Hello everyone. I made another update to the demo. Current version is 1.3 -- if you've played through already on an earlier version, there isn't much more to see. This just fixes some critical bugs, cleans up some UI stuff, and reworks some dungeon puzzles/logic in the Waterworks.

Cheers!

The demo for the Looming Spire has been released!

The demo consists of about 3-5 hours of playtime, depending how much you wander around. There are two major bosses to fight, three full areas to explore, tons of treasure to find, lots of monsters to fight, and a handful of puzzles to solve.

It's taken me too long to let this game be played by people. I hope you enjoy. But even if you don't, please do let me know you played the game, either by commenting here, or on the game page, or by sending me a message, or @-ing me on Twitter or the RMN discord or by finding me in real life, tapping me on the shoulder and saying "your game sucks/rules" (just kidding plz do not try to find me irl)

Much love. This is only the beginning.

Okay, so with this blog I'm going to dive a bit deep. The combat in The Looming Spire has been something that has plagued me as a developer in the time I have worked on this project, and I've wanted to -- for a long time -- break down the elements of its combat system in blog form. But to do that, I need to get into the history of this game a bit. So, here goes.

This game started out as a tech demo in 2009/2010. Rpg Maker VX was the hotness at the time, but I, as someone who had not yet learned how to write code, was incredible frustrated at the impotence of its event editor. Compared to an older tool (Rpg Maker 2003), the capability of the event system felt gutted and hollow. I think the rationale was (and still is!) that if scripting is introduced, events no longer need the technical power that 2003 provided. And to some degree, that's true. Scripting has been a very powerful and necessary component to introduce to the Rpg Maker series, but gutting the event editor left people like myself -- who really really enjoyed building crazy things with the event system -- in the lurch.

So I decided, for fun to go back and make something out of the old tool I loved and spent way too much time on growing up, RM2k3. The concept was simple -- you are a guy with a sword. You bump into a monster, battle starts right there on the map. You take turns attacking each other until one of you dies. The end. That was the entire conceit of the battle system.

Once I got a working prototype of that thing, I decided to try adding some more stuff. Obviously, items had to be included. Need to make potions. Magic seemed like a cool idea. How about multiple enemies? How do we learn magic, by the way? What other items should we add? Oh, maybe something to heal status effects... guess we should add status effects. On an on -- the evolution of the combat system, which was the entire game at the time, was pretty organic in this way. Eventually, there was this idea of making a dungeon crawler, with a UI where your HP was on screen at all times, and you could use magic to manipulate the environment and solve puzzles.

Eventually an event on RMN called "Release Something!" came around, which prompted me to release a small technical demo, and create this very gamepage. The demo wasn't much more than 6 small rooms and some monsters to beat up. But it was received pretty well and I thought, hey what the heck, why not try to make a full game like this? And thus, it began.

But, as you can imagine, the organic growth and design of this game was not sustainable. To make this idea last the entire length of a video game, it needed more substance. Decisions that were made early on in development no longer made sense and had to be re-designed. Lots of really insane implementation details needed to be addressed. I won't get into the technical details too deeply (the entire battle engine and more has been completely rewritten... at least twice) but I am going to try to explain what my design philosophy has been, where some of the pain lies, and the state of the game's combat as it exists today.

So first...

Design Philosophy

My design philosophy, in much of anything I create, has always been about constraints. Often, the constraints of the medium can lead to work that really branches out, explores and pushes the boundaries of those constraints as far as they'll go, whereas another medium with far less constraints might encourage someone (like myself) to feel more at home playing it safe, or worse, adopting a "kitchen sink" approach to your game design. Not too much or too little; with the right constraints, you are merely outlining what you desire to accomplish.

There are two kinds of constraints at play here: technical and self-imposed.

The technical constraints here are kind of obvious from the get-go: this is a game made in Rpg Maker 2003. And for all the love I have for this tool, the amount of effort required to produce meaningful results on this engine is a bit absurd. But this means the entire battle system is cobbled together using events only, using pictures to display UI elements and other things. This isn't the first time something like this has been built using this tool, and I don't think it'll be the last either. And perhaps I'm crazy for continuing with it after twelve years. But... well, yeah.

