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Dungeons, Menus, Puzzles, Progress!

Hi! How are you? Hope you're well! I've been chugging away and have a few updates to share with you.

Dungeon Maps



I've made some progress on the first dungeon area. It's smallish in size, with 6-7 mostly straightforward maps and the revival of the character switching mechanics from SU2k3. Paired with character switching is another JRPG staple: pushable blocks and floor switches. I felt these were a safe starting point. As development continues I'll add more mechanics to play with as well.

Ambience and lighting are missing; those will come later on (after a demo I hope!)

WIP Menus



I've got a small framework in place to handle menus, which are basically a collection of windows under the hood. Some windows can have child windows which adds for some neat logical grouping. This isn't very far along but it seems to work well. Again, I'm borrowing a lot of design here from 2k3 and some classic JRPGs.

The text is really ugly! I use bitmap fonts, and GM's anti-aliasing is a bit too much, so at some point later I'll probably end up manually anti-aliasing + outlining the larger stylized fonts.

Battle System

I've added the focus system from SU2k3, where monsters prioritize players to target based on how much damage they've dealt. This will be integral to planning out battles and mitigating damage. Monsters can now have multiple skills, each with some priority associated with it.

JSON Databases

Character, Monster, Skills, Items, etc are stored and loaded from JSON files. I might make a client to modify these on the go in the future, but for now they keep swaths of game data out of code and organized a bit.

Up next
A boss battle, save/load data, the first major town, and more menu screens. Thanks for reading. I hope you have a great day.

Posts

Pages: 1
dragonheartman
Developer, Starless Umbra / Heroes of Umbra
2966
author=dreadpirate
Hey dragonheartman just thought I'd say your menu looks great so far. I'm a big fan of not covering up the play screen completely with menu. It helps to not detach from the action so much when i'm bombing into a menu mid game. Looks awesome.
Thanks! I'm glad you noticed. I'm trying hard to minimize context switching so all the menuing and combat is done on the exploration maps. It definitely feels more immersive, or at least less segmented.
Hey dragonheartman just thought I'd say your menu looks great so far. I'm a big fan of not covering up the play screen completely with menu. It helps to not detach from the action so much when i'm bombing into a menu mid game. Looks awesome.
dragonheartman
Developer, Starless Umbra / Heroes of Umbra
2966
author=Darken
characters look wobbly in the camera scrolling, is that a sub pixel thing? :thinking:
Ah, I figured it out after all. I just decided to floor the coordinates for all my custom draw calls. This keeps things rounded to the nearest pixel which I want anyway.

author=Blind
The UI Text does a serviceable job, actually. May eventually want to clean up the SU Logo font tucked off on the side though. XD
Yeah, agreed. I think it needs at least an alias and maybe an outline. Thankfully they're just bitmap fonts so I can go back and fix the individual letters later and everything will look okay.
The UI Text does a serviceable job, actually. May eventually want to clean up the SU Logo font tucked off on the side though. XD
dragonheartman
Developer, Starless Umbra / Heroes of Umbra
2966
Yeah! I think so. I'm not quite sure what's up. It's definitely something with my custom draw callbacks and camera smoothing, because regular objects that don't override draw are fine. Maybe camera movement needs to be on a different callback or something else? I've noted that down, bugs me a bunch haha.
characters look wobbly in the camera scrolling, is that a sub pixel thing? :thinking:
Pages: 1