April marks one year since I started work on Starless Umbra’s engine. Since then, progress has been steady, but at times slow. Nonetheless, I feel it’s important to step back and objectively revisit what I was able to accomplish in the past two months.


Animation frames support coloring, sounds, and particle effects. Note the blood effect on enemy hit and the dust that appears on enemy approach.

Scripts now support basic control flow and copy/paste. Inspired heavily by RPG Maker’s event editor.


Skills are no longer hard-coded. Damage, cost, targeting, animations, and so on are all defined in the editor.

Enemies/enemy groups are no longer hardcoded.


The engine now supports parties and an inventory. More importantly, there’s an equip screen to change character equipment.

Game data (party, position, inventory, and flags) can be saved and loaded to disc.

Support for sounds/music. It’s small but worth mentioning.

Timed hits. Ever since I experienced this in Super Mario RPG I knew it was something I wanted to experiment with. This, combined with a few other tricks, should hopefully make battles feel more interactive.

Pathfinder improvements (stairs and cliffs). This is a constant struggle but basic pathfinding will go a long way with making scripted cutscenes more manageable.

Formulas from max hp to exp needed are all defined in the editor.

...And more! This is just a very quick, high-level overview but I’m planning on going a little more in depth with a video soon, so if you have any questions please let me know. Thanks for reading and have a great day.