing fancy, but it's something. Animations are also complete for the Mantis. I'm burnt out on rigging/modeling, so I'm refocusing on the overworld module.

HowDoGameDev

Update
Another demo is ready to go! Find it here.

Updates Include:

  • New Mushroom Unit

  • New Mantis Unit

  • Victory Conditions

  • Improved Skill Events

  • AI Improvements



As always, let me know if you encounter any bugs, have any questions or any comments.

HowDoGameDev

March 15, 2016, 07:40:27 pm #65 Last Edit: March 20, 2016, 05:37:43 pm by HowDoGameDev


Update

  • Complete

    • Skills and effects can now have a miss chance assigned.

    • Skills have a few more options for range calculation and AOE calculation.

    • Can view movement range of enemy units.


  • Todo


    • Add turn order display

    • Complete animations for human unit

    • Create Tactician 2.0.

Current Focuses:

  • Overworld

    • Party System

    • Random Encounters

    • Dynamically Generate Battle Scenes

  • New Stages


    • Will be low detail

    • Add simple water system


Current Stage Progress:

HowDoGameDev


Update
I tell myself to work on certain parts of the game, but inevitably get sidetracked by something else. Managed to work out the necessary shaders to emulate Wind Waker style water effects. My texturing needs to be more consistent, but I'm still experimenting with it.

I've solved the shoulder topology problem for my base humanoid model. After I fix the elbow and hip topology, I can start on the necessary animations and then on to customizing clothes, armor, etc for actual characters.

There are a few bugs that I need to track down and fix before I move along any further. After that, I'll resume work on the human model.

Guru

QuoteI  tell myself to work on certain parts of the game, but inevitably get sidetracked by something else. Managed to work out the necessary shaders to emulate Wind Waker style water effects. My texturing needs to be more consistent, but I'm still experimenting with it.


Progress is progress though! I feel bad I haven't had a chance to try out your demos yet, but my computer is still down and I'm still working on getting enough money to fix it. Besides the human, which needs quite a bit of work IMO, I think the sprites all look really good and the texture on the mantis came out awesome! Textures on the maps are looking good, the bridge needs some work, but I definitely like everything else.

Could always make a rock bridge btw, just have a few stepping stones instead of the bridge. Would look more natural and I think would look better than a actually bridge. IMO of course  :P

Keep it up man and keep us posted!

HowDoGameDev

Thanks for the feedback on the stage, Guru. I'd agree the bridge is looking pretty rough. I zoned out and didn't make the details as bold as the cliff face, water and the stone island. I think you're right that it looks a bit out of place. I'll see about changing some things up when I work on stages some more.

Project is still very much alive. Most of the progress is on the "Adventure" module. The adventure module could be considered the backbone as far as single player goes. It will coordinate the exchange of data between the overworld, story/event, party and battle modules. Various supporting systems like the party and story modules need further work as well. Once I feel that those are far enough along, I'll try to make some brief campaign to play through with the content I've got for testing.

I'm still hammering away on the human model. Collected some feedback from friends and I'm still messing with the anatomical proportions. I've solved a few topology issues as well to increase the flexibility of the model. I probably need to go through a few more character modeling tutorials and get more comfortable.



HowDoGameDev

Hello all,

I've created another demo. It can be found here:
https://howdogamedev.itch.io/tacticalrpg

There is a mild issue with this one, but I don't think it'll become a problem unless you play it for an extended period of time. Some of the buffers for objects are not being disposed of completely. Currently hunting down the cause.

The major addition to this demo is the ability to play on the waterfall map and unit deployment being implemented. The overworld module can now spawn random encounters when walking across wilderness locations, but that's not available in the demo.

Thanks,
HDGD

HowDoGameDev


Update
  • Story Module - I'm in the early planning stages for this.

  • Graphics

    •    
    • Male Model - Done as far as I'm concerned. Above screenshot has him with some random accessories I modeled.

    •    
    • Female Model - I'd like to experiment a bit more with the male model to make sure I can make changes as easily as I hope before starting on this

    •    
    • Outlines - Made the outlining of characters much finer.

    •    
    • Lighting - Character lighting is clearly broken. Shader seems to always have light coming from camera's position. Will look into fix./li]

  • Battle Module

    •    
    • Result - Need to have the battle store its results, along with character experience gained, etc.

    •    
    • Inventory - Currently working on framework for having consumables be available.

    •    
    • Projectiles - Getting projectiles working is currently on my radar. Not quite sure how I'll do it though.



