Combat Is Hard

Yet another status update! Before I get to that, here's a really quick progress video, showing off what I've been working on since last update - it's been a while since I made a video, so I figured it was time for a new one.

It's a short video, but you can get a glimpse of more or less everything I've been doing recently. You can see the world map in action - I think it looks a lot nicer in action (and with music!) than what you see from the screenshots I had previously posted.

As for the new things:

You may have missed it in the video, but I made a few minor updates to the main summary menu. The most important additions are:

• There now are icons in the header for stats that weren't visible before. The staff with the red X on it is your Arcane Spell Failure chance (from wearing armor), the blue dashing guy is your Initiative score and the black icon on the bottom-right of the header represents your Armor Check Penalty (used when you're wearing heavy armor and try to use skills like Hide or Move Silently).
• All of the new icons have tooltips, indicating where the final number comes from, in terms of your stats and equipment
• Some of the old stats which didn't have tooltips now do. Notably, you can now see how your equipment is contributing to your carrying weight, and where your HP value comes from. If you pay attention to the video, the HP tooltip displays how much HP you're getting from your class. If you take more levels in that class or in a different class, the tooltip will display how much of your total HP comes from each level you've taken in all classes you've ever taken a level in. 

I'm a big fan of giving players all the (relevant) information you can, so I think these are all pretty nice additions to the summary menu.

Another small but important addition is loading screens. RPG Maker games are usually so small and have such tiny resources compared to a standard 3D PC game that loading screens aren't actually necessary, but I find that - if done well - they're actually pretty nice to have just to add more visual flavor to the game.

I'm not entirely sure I like the font color on the LOADING/SAVING text, but I'm pretty happy with everything else about how these turned out. I'll be using various D&D related images throughout the game. 

Which image you see is usually random, though I've also added code in to allow me to display a specific image (or a random image from a specific set of images), so that you'll generally end up seeing images related to what you're actually doing in the game. When you rest in town you'll see a different image from when you rest in an inn, and those will be different from what you see when you fast travel or enter a map that's part of a particularly important plot point. I think that when used properly, these can add a lot to the atmosphere of the game.

Finally - the big elephant in the room - the combat system! Well. Almost-combat-system. Since you technically can't actually have any combat yet.

This is where the bulk of the work has been going in during the last couple weeks for me. The UI is intentionally completely bare-bones for now: I'm still implementing most of how the combat works; I can worry about what it looks like later (I'd go so far as to say the visuals are the easy part).

What you see in the video is pretty much all I have at the moment. There's a turn-based system running managing combat, and you can see the turn order (which is determined by every combatant making an actual d20 initiative roll at the start of combat) by looking at the portraits in the top-left of the screen.

Most of the commands in that menu don't actually do anything yet; I just put them there to get a feel for how the menu layout will eventually look like once it's done, and as a reminder for everything I want to eventually get working in the game. Every single one of those commands will eventually be implemented and work the way you expect them to if you're familiar with what they usually do in D&D.

The AP bar doesn't mean anything right now, though it eventually will. I'm planning on using it as a visual representation of what you've actually done so far that turn. For example: in D&D you can move up to twice per turn (or move once then act once). So after moving once, your bar will be half full.

The three little axes on the bottom-right display are placeholders for, in order: whether the unit is an ally or an enemy (eventually will be some kind of blue or red icon, depending on who the unit is), how many free actions the unit can make per round and how many Attacks of Opportunity the unit can make this round.

There's a few interesting things I put in the system that I'm not really able to show off in a video yet, like the ability for enemies to have random names (picked from a list of several hundred). They also have their own inventories, which determine loot at the end of combat - so if you see an enemy wielding a Great Sword of Kitty Murdering + 4, you will actually get it as a reward once you kill him in a fight. If an enemy starts combat with a bunch of potions or spell scrolls, you can get them as loot if you kill it before they get a chance to use them. And so on.

That's about all I have so far. There's a placeholder for a status window (which will look something like the summary window in the main menu, but you'll be able to see them for enemies too), though I doesn't have much inside it right now, and there's some enemy AI (though all it does at the moment is "Think" for 4~5 seconds, then end its turn without doing anything).

The groundwork for combat is all there, now I just have to keep adding to it. I can see why people don't build custom combat systems that are too different from RPG Maker's default very often. I still have a very long way to go before this is proper D&D combat and it's already taken me a couple weeks of work and 7 scripts which together total about 3000 lines of code.

That's all for now. I'll be working on combat for a while, posting more updates every now and then, when I make progress significant enough to show off in screenshots or a video.

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.

Feats: Status Update

After spending quite a while tweaking how the feat selection works, I can say I finally have a solid v1.0 of it going right now. Take a look:

In addition to the feat trees, the video shows a glimpse of a few additional feature's I've just added, namely:

• Character backgrounds. I've always really liked the idea behind the character background feats in Neverwinter Nights 2, but always felt they were way too weak; their bonuses too small to make any difference.
  
