EVO 2012!

It's been a little too long since my last status update, but here it is: better late than never, I suppose.

In case you're wondering, the reason for the delay is that this past weekend was EVO 2012 - the largest fighting game tournament in the world, held every year in Las Vegas - which I attended. I took some time off RPG Maker-related things for the last couple weeks to get a little bit of practice before going.

Now that that's over (it was incredible, by the way, you should watch some of the matches if you haven't done so already - KOFXIII and Marvel 3 in particular) - I can get back to work.

Despite the rather long break, I have actually gotten quite a bit done since my last update. The first major thing is that the game now has a Day/Night system.

Now, as simple and common as such a system might seem, it will actually have a significant effect on how you play the game. I don't want to give away too much just yet, but: in addition to the time of day changing, and the tint of the screen changing in outside areas, which actual day it is will matter as well.

The game will keep track of how many (in-game) days have passed since you started the game, and various events will happen differently depending on how soon or how late you trigger them. This will be a major influence in how the game's main storyline unfolds, and ultimately how the game ends. That's all I'm going to say about that for now!

Another thing you may have noticed is that in addition to a clock, the main menu now also has a World Map option. From there you can view the game's map, as well as fast-travel between locations you've visited before.

You can move the cursor around to highlight your destination, while moving it to the edges of the screen scrolls the map (which is actually quite large). For those without the patience to find their destinations' exact locations on the map (or for those times when you've simply forgotten), you can instead press X to open a quick menu displaying all your available destinations in a list.

Another new addition to the main menu is weapons and armor. The weapons & armor menus are now actually functioning menus, rather than placeholders, as they used to be.

All base (i.e.: non-magical) equipment functions as expected of a D&D 3.5 game, including the ability to Dual Wield smaller weapons, use larger weapons in two hands and Double Weapons having two separate attacks.

All equipment is unique, so you can have several different pieces of Chain Mail, for example, each with different extra bonuses. You can also press X while highlighting any piece of equipment to view a description window detailing its properties:

Another nifty feature is that the equipment you use will actually affect your character sprite's appearance in-game. So even if you have two characters which look exactly the same after you've finished customizing your appearance when you start the game, they will still end up looking different if you have, say, one wearing scale mail and the other wearing a helmet and a set of full plate mail:

Finally, I've completely reworked how I'm representing player attributes in-game. Initially, I was using the standard RPG method of assigning players some base value of, say, Strength, then in a separate structure I'd hold any enhancement bonuses they might have from, say, equipment or abilities.

When I started actually implementing equipment I realized how this didn't quite fit the way D&D handles attributes: there's an unlimited number of different bonuses that can be applied to any attribute, and you have to keep track of what bonus is of what type, because bonuses of the same type don't stack (with a couple rare exceptions).

With that in mind, I completely reworked how I model player stats. Now, every attribute is actually a hash table, which itself contains an array of values of a given type of bonus. The largest value is always used, but all values are stored, in addition to some meta-information on what's responsible for that bonus in the first place.

I like this because it's a much more faithful representation of how D&D attribute bonuses work, but also because it allows me to add new cool features like this:

That's what the status menu looks like (and has looked like for a while). Before, all you could do was look at it. Now, you can hit the confirm key and move the cursor into that window, like so:

And you'll get to highlight the core stats displayed in that window. Each stat you highlight has an associated tooltip which displays everything that's contributing to that stat's final value. In this case, your total AC is 17 - 10 from the base value every character has, and another 7 from your equipped armor and shield.

Bonuses are displayed in green, while penalties are displayed in red. In addition to bonuses from equipment, you can also see modifiers for certain stats, like your character's saving throws (which are modified by certain other core attributes).

And that's all I have for now!

Next on the schedule, I've actually decided to put off some of the things I detailed in my previous post (such as autosaves and minimaps), since I don't think they're terribly important to get done just yet.

Instead, I'm going to start tackling what is probably the most important part of the game: the combat system. It is, after all, the biggest part of the core gameplay and I haven't even started working on it yet. I've also gotten all the major requirements for some basic combat done (i.e. characters have equipment, stats, feats, etc. - they're more or less ready for combat in every way outside of having an actual combat system).

That's probably going to take a while, but once I have that done, this will feel a lot more like a proper game, I think. Then I can start working on the smaller things - like the minimaps, the autosaves and the quest system.