TacticalRPG Engine

[Guru]

Everything is looking good man. Nice to see your making good progress! Female sprite came out nicely, and the flying bug monster looks just as awesome as the mantis. Keep it up man, look forward to seeing more.

Any suggestions for a forest or swamp monster?

Hmm how about frogs/toads? Phantasy star has 2 different sprites that I always liked for these
http://shrines.rpgclassics.com/genesis/ps4/monsters.shtml (abe frog and sand newt)

lizards, alligators, crabs for swamp

forest I'm kinda striking out on right now. Spiders would be cool. AH some wolves, werewolves or bears too.

[HowDoGameDev]

Update
The textures for the path and the building are pretty bad, but I threw them together as fast as possible. Working on characters is my main priority because I don't think people want to play/look at a game about characters that are all clones of the same parking valet. Or maybe they do.

Forest/Swamp Units
I would like to do a frog, but one of the issues I'm afraid of is how a frog moves. It hops, stops, then hops again. It'd require slightly different movement code. I don't think it'd be that difficult to implement, but I'm trying to avoid adding complication at this stage.
As for the spider, I think that's doable. I have a swamp/water monster that's currently in a very early state. Will hopefully cover the gap in the monsters not having something that fits the status effect niche and give me a reason to implement more status effects.

As always, thanks again for the kind words. It does help keep me going.

[3lric]

I get all giddy when I see the word Event.

[HowDoGameDev]

I think i've matched my definition of an event to FFT. It's basically a set of visual actions during a skill/battle/cutscene. Skills and cutscenes both utilize the same classes, so whatever can be done in one can be done in another with some exceptions.

Actions supported:
Focus/zoom/tilt/raise/revolve camera
CharDialogue
DisplayEffects - shows status symbol or stat change numbers
SetActorPosition - Teleport to position
ShowActor - works for "Hide" as well
LookActor - makes actor look at tile, position or another actor
MoveActorTo
RemoveActor
RevolveActor
WalkCharacter - Like MoveActor, but plays walk animation
AnimateCharacter - Set animation state
StartEmitter - turns on/off particle emitter
DisplayMenu
DisplaySkillName

[Andrew]

It's nice to see that you've been sticking to it!  This makes me grin like a little kid. 

[3lric]

Very nice. I would be interested in mucking around with events in this at some point.

currently I've made more events than Square did for the original FFT, so I like to think I have a pretty good understanding of how it all works in FFT lol

[HowDoGameDev]

Got another unit ready to go as far as texturing, modeling and animating. It'll be the first ranged unit. It will shoot seeds, which finally gives me a reason to implement projectile based skills. The unit will also have a unique mechanic regarding its death.

I'll see what I can do as far as a friendly build for creating events. The Overworld cannot currently drop the player into a story battle, only random encounters. I can probably figure something out for just starting the game up in a designated scene. I think I have some of the stuff documented, if not, I'll throw something together.

[HowDoGameDev]

Have a lot of the code necessary to do a projectile attack completed. I think there are quite a few cases that the current logic might get wrong, but I'll work through those.

Still messing with the color scheme, but I've got another unit modeled. Model is rigged and it looks like the weight painting came out pretty well, so I don't expect many adjustments will be needed for her. That's one less parking valet. Only 7 or 8 left to go.

[dotchan]

Suggested feature, if you haven't added it already: add an outline to at least your currently active unit so that said outline is visible even behind obstruction.  (I personally would do it for all characters, period, but I don't know what effect that would have on lag or gameplay issues.) That would also allow slightly more varied map designs.

[HowDoGameDev]

Outlines
Making the outline visible through obstructions may involve some additional trickery, but I can certainly look into it. I would like to see if I can figure out a method to make the graphics code intelligent enough to identify when a column, tree, wall, etc is obstructing view and make it draw translucently instead.

Scenes/Events
As for an event friendly build, I'll try to resume working on that as soon as I can. I've not had time to work on the game very much since the last update. For the last day or two I've been brain storming how to best organize the single player campaign structure and store its progress. Party, inventory and stuff like that I think will be easy. This is more for things like:
Win Battle A -> Add location B to map, draw path to location B, add scene to location B

I think what I can do is have the scene file (declares stage, actors, events, victory conditions, etc) store information about what to do when completed. Special completion items could also be stored with certain requirements as well, such as "if Unit A survives, increase reward" and stuff like that. As a side effect, branching story lines would be possible, albeit I probably wouldn't use them. So the scene file would store:
Completion Requirement - Action
Achieved Victory - Add location B to map... etc

From there, I can create a simple progress file that stores scene completion information that I can walk through to get everything set up as needed:
SceneA - Result IDs
SceneB - Result IDs

Roster Update

I still need to figure out how to handle weapon display. I suspect I'll just implement very simple skeletal animation for weapons.

[HowDoGameDev]

Quick Update
It is a bit hokey, but I think I've got the campaign progression working. Tracking the progress isn't done, but it should be simple to implement.

Whatever event causes a scene to end will have an attribute called a completion code. This code is stored alongside the scene the event belonged to. This code is read by the campaign management module. It looks at this code and identifies any scenes unlocked by it. The new scenes either auto play or are added to whatever location assigned to them and will be triggered when the location is visited.

I am using tiddlywiki for the documentation and will include it in the next demo. I'll try to get something out either tonight or in the next few days.

[HowDoGameDev]

New Demo
I've released an event/campaign friendly demo. It can be found on itch.io:
https://howdogamedev.itch.io/tacticalrpg

TacticalRPG-2016092802.7z - The game
TacticalRPG Wiki - The documentation

Documentation is a bit weak at the moment, but it should give someone a grasp on how the events work. Not much experience writing documentation, so if you want me to elaborate on something, let me know.

I've encountered some shader errors thrown by my new laptop. It has a Geforce 960M. Currently identifying the cause. Nothing fatal to the program, it just fills the console with warnings and displays a few things oddly.

[3lric]

Great work man, glad to see you still cracking away at this, that kind of dedication is rare these days, keep up the good work!

[Kaijyuu]

"These days"? It's always been rare

As always, good job for keeping at it. I have trouble sticking to my projects as long as you have yours.

[HowDoGameDev]

Thanks as always for the kind words. I've got a knight modeled and I'm working on finishing touches for the squid man. The knight is one of the main party members. Counting this guy, I have 4 out of the 10ish models I need for the first battle.

His hips are a bit too square for my liking. He'll cast annoying status effects like the mindflayer and gives me another unit to throw on stages with water. Also gives me a reason to add things like confusion, berserk and blind.

This puts my monster count at 6. I don't plan on adding anymore for now unless something cool comes to mind.

[HowDoGameDev]

Made some posture and structural adjustments to the squid. I've also finished his skeleton. Haven't decided on how he'll walk yet.

I've finished the icons for berserk and confusion. Now I just need to implement them in code. Berserk should be pretty simple as I already have a berserk AI that I can have a unit switch to. Confusion should also be fairly simple. I don't have the code to tint units certain colors based on current status effect, but I think I can add that to the shader.

Implemented Status Effects:
Dead, Casting, Poison, Float

In progress:
Confusion, Berserk

Planned:
Blind, Silence, Slow, Haste, Regen

[3lric]

Great job as always man, keep it up!

[Koruten]

Man this is fantastic work. I can't wait to see this completed.

[HowDoGameDev]

Making some minor quality of life improvements to the UI as it was pretty awful. Not dead set on the colors, but it hurts the eyes less.

[3lric]

Lookin good!