https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/244737/79654df2-89d6-421b-a23e-1bb6607fcb9f/banner.png
Howdy! I've been on Facepunch for a while but I've decided to take a pseudonym with this project. It's pretty awesome that FP has a forum for WAYWO now. Thanks Garry!
I've been working for about a year and a half on a RPG. Partly because I just got out of college with a Comp Sci degree and needed something to practice my programming skills with, but also because It's been a dream to make a game since I started doing work on Source mods years ago.
What is Bravewater?
Have you ever played Shining Force for the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive? It's basically going to be that.
Shining Force was one of my favorite games as a kid. It irks me that any other game that has a similar battle style (i.e. Fire Emblem) is nothing but battle after battle with story cutscenes thrown in between. I love the element of exploring towns, talking to characters, finding items to help you in battle, and all the other cool stuff that comes with having an RPG element alongside a turn based strategy element.
What's done so far?
As of last week I pretty much finished the RPG element's code. It took a year or so to do it, mainly because I had to learn Unity.
Let's go through some of the fun things you can do in RPG land:
Walkin' Around
You can use a keyboard, but I've made a pretty good effort to make everything playable with touch. It's way easier to demo a game to your friends on your phone than lugging around a laptop all the time.
I wanted to be able to tap a spot and have the character figure out how to get there. I found out that's usually accomplished through a pathfinding algorithm.
I learned how the A* Pathfinding algorithm worked, decided that was a lot of work to implement by hand, and downloaded a plugin for Unity to do it. The guy wants almost $100 for the multithreaded version which sucks, so I'm half tempted to go do the work and code it myself to save the money.
Here's what that ended up looking like:
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/244737/25adc46d-9f1d-40b0-89eb-95459fe8f590/walkin.gif
It also lets me make NPCs figure out how to walk to anywhere. In this case, I've got the witch walking to the player:
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/244737/6ee0ad34-9bd7-4939-b85a-f55266441442/GIF2.gif
Dialogue and Quests
Dialogue was a bitch to code. I originally came up with this super non-expandable system where you could only answer "yes" or "no" to a question ala Shining Force. I wasn't happy with that, so I re-wrote the system completely. It looks and works great now. I can execute almost any piece of code after a character finishes their line of dialogue, which you can see makes some interesting results:
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/244737/f5b3594f-83fd-45fd-b16b-68cc4a2013d4/Dialogue.gif
You'll also see that quests can be assigned to the player. I can run any code I want at the end of quests which is also pretty cool. I could unlock a door when a quest is completed, for example.
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/244737/c488b970-7b12-4d65-a8c7-bc99a8dc89c2/Quest.gif
Inventory / Stats / Buying & Selling
I lumped this all together because...it's all lumped together in the game.
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/244737/10356a5f-a8dc-47a7-a80f-6e63bdab1f6e/inventory.png
Items can be classified as just plain old normal items (potions, RPG progressing items), weapons, or "rings" (from Shining Force, you can wear a ring to boost specific stats)
Last month I finished the shop where you can buy and sell items!
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/244737/99e0baf5-a495-4160-8829-2d8cb37ade88/Shopkeeper.gif
Items and money can also be acquired in chests...
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/244737/e867209d-6088-4c0a-9dfe-c2dbf8cba555/Chests.gif
World Items
You can tap items in the world to learn more about them. Here are some sign posts:
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/244737/95160dbd-2cfc-4535-a42a-59f78db48908/Signs.gif
Triggers
You can walk through a trigger to...trigger an event. Here are a few of those:
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/244737/2c0c8521-f2d5-4d13-9f2c-b00e5488fc5f/Triggers.gif
Got a TL;DR?
Here's a somewhat dated gameplay demo from a few months ago that has most of what I talked about:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxmmCzi9pas
What's next?
At this point I want to build out the first level of the game before I start working on the battle system. I'm so psyched for making the battle system. I took a 3D modelling class in my last semester of college and I'm pretty stoked to be able to use that experience (along with my experience making maps and shit for HL2) to create some awesome 3D backgrounds for the battles.
I'd love to get your guys' feedback on what I have so far and what you like / what I could improve on. I posted it over on Reddit's Unity 2D subreddit and they seemed to really enjoy it which was great motivation to keep working on it.
I never played Shining Force, but this looks like a cool project. I like the dialog system
Your grid is really low res, threaded pathfinding shouldn't be needed anyways
I thought so too, but there's a pretty noticeable stutter when the grid collision mesh is recalculated (when a NPC moves, a gameobject is enabled/disabled, etc.). I'm pretty sure it's because it's on the same thread as the rest of the game. But maybe it's just because the plugin I have isn't very lightweight. I'll have to investigate more.
Ah, there should be a really easy and fast way to flag individual points on the grid without recalculating the entire thing. It's possible the plugin's threading will only be utilized for processing paths, since graphs are generally calculated once then tweaked during gameplay.
I really like the UI a lot! It's really sleek, definitely good job on that!
However I feel like the character sprites seem to clash aesthetically with that UI. They seem low res while the UI is clean/HD. Are they just placeholders for now?
They're totally placeholders. I'm about the furthest thing away from an artist (but I can make a mean UI, go figure right?) so I'm waiting on my "artist" to draw some chibi forms to plop in the world.
I've spent more time focusing on coding and UI that artwork is just "one of those things" I'm gonna get to lol
Alright, cool! Definitely doing good so far, I'll be following your progress on this 👍
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