Pretty happy with the human model's shape. The rig is pretty easy to use as well. If anyone has any suggestions on eye styling, I'm all ears. I've not been thrilled with anything I've come up with yet. Also not sure how I'm going to do weapons. At first, I'll probably just have a base model for each type.

HowDoGameDev



Updates
Particles - I've fixed my particle emitter and made it customizable. There's certainly still more work to do on it, but once I can assign textures, it should allow for much better skill effects.

Sound - Menus now have sound effects for scrolling and clicking buttons and cancelling actions. Battles also have background music, albeit it's static for the time being. Fixing this is one or two lines of code, I just don't have much music to work with, so I haven't bothered. Skills can also generate sounds now, but it's based on the "action" layer of the skill's event, instead of being tied to the animation's frame. This will eventually be fixed, but this is low on the priority list.

Models
I've created some simple armor and a few other accessories for the male human model. This hasn't proved difficult. A link to the armor can be found here:
http://i.imgur.com/1lhtRg7.png
It's a work in progress, but seems to work pretty well.


Current Focus
Figure out what's necessary to emulate the "Cure" and "Ice" spells from Tactics. These two spells should help provide some direction for me.


3lric

Very nice, I like it.

Though I was really hoping you'd punch that giant mantis in the back of the head.

Also, the guys avatar must be as old as my license :P that picture doesn't look like me anymore either :D
  • Modding version: PSX

HowDoGameDev

I'm afraid that punching and updated driver's license photos are outside of my skill level. I did get particles to be much more flexible though. Still can't map textures yet.



With some tweaks, I should be able to do some more complicated stuff.

HowDoGameDev

June 28, 2016, 12:29:53 pm #74 Last Edit: July 01, 2016, 02:00:55 pm by HowDoGameDev


New swamp stage is under construction. Need to finish up texturing.

Lighting system still needs work.
Particles can be used with skills and as stage props.
Usable items are implemented

Next up:
Equipment
Overworld store

HowDoGameDev

Update
Playable Demo Released:
https://howdogamedev.itch.io/tacticalrpg

Two Stages
Alta Swamp - Poisonous swamp. Enemies include shrooms, mosquito mantids and slimes
Alta River - A narrow river crossing. Enemies include shrooms, mantids and slimes

Overworld
4 locations, albeit you can't do anything at the Hut or Port.
Deployment area dictated by which direction a location is approached from.

Party
Two shroom men, two mantids, two slimes, one mosquito, one doctor, one "Guy". Guy is pretty worthless though, so I wouldn't use him.

To Do
Add skill description display
Assign proper particle effects to skills
Improve UI
Add mouse support
Start modeling generic female base

Darkholme

Wow. The new progress is very cool.

I like the modular human model you've got. Very cool.

Keep up the good work!

I look forward to what you do next.

Once you have your engine up and running, what comes after?

HowDoGameDev

Thanks for the kind words.

As for when the engine is "complete", I have two things I'd like to accomplish.

Barring the graphical elements such as the unit models and stages, the engine uses XML files to define just about everything: skills, stages, overworld, encounters, items, events, how skills are displayed, stores, cities, etc. I think this will prove to be quite friendly and attractive to someone that wants to make their own game/scenarios/skills/whatever. To support that I plan on writing up some documentation in a wiki. I already have this started, but it is by no means complete.

The second thing is I have my own story planned. I hope to have the engine far enough along to release a rough draft of the first chapter in a few months. The major component missing from the engine to facilitate this is the story module. I think that'll be simple compared to the other modules though. Asset creation is the biggest obstacle for me at the moment.

HowDoGameDev


Update
Most of my progress has been related to content. I've started working on the first/tutorial mission for the game. A rough draft of the stage is modeled, textured and playable. I've also got some of the dialogue and actions for the scene scripted, but there's still quite a bit left to do. It also looks strange with all of the models being placeholders. As a result, I've started working on characters. I have to keep things simple as I'm not that skilled, nor do I want to spend truck loads of time on something that might be a placeholder. Base female model is completed and I've created a rough character based off of it. This one will be used in the tutorial mission.

The doctor and the bat guy are characters I made to goof off and probably will not be used. That means I've got 7-9 characters left to design, model and texture. Hopefully I start getting faster at this. Any suggestions for a forest or swamp monster?

3lric

Nice job man. Glad to see you still pushing along on this. Very promising stuff here!
  • Modding version: PSX