PROGRESS JOURNAL: MENUS

Wow, it’s been a while since the last one of these.

I’ve got a good excuse for some of that time. My sister had a baby, and I was visiting with her and her husband. But for the rest of it, I’ve just been working. And I just finished a new TURBU build and put it up waiting on the Downloads page.

After completing The Frozen World, I’ve been working on playing through Love and War. It’s been really good for progress on the game engine, since I keep running into new issues in the scripting system and figuring out how to fix them. Right now, I’ve gotten as far as the second delivery mission, and fixed a ton of bugs.

I’ve also added a new feature since the last update: the menu system. Right now, the main menu will come up as expected, and the Items, Skills and Equipment menus have been implemented. Save and End Game currently do nothing, and I haven’t gotten around to any of the menus introduced in RM 2003 yet.

Next up are the Save menu and the Shop system, which is essentially a menu as well. I plan on following the RPG Maker model pretty closely, except that I’m going to add a feature to the Shop menu that it always bugged me that RPG Maker didn’t have: Equip.

After that, the script system will be pretty much complete, at least for Phase 1: achieving parity with RM2K. In Phase 2, I plan to move a lot of the things that are currently handled by the game engine into scripts, so that developers will be able to customize and extend things a lot more deeply than they’re currently able to. For example, defining custom transitions, new menus, or new character, monster and item attributes. But that will have to wait until after I finish the core feature set.

After I finish the menus, next up will be the battle system, finally. I’ll implement a RM2K battle system, and then I’ll work on menus and then a battle system for RM2K3. When those are done, we’ll have a complete game engine! Then all that will be left will be to finish up the missing features in the editor.

This is an exciting time, being so close to finishing! Hopefully I’ll be able to keep making progress at a good pace!