  In D&D 3.5, you can take something called character "Templates", which work something like NWN2's backgrounds, but those were on the other side of the power spectrum - they tend to produce over-powered characters.
  
  I've implemented what I think is a reasonable middle-of-the-road solution. If you don't know what I'm talking about, a background is basically a quick nod to what your character might have been like before the game started (which you get to decide), and this background provides him or her with a fixed bonus. You can only take one, and only at Level 1, during character creation.
  
  Bonuses you'll get range from +2 to a particular stat, +2~4 to one or more skills or some other unique bonus like being able to move 10ft further each turn if your background is Athlete, or giving your allies +1 attack while lowering your own by the same amount if you're a Natural Leader. I think it adds a nice amount of flavor to character creation, especially when the bonuses you get will be large enough to actually be relevant in the game.
• Description windows. Almost everything has a description window now, either normally displayed on the screen (as it is when you pick a class) or as a separate window you can bring up by pressing (A) or (X) (as it is when you're picking feats). I've also updated the main menu to use these when displaying feats or skills.
  
  This gets around a problem I've been having of wanting to have fairly long descriptions of things but not having any screen-space to display it in most menus, due to RPG Maker's tiny, eye-strain-o-vision screen resolution.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Racial feats. Now, in addition to changing your appearance, the race you select also modifies your starting stats, skills and feats. Each race gets some kind of stat bonus (usually +2 to two stats and -2 to a third) and starts with several feats (you can see Dwarves and Elves starting with Darkvision and Humans starting with Skilled in the above video).
  
  Classes now also gain various feats, such as monks starting with various bare-handed fighting feats and fighters starting with several Weapon and Armor proficiencies.
  
  
  
• Feat Requirements are now displayed while you're picking feats from the tree, if you don't meet them. If you meet some of the requirements for a feat (say it has 5 requirements and you meet 3), it will only display the ones you're missing. This should make it much easier to see what's available, what you want to take and when you can take it.

And that completely wraps up character creation for now. As of today, you can create a full party of 5 characters, customize their appearance (race/gender/hair/eyes/portrait/etc.) and their stats (class/feats/skills/etc.) and jump into the game.

The game itself so far only has a working menu. I haven't gotten into any actual gameplay yet (maps, combat, etc.) because I want to make absolutely sure everything else is setup properly before I start with that. Pre-production and whatnot. Once that's all done, even having a little gameplay will make it feel like a proper, decent quality game.

I'm a fan of the Blizzard idea of polish-everything-as-you-go, rather than do-everything-sloppy-now-we-can-polish-later (I can't remember who it was that said this in an interview, but it was something along the lines of: "There is no later. Polish everything now. Do everything right the first time").

Anyways, next on my schedule:

• Add a world map to the menu. When I get to actually making the game maps, you'll be able to use it for fast-travel from any outdoors (non-dungeon) area.
• A simple Party HUD: something that displays everybody's portraits and HP bars as you're walking around the game. Once I get around to implementing combat, it will all happen on the actual game maps themselves instead of going to a separate battle scene, so knowing your party status at all times (without having to open menus) will be useful.
• Autosaves and Quicksaves
• Quests, and a quest menu
• Minimaps
• Unique items and equipment. I'll probably be using a modified version of Tsukihime's Inventory System for this.
• Crafting. This will be fairly simple. I liked the crafting in Temple of Elemental Evil, where you don't really need ingredients to craft anything; you only need the appropriate feat, meet a level requirement and pay some gold. It's pretty straightforward and shouldn't be too hard to implement once I have items working correctly.

Feat Trees

So it turns out that making what is basically a skill tree made of dozens and dozens of skills isn't exactly easy. It's not really hard either but it takes a bit of planning. Like...more than I had done so far. After spending about 10 minutes  in the database manually assigning positions on the tree to various skills, it became pretty obvious that doing things this way wasn't going to work.

So I decided it'd be easier to make a full mock-up of the whole thing first, as close to scale (in terms of things being roughly in the right position relative to each other) as possible. I could worry about what that meant in terms of actual coordinates inside the window later.

A few minutes of googling turned up this site called lucidchart.com. It's apparently an online flow-chart designer, and it actually works pretty well. It was certainly a lot more pleasant to deal with than Microsoft's Visio, which I had used the previous times I had to do something like this. After a couple hours of messing around with it and cross-referencing my game's database and the D&D SRD wiki, I came up with this:

They're ordered roughly based on what level you'd have access to them. Low-level feats at the top, high-level epic feats near the bottom. Beyond that, I divided feats into categories; these are just the ones that I put under "Combat". It's amazing how something this simple gives you a much better idea of how a menu should actually look like. Once I had that, on to actually putting it in the game!

