Lately I’ve been playing King’s Bounty: Armored Princess at Tycho’s recommendation, and at steam sale prices it was certainly a worthy purchase. The primary gameplay is turn based strategy on a hex grid.
Done.
That said, and this may simply be my disillusionment with games in general speaking, the gameplay is somewhat formulaic. There is an option available in every single battle to do “autocombat” wherein the AI takes control of your armies and fights for you; you are able to take back control at any time. This feature is nice, but is limited by the facts that it doesn’t allow you to skip the animations and the AI sometimes makes painfully dumb moves. Ten minutes of watching (potentially inept) automated combat isn’t the most entertaining thing you could do, so you’ll probably want to fight most of the battles yourself. The decision making involved isn’t terribly difficult and the scale of any given battle is small enough to easily hold in your head, so the main effect of the game is the emotional impact of watching your armies die. Forever. The entire game world is built on a limited resources model, so if you achieve one too many pyrrhic victories you may find yourself unable to progress later in the game. Furthermore there is an in game time system that is potentially fed by realtime despite the fact that all other aspects of the game are turn-based.
If any of that sounded good to you, it might be worth a try: http://store.steampowered.com/app/3170/
Saturday, January 16, 2010
If you’re following the progress of Lorika, I have a very exciting link for you: http://pyrosim.net/wiki/Lorika
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Lorika now has physics, via Bullet. 
And there was much rejoicing!
No time for a full post now, but Lorika has made _huge_ strides of progress, including:
Levels
Wearable equipment
Usable items
Progress bars
After battle rewards
Quite nice explore menu
Spells
In battle targeting
And that name is Lorika. Exciting, isn’t it?
JRPG now has texture support in earnest. As a treat to you guys, you get to see the texture I made to as a sample for the development process XD : 
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Here’s a current Linux build, replete with debug symbols: http://pyrosim.net/jrpg/Linux134.tar.bz2
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Just a quick list of the features that are presently implemented in JRPG and those I intend to work on next.
Completed:
- Multiple choice, file loaded dialog system
- Wavefront model loading and display
- Combat mode
- Exploration mode
- Event triggered mode transitions
For future completion:
- File loaded exploration areas
- Textures
- Actual plot
- Actual models
Monday, December 28, 2009
I am not so naive as to believe I can force JRPG to succeed where Ascent failed by force of will alone: Ascent died for a reason. That said, there are already a few characteristics JRPG possesses that I feel enhance its odds of success.
In the later days of ascent, a clean build could take up to half an hour. Individual object builds could take several minutes a piece. This made development and debugging an incredibly tedious prospect. JRPG, despite implementing a similar feature set, can be pulled from SVN and built from clean in under twenty seconds. This speed boost comes from two things:
- Ascent used Boost and libcolladadom. Both of those libraries were extremely large and time consuming to build. JRPG uses SDL threads and a homerolled wavefront loader, which impose almost no overhead.
- Ascent tended to include other headers from inside its main headers. This leads to potentially much more inclusion than is necessary. JRPG uses includes almost exclusively in object files.
JRPG, as a consequence of the genre, doesn’t require any network support. Multiplayer was difficult to debug in Ascent because I am the only developer on this project.
What JRPG lacks in network support, it gains with sound support which Ascent never had. Music is a major contributor to my feelings about commercial games, and so original music in JRPG could both boost its enjoyability for others and my motivation to work on it. In the period since the abandonment of Ascent I have acquired some music production equipment and encountered LMMS which appears to be a wonderful way to compose original music. I’ve spent some time experimenting with these tools, and a sample of my efforts can be found here: http://pyrosim.net/loudblog/index.php?id=5