WeaponBirth: Ferrum Anima

I haven't made an update in a while since I didn't feel like posting while I was moving my project. First, the '1' key on my netbook doesn't work anymore and it's not exactly the best thing to happen to a programmer. Sure enough, school has finished (with painful grades this time) and summer has begun. There's still going to be lots of stuff in my life during the summer but it's not going to stop me. I wrote an entire compiler for this engine whilst studying for finals, why would life stop me now?

You can see the resulting picture in the images. You also get to see me apply the graphics to the dialog from the previous Mk. I engine. It might be a nice thing that I can legally own a copy of Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Professional at no cost (I think the thing was thousands of dollars normally), it made the project hard to move. It's all moved and the results are satisfying. My desktop is overkill for running my engine, I can't even read the FPS count since it changes so fast around 900-1000 frames a second. You probably can't buy a monitor with a refresh rate that high. I'll have to be careful when programming so that I don't break my low-end specs (low-end specs allows me to still play this game on a netbook).

Once I get the annoying issue of {} matching out of the way (so I can have if statements effect more than one line of code and nest them) I'm pretty much nearly done with the engine period. If you think about it, battles are nothing more than a "minigame" in terms of an RPG- the whole important part of an RPG is the event system in which the story and gameplay progresses. My time will be spent just adding and tweaking the features to make a WeaponSoul game.

It's really annoying though, I might draw some more concepts before tackling it (eventually I'll have to sit and plan out the first part anyway).

This time I'm going to post a bit of background information I have so far. I go on often about the engine and workings but I haven't really told you about the story. Don't worry, how can there be spoilers to a story that isn't written yet!?


The game begins in a place labeled "Gray Rock" as the player emerges from a place deep in a crevice. I tend to like disorienting intros like this which match up with the player themselves having no knowledge of anything. It's not a case of amnesia, Tetsumori is about as pristine and innocent as any animal. She doesn't know any languages, but she is the only character the player will get to see the thoughts to. In the beginning it's really mostly just her, but when she meets people you can see what she is thinking when she desperately tries to communicate with people.

Now the name "Gray Rock" isn't actually what the place is called. All locations you find are what Tetsumori knows- that is "Gray Rock" is the label for the place because that's what Tetsumori thinks it looks like. Until you learn the proper name for any place, it will be labeled as whatever Tetsumori thinks it should be called. It's much better than just "???" since I think I would run out of question marks if I did that.

In the beginning she just wanders twords something that sort of just pulls her forward. It's really the only thing that could possibly be in her mind and she's sensitive to magnetic fields (just like some marine life on Earth does as a direction map). Of course it's going to be that over-sized magnet she "carries" around. I'm not sure if you'll see it when walking around, but in battle it floats behind her back until you attack with it.

Ever notice how you just happen to know which way is north in RPG games without having a compass in your inventory? Tetsumori doesn't need a compass or anything like a homing pidgeon, but compass directions aren't important in this game since it's a top-down perspective and the camera never rotates in the pan direction.

Now I've got this whole perception system I'm going to add. Like a chat window of sorts, you'll see notices and stuff appear at the bottom left of the screen. This is for anything you hear, feel, think, etc. and is related to the main character you play as. You have really sharp senses (except vision) so you'll be able to tell things about the maps you're on and use the clues to find any hidden stuff. It will also be where you overhear NPC dialogs.

As a person, Tetsumori is intelligent, durable, and sharp. She gets more HP and Power as well as good accuracy. Lots of attacks she can use on dodgy characters because they never miss (you are never free of the influence of gravity or magnetism as you would have to be infinitely far away from the source to be free). Of course you can just run up and claw at or punch your enemies. Even without the magnet she can still have impact to her hands using power. She isn't really that strong or fast though, she isn't slow either. Electricity just deflects off of her, but other dark type attacks would still do normal damage.

She's not one of those stereotypical pretty lead female protagonist characters you see all the time, she's kind of rugged. She's got only the primal sense of compassion and love that come with naturalistic morals that are present in many different animals- so she's not evil or anything. Think of a not-so-hairy caveperson that is actually pretty intelligent. She can use different methods to get across her ideas without conventional languages, but she eventually learns to speak.

The latest picture is me working on Mark II of the WeaponBirth engine. This version is much better than the last and it's going really smoothly. I just need to activate my WeaponBirth Event Binary Executable Interpreter so that the events begin to run their assigned scripts from the RPG Binary. This engine is far more capable than the last and much more of it is written in C/C++ than the last.