Secondly, self-imposed constraints. Here's where I get a bit philosophical. Despite having spent a helluva lot of time on the combat system, tweaking elements here and there, designing enemies & abilities, setting up battles, re-writing tons of things... I've never wanted the combat in this game to be the star of the show. I've always wanted the game to feel more like an adventure game, akin more to a Zelda, Metroid, Castlevania, etc, rather than your standard JRPG. I just thought, what if Link to the Past had a turn-based combat system? What would it need to be to evoke the same feeling as those games? I would later play a game called Vagrant Story, and realize my vision was closer to that game than anything else, albeit I'm aiming for much simpler and more strictly turn-based. I digress -- the point here is that I always wanted the Looming Spire to be a single-character RPG with turn-based combat, where combat is a meaningful element of the overall challenge, always fast-paced yet impactful, but never feeling too oppressive. As such, battles never have more than three enemies.

Alright, so with those ideas in mind.... Why is this blog post so long already?

Evolution of the Battle System

Let's take a look at how the battle system has evolved over time.



2010





Early on, the battles were exactly as described above. You bump into a slime, and a small menu pops up right next to the hero, allowing you to choose "Fight" "Skill" and "Item". If I recall, back then, "Skill" allowed you to use whatever runes you had equipped (the lightning bolt on the lower-left side of the screenshot is one of the equipped runes), each rune having a single corresponding ability. I'm going to be completely honest though, I don't remember the details of how it worked this early on. I do wish I had a copy of this first download, would be fun to look back on.





Things evolved a bit over the coming months. The HUD changed, for one. Magic was learned by "leveling up" your runes, and this is where the rune system was starting to take shape.

For each rune (Fire, Frost, Sky, Earth, Light, Void), there are base elemental spells, i.e. three fire spells, three frost spells, etc.
On top of that, there is one spell for each pair of runes: one fire+frost spell, one fire+sky spell, one frost+sky spell, etc. These are known as doublespells.
Finally, there are four triplespells that can be learned, which is a spell that combines the power of three different runes.

Each of these spells were learned naturally, as you levelled up your runes. Level 1 gives a spell, level 2 gives a spell, level 3 enables learning doublespells, level 4 learns a spell, and level 5 enables learning triplespells. Back then, there was still an MP system, and casting a spell cost MP.



2011



On the next iteration, timed hits were introduced. Well, in a limited capacity. You can perform a "timed hit", which is pressing the confirm button right as you land an attack with your sword. This was to spice up things a bit, to make the basic attack maneuver feel a little more involved. It's one of the few features that has gone relatively unchanged as the battle system has evolved.



2014



At this point is where the game began to run into development hell, something I might write a blog about someday when I finish this damn game. But as you can see, the HUD has relatively gone unchanged -- an update to the character was made, but that's about it. Development slowed to a crawl, but even slower was development of the battle system -- there were some fundamental flaws in how I was building things that made changing anything extremely time-consuming and difficult, and sapped my motivation away. I didn't know enough about how to build and maintain a large project like this at the time!

And it was at this point that development of this game would lapse, on and off, for years at a time. I'd work on the game for a couple months, little bits here and there really, and then just drop it, feeling too overwhelmed with the idea that it is a waste of time. Perhaps, in a sense, that is true, but I think viewing it as an absolute like that came from a lack of perspective on my part. As I've gotten older, I find the only things worth spending your time on are the things that make you happy. Though I might gripe about it, making this game comes from a place of love, and I get excited making things work with it. I'm pretty much making it only for myself. Okay okay, I'm getting off track again.



2019



This here is, I believe, the third time the battle engine was re-written. And I mean, fully re-written. At this point in development, the steam version of RPG Maker 2003 had been released, and I began taking advantage of its new features, and that meant tackling the behemoth of revisiting a lot of old code. Things were trucking along!

The rune system was reworked quite a bit. Rather than learning spells through levelling, things were altered to grant three base element spells with each rune, and learning double/triple spells comes about by "finding" them in the dungeon. At this point, you can still level up your runes, but all it does is increase the damage/effectiveness of spells, no new abilities are acquired.

Otherwise, things were mostly the same! Timed hits still exist, enemies are largely unchanged.



2021



Later on, the UI was changed QUITE a bit, and the "energy" system was introduced. No longer does your hero have MP. You start the battle with 0 energy, but at the start of each turn, you gain 2 energy. Attacking costs 1 energy, and each timed hit costs another energy, up to 3. Spells each have a fixed energy cost, and using an item or passing your turn costs zero energy.

Also, a "parry" system was added. The idea here was to allow for players to avoid more combat than they had to -- to avoid the need for the player to grind experience. If you can parry well, you can cruise through the game!

This worked... sorta OK. To parry, you could press SHIFT to lift up your sword in a defensive stance between your turns. If the enemy attacked you while holding up your sword, you got a chance to parry. While holding up your sword, your turn meter doesn't increase at all. When you parry, you gain an extra energy point!