Before that, though, I just found out, completely by accident, that UTF-8 happens to have characters for drawing things. And I just happen to be working on drawing the links between feats inside the feat selection window when this happened. And it turns out that some of the characters are shaped exactly like the icons I wanted to use to display the links in the tree.

So, being the incredibly clever programmer that I am, I came up with this:

Screw figuring out positions for things, I'll just draw all the links (with text) and let the feat window code figure it out. I don't know why, but I find it kind of hilarious that this actually works. After messing around with the icons for a bit so they all line up when you draw them, the feat window now looks like this:

I had to copy/paste a few screenshots to get that (the actual window only displays about a third of that, and you can scroll up or down to see the rest), but you get the idea. I still have to give them proper icons and everything, but it's looking pretty good so far.

Feat Selection!

So I've just recently finished the visual aspects of character creation. You can see a video demo of it here:

With that done, I started (and spent most of the last three days working on) the other part of character creation. Stats, skills, classes...you know, the important stuff. The game part of the game.

Given that I already had the level-up process working for classes, attributes and skills, (yes, I implemented leveling up before character creation and yes, that is completely backwards; I'm weird like that) this was actually fairly quick and easy. Only took about a day's worth of work and I already had everything up and running.

Then came the hard part of putting work into the things I hadn't actually done any of yet. A few weeks ago I had a pretty awesome idea on how to handle the feat selection menu, but I never quite had the time to get to it then, since there were more important things to finish first. Well, I've finished those now, so I took a crack at it.

The main idea is: if you've ever played a D&D based game (like, say, Neverwinter Nights), you know that one of the things you pick every few levels is feats. If you, like me, played the game before ever playing pen-and-paper D&D, you've probably had the experience of being completely fucking lost in the feat screen.

If this all sounds like greek to you, feats are essentially special abilities your character earns ever few levels (every 3 for most characters, some classes get additional ones every few levels). They're all binary things: you either have them or you don't, there's no "levels" of them. Some of them are active, some are passive, some have nothing to do with combat. You could think of them as RPG Maker's Skills, but a little more generic.

See, the problem with them is there's fucking hundreds of these things. When you first create a level 1 Fighter   in Neverwinter Nights 2, you get to pick 2 of these (or 3 if you're a Human). The game gives you an enormous shopping list of every damn feat in the game that you qualify for (which even at level 1 is in the order of several dozen) and it's up to you to pick 3. And that's pretty much all the information you get. Hopefully you don't pick something useless that will screw you over for the rest of the game. Good luck!

That's always struck me as an awful way of implementing that. Even now, when I'm more familiar with D&D rules, I still have to double check rulebooks (or, more often, online D&D wikis) to make sure I'm picking things in the correct order and won't screw up and miss a pre-requirement for a feat I'll want to have like 6 levels from now.

So I started thinking: why doesn't this happen in other games? Well, usually you don't have that many choices, but in some games you do. You never feel lost like that when you play Final Fantasy XII or Diablo II though. This is because of how the implement their UI.

The main thing NWN2 is missing is that it requires you to actually know more than you can possibly be expected to know to make a proper decision. There's no way for you to look at that feat screen and know things like "Is this a pre-requisite for a better feat that I can't pick right now?" or "Can I just see the spellcasting feats? I don't really care about all these melee combat ones".

So I came up with a different way of displaying what feats you can select from. It'll look something like a mix between Diablo II's skill trees and Final Fantasy X's sphere grid.

The main point of it will be to display everything you can have, even if you don't qualify for it just yet (so you can have an idea of what to invest in and what might pay off to have down the road), and to divide them all into categories, so you don't feel as overwhelmed by the amount of them and you can easily find feats of a particular type.

That's what I've spent most of the last couple of days working on. Turns out it's a little bit trickier to implement than I expected, but I'm still making progress. With any luck I'll have a working first version of it done in a few days. This is what the menu looks like right now:

It's kind of hard to tell right now, since I haven't actually added very many of them (or drawn any of the connections between them), but the inside of that menu (the part with all the icons) is basically a giant grid. The orange tabs at the top are the categories and the icons are the feats. Hovering the cursor over one shows that tooltip with a feat's name on it. Related feats (i.e.: Power Attack -> Cleave -> Great Cleave) will have lines connecting them (like a skill tree).

Anyway, it'll make more sense when it's done. I'll probably post a video of it when it's all working.

Blog:new()

I tend to have all sorts of ideas while working on games, and I have the bad habit of never writing them down. So I figured it's time to start a blog!

I'll be posting pretty much anything and everything about my current project here, from screenshots, to cool or weird programming-related things I figure out by breaking apart the RMVX Ace engine, to random game-design brain-droppings I have while thinking about my project.

I'll post a more detailed progress update of my current project sometime in the next few days.