The new interface engine is more capable than the last and lets me easily write complicated GUI elements and features such as variable-width fonts and compounded panels. With the power of good old C/C++, I can easily manipulate hundreds of panels and bitmaps to create the new GUI. Not only that, but this version also includes an auto-resource compiler.

Unlike the RPG Maker series of engines, you can actually arbitrarily drop resources into the different folders and the engine automatically converts them all into a lump of resources ready for use. Each release has all of its converted resources in the "bin" folder.

Finally, this time around the engine can easily be plugged into many Acknex 6.60 and above projects. The only thing you have to do is load the .wdl files for the plugin and make your levels according to the engine. The scripting system compiles the actual RPG game events themselves into a binary making it harder for someone to modify the game in an editor and cheat or to find out secrets the easy way.

Once the event system is alive and well, I plan on releasing a series of debugger demos. Note that these demos tend to run at very low FPS in debug mode with that wall of text indicating engine stats you see in the latest screenshot.

The laptop and environment I use for making 3D games is out of commission and I won't have the time to be working on this for a long time. I'll be focusing everything back into NovaForce- I need to get that project going.

Like I could wait to work on this game, when things are beginning to get interesting! I've been working on the dialog boxes, which are very very important in any RPG for advancing the story. Even when your characters actually speak, it's important to have text on the screen to caption what people say and your responses to them for complete comprehension. Nothing is worse than not hearing an NPC and wondering what they just said. My game won't have voice acting (of course) but dialog boxes are still important.



Even... I.... Was guilty.... Of slow text at some point. It actually ruins the entire feeling you've built up and hurts the rhythm of the game. Some people actually want to read the text while it zips and scrolls, others want to read the text as fast as possible- as fast as they read fantasy novels. Every part of my game may be programmed in a very crude fashion, but the design for it must be carefully thought out. One mistake may ruin the entire game if made in such an important system as dialog.

My solution to this common problem is what you typically see in any good Japanese style RPG. First off, people need a text speed setting in their game and RM2K/3 will not give it to you (easily). I only have two speeds, scrolling and instant. The scrolling speed is pretty fast all on its own, by the time you read half the text the dialog was waiting for you to press the OK button. Instant just smashes the text on the screen.

Pauses do add emphasis to the emotions on a character, but it helps to have emoticon effect for sprite games like this. However, if the player wants instant text splatter, they could care less if they didn't care that they have to sit through all the dramatic pauses. My dialog only has one type of short pause, which is very quick and will do the trick. In instant mode, all the pauses are skipped and the text is just there. Emoticons still show though (and unlike RM2K/3 you can have thousands of emoticon effects playing at one time if you were insane enough).

The one thing you should NEVER do and ended up being a horrible idea in dialog is the input pause. It can be confusing if the text just stops and you realize you need to push OK again. Plus it's annoying because now the instant text player is mashing their OK button and begins to not care what anyone is saying- only that they are saying it in the most annoying fashion possible. Use a short pause if you must. Commercial games were guilty of this too. It's not even OK if instant skips input pauses because it's just overall annoying to read (and to test, mind you).

One thing I'm not sure I will implement (but I want to) is a really great replacement for pauses. TEXT EFFECTS. Read it ^^, games like Breath of Fire 3 had fun effects where the text would jiggle around, explode and grow and return to normal size which both added greatly to emotion without resorting to pauses. You can't easily do this in RM2K/3 and it's probably a big scripting job in XP/VX but if you can do it DO IT. I just know after saying this that you will not let me get away with not having text effects and resorting to pauses instead. Instant mode will have to skip this fun, but they might consider reading it in scrolling mode if the text does funny things. Comic books do it, and it works out great (though I might still do both effects and short pauses).

Highlighting is OK, but it is no replacement for inexplicable dialog. If the user could not understand what the important people/places/things/ideas were from normal text, highlighting it will not help. and () are cheap ways of emphasizing important nouns, but again, it won't fix confusing dialog. If you are bad at explaining key gameplay points in the dialog to direct the player, try using pretty pictures to aid them. Diagrams, pictures, cues, and anything else also help international players. What if English isn't exactly their main language, it helps if the game makes an attempt to illustrate what it is talking about for you. An amazing game is a game where you could replace the text with BLEH BLEH BLEH and would still at least know what the next gameplay element is because of intelligent direction.

Anyway, if you actually read all of this, just remember that slow text speed kills.