At first, if the enemy attacked while holding your sword up, you parry. This felt both busted and bad at the same time. Due to how the combat engine was built, the enemy's attack animation happens outside of the event loop in which you can lift up your sword, so parrying in a reflexive manner was not possible; you had to fully anticipate when the enemy would attack. But if you could do that (and it wasn't hard to do, honestly), then you could avoid almost all damage an enemy puts out, outside of spell damage.

So, to add a little more depth, this "parry meter" was added. When you perform a parry, a cursor will be sent careening down a bar passing by small red balls on its way. If you press the CONFIRM button while the cursor is on the balls, you will break them. Break them all, and you successfully perform a parry. This still had the issue of the player needing to fully anticipate the enemy's attack, which felt weird and bad, in my opinion. However, it was still kinda cool and worked fairly well, and created a skill window that could allow a skilled player to bend the game over their knee.

But now, finally...



Where things are now

2022



This is where combat is today. The parry system was reworked -- now players will get a chance to parry EVERY attack, regardless of whether or not they held up their sword in anticipation. And the parry event was completely changed: now it depicts the player character facing down some projectiles.

The player can choose to
1) soak the projectile (taking full damage)
2) Block the projectile (hold the defend button and take half damage, and reducing the Guard meter -- if the guard meter "breaks", you can't defend until it recovers)
3) Parry the projectile (press the defend button right as the projectile lands to parry it)

Parrying all the projectiles for a given attack will net you one extra energy point. Every enemy has their own unique projectile pattern!





I think the combat is in a fairly good spot. There are a few more features that I've kinda glossed over that get shown in that last video:

• Status effects! The player can be poisoned, disarmed, silenced, a whole slew of other things. The player can similarly receive buffs to their attack, speed, etc. They show up in the left-hand side.
• Wards, a type of spell that when cast, places a "ward" on the battlefield (shows up on the left with a "crystal" icon). The player can have at most three wards in play, which trigger their effect at the start of each of the players' turns. Some spells have different effects based on the number of wards in play!
  
• Equipment! Boy, a whole blog could probably be written about this alone, but the player has access to armor, helmets, and rings. Armor increases stats (like DEF, INT, etc), helmets provide effects that trigger when attacked, and rings provide effects that trigger when you land an attack. The player can also upgrade their sword using an item called Runic Ore, found throughout the Spire.
  
• Enemy states! Enemies can respond to specific attacks, have a "final breath" attack when dying, and can change their behavior in response to specific conditions. For example, there's a robot enemy who, when attacked with an electric move, will go into a "charged" state and start slinging powerful electric abilities.
  
• And more!
  

Alright, I think that's all I really have on this subject.
In the near future, I need to make updates to how Runes are "leveled", since a flat leveling curve no longer really makes sense, and introduces issues that come with how the progression of this game is laid out. But beyond that, this is the battle system!

Thanks, let me know your thoughts.

In the Looming Spire, the hero will come across lots of unique and useful gear. Equipment for protection, rings and helmets for combat utility, and magic runes that allow the user to cast magic. The hero will also find what are known as Relics, which are unique tools that allow the hero to perform unique abilities outside of combat. Once equipped, the player can press SHIFT to use the Relic. Some relics can't be equipped, but will provide passive benefits.

Let's get into it, shall we?

Charge Boots Take off at amazing speeds! With the Charge Boots equipped, hold down the SHIFT key to build power. Release the button to get sent flying! The Charge Boots allow you to fly past crumbling bridges, and break straight through certain barriers.

Cloner Prepare to meet your match! Literally. With the Cloner, the Hero can magically fabricate a statue-like facsimilie of himself. The statue can be pushed and pulled, and used to weigh down switches or block enemies.

Truesight Stone See what the eyes can't! With the Truesight Stone equipped, pressing the SHIFT key will reveal all hidden passages in the room.

Swim Gear Get your sea legs moving! No need to equip this one. The Swim Gear allows the hero to enter into pools of water at designated swimming entrances (i.e. stairs) with a press of the Z key. Use this relic to access previously unreachable areas.

Climbing Gloves Finally! With the Climbing Gloves at your disposal, climb any wall! Simply walk up to a wall and press the SHIFT key while the relic is equipped, and begin scaling the wall. Use this to climb up and down platforms, scale across into unreachable areas, and avoid traps and enemies!

In the game, there are twelve relics in all. We covered just under half of them here in this blog. Some of the other relics have various effects like making monsters ignore you, giving you a shield against environmental hazards, or teleporting you to the beginning of the room.

