Back when I was a new to Dark Basic Pro I was but a teenager, one easily distracted and overly ambitious teenager who wanted to pull off a great project but lacked the ability and attention span. The project was called 'Ronin'. In order to embarrass myself
you're welcome to look at the thread here.
Anyways, I'm a much better programmer/modeller these days and I have Unity3D on my side to help make it more manageable. Plus a great deal in the design has changed/improved since then. I liked the original concept, hence I want to see it through. It doesn't mean I've stopped doing Abeyance either, this is just suppose to be something I'm doing with a couple of friends (as they won't be much help on Abeyance).
How Will it Be Manageable?
Figure I'd put this up first, because it is a big project and it's only recently I've actually properly considered methods of how to make projects manageable. There's 4 things that will make this managle:
The First: Unity3D. A lot of the work is already done. It's an excellent tool and its scripting isn't that difficult to get used to. Once the major scripting is done, it really is mostly a case of drag & drop and editing different values inside of the editor. In a way, like using FPSC, but customised to my gameplay methods.
The Second: Reusable segments. Rather than model out each area, I'm making various components I can reuse across different areas. People do it a lot already.
The Third: Simple hand drawn textures. To keep the texturing quick, simple and effective. It will appear cartoonish, but the style will work together and hopefully look good enough.
The Fourth: You can already see in
this thread. Character modelling can be time consuming, particularly when you've got a lot of them. You've got to model them, UV Map them, texture them, rig them and then animate them. Sod all that hard work.
I've only have 2 rigs, aka, the male & female body rigs. It is a generic 3D model for the body, just missing a head, hands and feet. Textures will be different per character and because the rigs have all limbs accounted for, I can just attach extra pieces to the skeleton to customise them. Akai may have boots, a helmet, facial hair, gauntlets and extra body armour, whilst Ratis will be dressed entirely differently.
Basically, this:
The Premise:
This is a turnbased role playing game that has some real-time elements (it will be explained). There are a total of 9 characters and you can control up to 3 of them at any one time. It's set in a fantasy setting akin to feudal Japan, it follows a character by the name of 'Akai' who became disgraced when he failed to protect his master during an invasion from an enemy clan. He ends up working as a mercenary in a port town help Western traders protect their goods from pirates & thieves. Teaming up with him is a privateer by the name of Ratis. The story gets into more depth from there and I'm not going to cover that.
The Battle System:
The important thing in any RPG. You have 3 types of characters in battle. You have you 'melee', your 'range' and your 'magic'. For an example of this, Akai The Samurai is a melee fighter, Ratis the Privateer is ranged fighter and Miko the Shintoist is a magic fighter. As such the battle works in a formation. You have real-time control of the melee user's movements whilst the range & magic fighters will hold their position. You sent commands to each in battle. The melee fighter has the ability to pull the enemy away from the other too, think of the concept as 'tanking', like you would in an MMORPG. Unlike an MMORPG, you're playing tank, melee DPS, range DPS, magic DPS, support & healer at the same time. Hence the turn based elements.
What you're looking at here is the prototype for the battle system, with a bit of debug data. 83 with a decimal after it is showing the battle calculator's values for the melee user. 'Retainer' and the number after is the target & their HP. The menu below is Akai's available 'Bushido' skills. Basically you're in control of those 3 sets of menus. Do not worry about the Kanji symbols, they're a part of a system I've not worked in yet, so that'll be a future update.
[edit]
Might as well add my basic formula for my battle damage calculations:
public static float MeleeDamage()
{
var strMod = Overlay.Instance.MeleeStat.STR + Overlay.Instance.MeleeStat.MainHandMod + Overlay.Instance.MeleeStat.OffHandMod;
var rndMod = Random.Range(Overlay.Instance.MeleeStat.STR, strMod);
var damage = strMod + rndMod - Overlay.Instance.Enemy.VIT;
damage = Mathf.Clamp(damage, 0, 9999);
return damage;
}
In non C# terms that's:
StrengthMod = PlayerSTR + MainhandWeaponDamage + OffhandWeaponDamage
RandomMod = Random Number between playerSTR & Strength Mod
Damage = StrengthMod + RandomMod - EnemyVIT
Clamp damage to between 0 & 9999
The Classes
As I said there will be a total of 9 characters and they're set out into different classes:
Melee:
Samurai, Drengur, Ninja
Range:
Privateer, Kyudoka, Gunslinger
Magic:
Shintoist, Kijutsushi, Froðmaður
I figure I'll leave it at that. I'll post more as there's more. I'm not going to type out my whole game design document, but I figure I'd get started with something on here.
