Building an RPG engine in GML

[charon the ferryman]

I've had this idea for an RPG engine for a while so I've started building it out. I'm using GS sprites for the visuals since it will use a similar graphics engine for the battles.

Currently I just have the basic rotation effect working, but it's pretty rad. I have it for download here.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/am7kanqpujj5rj9/gsdemo.zip?dl=0

File's still uploading while I write this but yeah.

[Salanewt]

Nice work! I do believe I will take a look pretty soon, provided I don't forget.  

Are you planning a whole new game with this engine?

Edit: Took a look, and it seems like a nice start! For those who decide to check it out and can't understand it, the speed of your mouse decides how much the camera will spin (and how fast). Horizontal movement.

[charon the ferryman]

Yeah, I'm building a game out, I just want to have the basic animation functions for battle ready. Currently I have the following working:

> Camera rotation (fixed a lot of the issues)
> jumping
> Zoom for critical hits (sort of working, still need to figure out how to center the camera

Once I finish doing moving from one character towards another, I can set up basic attack animations and start building the actually battle engine. The stats are there but they don't really do anything.

[charon the ferryman]

Update:

Working on attacking animations right now, but I got this humerous bug:



Clearly that jupiter djinni just wants to get out of there.

[Salanewt]

Well yeah, they have been stuck in that room for days now. :P

Looking good! I'm also pretty excited to see what sort of game you're planning with this engine; should be fun.

[charon the ferryman]

Alright, I've updated the link again. New features:

- Title screen with music.
- Jumping attack with critical animation.
- Battle entrance animation by pressing enter.
- Showing a little off with the music engine changing songs.
- Restart the demo by pressing shift.

EDIT: Totally forgot this forum had an upload feature lol

[Salanewt]

Going to check it out later, but I already downloaded; looks good so far!

Also lol, yeah. Uploading is fun. :P

[charon the ferryman]

Updated the dropbox link again, if you really need the old version, you can download it from the above posts.

Updates:
- Have attack animation. You have to press enter twice to get through it entirely.
- Expanded sprites and backgrounds by 4 times, they will be replaced by the next release
- Names above the Battlers (representing their future sprites)
- Text below the battle scene
- Locks rotation when attacking.

There are some bugs regarding depth, shadows and some attack angles and the critical hit I'd like to work out a bit better. But it's looking a lot better than before.

I'll update this post with some pics of it in action.

EDIT: Images

The game's tentative name is currently "Colors".

[spoiler]
Title Screen


Enter Battle


Attack

[/spoiler]

[Salanewt]

Looking good! I just tried it out, and everything seems to work okay enough as well.

[charon the ferryman]

Here's a preview with some new sprites.

[Salanewt]

Looking good! An army of Mikes and a Uniwyvern?

[charon the ferryman]

Right now I'm working on getting the stats to load into their proper places. Since there's no real general party objects defined yet, the party just spawns a bunch of empty battlers, which defaults to Mike.

The birds are called "Skullbird" and the Unicorn thing is called "Tricorn".

[Salanewt]

Awesome, nice work! I'm really interested in seeing how this develops; the "aura" in the upper left in particular.

[Luna_blade]

Great stuff.

[charon the ferryman]

To answer your question Salanewt, the Aura colour is a colour that is used for your team's "aura", which is a combination of the colours in your party.

The algorithm is this:

If the colour's individual red/green/blue values are under 127, it subtracts from the current value. Otherwise it adds x - 127 to the current colour. It clamps between 0 and 255.

The closer each red/green/blue value is to either 0 or 255, the more of a stat boost you get, depending on what value it is. It goes up to 7 and applies to attack, defense, magic, resistance, agility and MP recovery.

In addition, if the aura colour is in a certain range, you also get special field effects that correlate with that colour's element. For example, red burns all non-fire type opponents for burn damage at the end of each turn.

There are two ways to change colour in battle.

Basically, each team has a colour modifier list, that you can add new colours to. It applies the same algorithm, in order, from the team's base colour calculated at the beginning of the battle through all the colours in this list.

You can add colours to your team by "dipping the paint", which adds the character's colour value to the current aura. Or, your enemy can "throw the paint" at you, which will add their aura colour to yours. Some monsters have special abilities that can add colours to your or their aura as well.

The catch - you can't see your opponent's aura and vice versa. You can only tell what it approximately is from the elemental field effects that are applied.

The colour changing effects decay after 2 turns, and only one member of either team can "dip the paint" or "throw the paint" a turn (however any other effect that adds colours can still apply)

In addition, each character has a weapon that basically adds a special chance effect to their ordinary attack. For example, people with canes have a chance to attack 3 times in a row, swords can cause the bleed status while guns can cause an enemy to flinch.

[Salanewt]

Okay, cool. I think I actually remember you discussing this colour thing over Skype a long time ago; maybe over a year ago now? Pretty neat to see it coming to fruition, so good luck with that.

Any progress updates?

[charon the ferryman]

You're totally right Sala, its the same thing. I've worked out a lot of the issues, and I've got the plotlines for the main characters set up. I've also thought of a few different ways the story can play out, so there are different paths (there's currently a 100% ending, a regular ending and a genocide ending).

The basic plotline is that you play as Black, and since black is #000000, in that culture that's really bad because essentially you can't predict your future. It's explained in more detail once I get the demo up. Anyways, your friend Red, who also faces discrimination because of the colour of his soul, discusses with you some of the problems with this and wishes for a world without colour. Well, the next morning you wake up, and all the colour is gone! Only the people who can "dip the paint", or touch the colours of their souls, are able to get out of bed. So you and Red go on a mission to discover why and see what can be done about the situation... as well as reversing society's trend of discrimination.

I'll have something out tonight most likely. I currently just got the colour thing working, but there's a bug where the display counter does this annoying thing where if it's 255 it goes to 0 and vice versa.

I REALLY wanna see if I can get the battle workflow running by the end of the week though. That'd be awesome.

Also, there's a new enemy. Meet Dipper:

[Salanewt]

Sweet, nice work! Sounds like an interesting story as well. I'm particularly curious about the genocide ending now, given that one of my new favourite games has something similar and this makes me wonder if there's a connection between the two. :P

Also, Dipper is cute.

[charon the ferryman]

Here's some progress I made:

The aura now updates properly, and depending on what your aura is when you enter battle, the music changes instruments!

colour update demonstration

song change demonstration

Oh, and the background track for the battle theme, for your listening enjoyment:

[Luna_blade]

You're totally right Sala, its the same thing. I've worked out a lot of the issues, and I've got the plotlines for the main characters set up. I've also thought of a few different ways the story can play out, so there are different paths (there's currently a 100% ending, a regular ending and a genocide ending).

The basic plotline is that you play as Black, and since black is #000000, in that culture that's really bad because essentially you can't predict your future. It's explained in more detail once I get the demo up. Anyways, your friend Red, who also faces discrimination because of the colour of his soul, discusses with you some of the problems with this and wishes for a world without colour. Well, the next morning you wake up, and all the colour is gone! Only the people who can "dip the paint", or touch the colours of their souls, are able to get out of bed. So you and Red go on a mission to discover why and see what can be done about the situation... as well as reversing society's trend of discrimination.

I'll have something out tonight most likely. I currently just got the colour thing working, but there's a bug where the display counter does this annoying thing where if it's 255 it goes to 0 and vice versa.

Damn, that sounds interesting. Is it going to be an abstract game or something?