Development Progress Week 7

Hi guys, Monkeydlu here.

I've made a good amount of progress again since last time, and the week isn't even over yet!

Spring break is coming up soon, so hopefully I'll be getting some decent work in on this project.

Anyways, I'm glad to say the battle system is coming along somewhat nicely!

things completed since last time:
-Unit representations on the battle grid completed.
-Battle map grid reworked to be handled differently with more accessibility.
-created linking methods between tiles, and if their occupied.
-created the move command for player units.

though although so far all I have is the movement system implemented, it's still pretty neat!

It sets up the basics so that attacks and skills and items can come much easier. Hopefully by the end of this weekend I'll have attack figured out. 

After that will come the enemy ai, and of course the enemy data base itself. 

After that, which should be somewhere around after spring break, will come setting up the custom sprite sheets and animations, still using place holders of course :(

but Skills and Items will come last. I will probably move on to work on the character status screen and dungeon progression before working on those. 

Anyways, I made a short little video showing off some game play for the first time, hope you enjoy! I'm excited about this project, it's starting to come together a bit finally!

Development Progress Week 6

Hi guys, Monkeydlu here

Ok, so I am disregarding the week of the Asian New Years Festival performance, because I just simply did not have time to touch this project at all, but since this the past week I have been doing at least a decent amount of work.

Anyways, things I've done since last time:

-got the battle layer to successfully generate itself.
-cleaned up a few more errors on dungeon map generation.
-started rouge ideas of character unit management and battle system management.

hmmm, but I guess thats it. Not alot to show for two whole weeks, I know, but hopefully the next week will be much much better. I plan on getting the battle system to be up and running by at least the end of Spring break.

After that, the last major item on hand is pretty much enemy AI, and the game will have a working skeleton.

As  a side note, I did dedicate some time this week to cleaning up my former project, a ERS Battle game, giving it some clean up and borrowing some graphics from The World Ends With You (Best game on the DS ever made btw)

I'm still currently looking for artists, so if you know any that might be interested in doing art for video games, please tell them to send me a e-mail at MingYang.Lu@Vanderbilt.edu

Thanks!

Development Progress Week 5

Monkeydlu here, progress has been slow due to other school related duties as well as Asian New Year festival preparations, as well as Fire Emblem Awakening being released for the 3ds (Best game of the year, go play it!)

Completed since last time:

- Dungeon Map exploration cleaned up
- Battle Scene calling
- Base skeleton class for enemies
- Reworked character class for battle system

And thats pretty much it. Not a lot of work unfortunately. I wish I could say this week will be different, but it might be even worse because of Asian New Year Festival here at school (which I am a performer for.)

No screen shots this time! :(

Battle System Mock Up and Info on the Game

Hi guys, I've started coding the battle system yesterday, and after playing around with a few mock ups, I think I've finally come to a battle system design that I really like. Heres the mock up :D

So, in this game, your characters never "level up", rather, they progress through the continuous fusing of "Colored Souls" to a particular character. There are 5 colors for the souls, RED, GREEN, YELLOW, BLUE, and PURPLE. These souls will be collected from every enemy, and also as treasure. They can also be offered at alters in order to heal your party, so you need to balance between using the souls to strengthen your characters, and using the souls to keep your party healthy.

All classes start off with a specific spectrum for their colors, valuing 5-1 for each color.

Each of these colors then, also represents a statistic of that character. Red is Strength. Green is Vitality. Yellow is Agility. Blue is Wisdom. Purple is Dexterity.

The calculations for this game will be somewhat of a hybrid between the formulas of Fire Emblem, and Etrian Odyssey 3, so go look them up if you're interested :)

ANYWAYS, about this mock up.

The battle system will be, as you can see, a tactical battle system.

It will use input very similar to that of Final Fantasy IV, or a more recent example, FTL.

Basically, all of your characters will have a "charge" bar, standardized to 5 seconds. Each character has a modifier attribute, that will range from 60% to 140% of that 5 seconds. When the character is charged, you can tap that character to pause the game, and input commands for that character.

You do not have to tap a character immediately when he/she is finished charging, and in fact, thats the main reason I went with this system, but there are a lot of different strategies which would require the delaying of commands in order to make sure things happen in certain orders.

Anyways, more info will be revealed later on, but as for why there are colors on the hex grids!

The colors of course represent the 5 color system the game uses. When a character, or enemy, is standing on top of a hex, the stat of that color is going to be increased by a percentage for that character.

As to what the percentage will be. The outer ring will get a 20% increase, so a STR of 10 will become 12 on a red tile. The inner ring will get a 40% increase. And finally the middle tile alone will get a 60% increase!

This is pretty important, because this means gaining the middle ground can lead to huge rewards, but also put that character in the most danger. This also gives worth to characters who specialize in not combat but the manipulation of grid colors.

Anyways, that is all! Hope you enjoyed the update :)

Development Progress week 4

Hi, Monkeydlu here, and here is the first progress update post :)

Completed since last time: (even though this is the first post lol)

- Finished the object classes for characters. 

- Finished character selection screen. Player has a party of 3 characters. 15 classes male/female. 

- Finished storing player party and the basic gameplay scene. 

- Finished dungeon generation and basic exploration. 4x4 grid map of 12 rooms (4 empty). 

The way dungeon exploration will work is the dungeon is randomly generated, there are 12 rooms, and 1 starting room. You can explore rooms that are immediately next to rooms already explored, and you progress through the floor that way. This idea was inspired by Dungelot, though originally the dungeon exploration was going to be very similar to that of Binding of Issac, after playing dungelot, I decided that this method of exploration is much better for a simpler rpg, especially one on the iphone touch screen. 

Dungelot is a really neat little iphone rogue like that I do recommend at least playing the free version for. It's not a very deep game, but it's fun, easy, and very quick to play. It's a game of repetitive grinding, but it's presented in a very fun an crisp way thats definitely perfect for the smartphone. 

Also Binding of Issac, you should know it already, if not, google, and then get, and then play :D

Screen shots!

(all images stolen from the wonderful game series Odyssey. Etrian Odyssey 4 is coming soon guys! It's an awesome dungeon crawler series and totally recommended if you like NUMBER CRUNCHING lol)