There are also ways to combine the functionality of certain relics. One notable such instance is using the climbing gloves to climb down into water, allowing the hero to swim in water inaccessible otherwise!

Thanks for reading!

Warning: this blog has no screenshots, because I don't have too much to show at the moment. If you want a TL;DR, scroll to the bottom.

Let me preface what I'm about to say with the fact that this project started in March of 2010. Add it up! That's nearly nine whole years ago. Lots of things in my life have changed since then, and the overall vision of this project has evolved and morphed into something a lot different than what I anticipated at the start.

Of course, with the project being old as it is, there were a LOT of questionable design decisions made way back when. Decisions that were mostly made on a whim, without a ton of thought behind them: Battle mechanics, menu design, overall narrative, etc. Furthermore, the event code that makes all these things run were, dare I say, completely unmaintainable. Way back when I started this thing, I maybe had the know-how to make things tick the right way, but I didn't have a clue about how to make things generic enough to be re-usable and/or extendable whatsoever. Small changes would be scoped to days worth of effort due to the nature of how things were cobbled together. Lots of copy and paste, everywhere. Lots of insider-knowledge stuff, things that were impossible to parse when trying to understand why things were made the way they were. As you can probably imagine, this made things extremely difficult when trying to make any meaningful headway in terms of development on this project.

It goes without saying: This project is old, and it's got a lot of cobwebs to clean out. But, it has so many neat ideas that I want to show everyone! I don't know if I could begin to quantify how many hours have been spent working on this thing. It hasn't been continuous over the last nine years (hell, not even the last one year) but it must be thousands of hours at this point. I was doing a lot of significant work on this game in 2017, but got sidetracked when some real-life stuff got in the way (including needing to find a new job... TWICE! frig), and so I let TLS fall to the wayside while I focused on getting my life in a good place. This has happened at least a few times over the last near-decade. But the thing is, when I'm not actively working in the editor, or drawing stupid little pixels, or making music, or whatever else, I'm just simply ruminating on The Looming Spire. I've scrawled out hundreds of tiny ideas in tons of little notebooks (many of which have been lost to the annals of time), storyboarded so many little story events, and constantly thought and re-thought so many details that are, at the moment, nothing but fragments of the ether in my crazy head. I have also, of course, given up on this project many many times. I just keep coming back to it. At this point, it's almost unhealthy. I can't keep it internal anymore.

So, that brings me to the purpose of this blog post. The Looming Spire will be finished this year.

There, I said it. It's going to be finished, come hell or high water. I can't keep dreaming of what this project could be, and I can't let all the work poured into this thing go to waste. Even if no one plays the damn thing, I want to see it completed. I'm doing this for me, to finally say I've finished something with pride. With that, my motto for this year is

2019: FINISH. THE. GAME.


Ok. So there's my announcement. But what about all that other stuff I was talking about? How the game is completely unmaintainable, impossible to work with, etc? Well, sometime in 2017 or so, well after RPG Maker 2003 was given an official english translation, Cherry made some incredibly significant updates to the engine that made development of this project SIGNIFICANTLY EASIER. (The primary change being that when referring to "This Event" in Common Events it refers to the last map event in the call stack, which, man, I cannot overstate how useful that is for what I'm doing specifically).

As a result, I spent a huge amount of time re-writing the battle engine for this game. Of course, while deep in the guts of this game's mechanics, I decided to re-think some initial design decisions made, and have since decided to re-tool almost the entire thing. The Rune system works well outside of combat for puzzle solving and stuff, but the way the mechanics were implemented within a combat setting were clunky and without a real purpose or intent in mind. Status effects were confusing and unintuitive. Battles overall were pretty brain-dead and didn't really try to do anything interesting. So I figure, if I'm going to make this thing work, I might as well make it the best it can be and really go for it.

At this point, I've got all the initial design documentation in place. I've already refactored the entire battle engine to be much much much easier to work with, with all the enemy and battle mechanics in one place instead of scattered amongst hundreds of maps. I've also added in some new features and mechanics that I will introduce in a later blog post. Lastly, I'm currently working on re-designing the menus so they are more intuitive and much more informative (which, again, thanks to Cherry's updates, this is a hell of a lot easier to accomplish).

TL;DR: It's been nine years, but the game will be finished this year even if it kills me. Much of the core gameplay event programming in this game had to be re-worked, but it is now a lot easier to work with. Lots of big changes coming. Expect updates by the end of February.

Thanks for reading. Cheers.