Blimey, things have been manic this week. It's full steam ahead at Scirra HQ as we're preparing for a big education exhibition next week and there's a lot to get done!
That means that I've not really had time to work on my game, hence why I did the short 'jam-style' stream on Tuesday. If you've not seen it, I streamed for an hour and tried to make a game that fit some random criteria in just 45 minutes. And it worked! I made a tiny RPG with stats and exp where the goal was to remove all the enemies. I know Construct is quick to work with, but it surprised even me as to just how much you can do in a short space of time!
So, seeing as I don't have any new stuff to talk about, I figured it was a good time to summarise what exists in the game so far! The game is just a fraction of what it could be, but it already includes:
- Tile-based player movement system with placeholder events to eventually allow for keyboard or gamepad control
- Transition system using sender and receiver points to allow the player to move between areas, including area names where they're needed
- Sign-posts around the first city which use an array system to display text unique to each sign
- NPCs which have various types of movement, can be interacted with by the player and can initiate the battle sequence
- Random encounter and random item systems, both utilising Advanced Random's probability tables. You can now find creatures in the tall grass around the game's world, and specific tiles will be spawn points for items which restock over time.
To be honest, I've thought that I'd not made as much progress as I'd have hoped, but writing it in that list makes me realise it's actually quite a lot! Especially for a beginner! And considering I've also written four tutorials alongside this game, that's pretty good going in my opinion.
There is however some super complicated stuff coming up, like the turn-based battle system, experience and stat systems, inventories, menus and so on. So there's still plenty to come from me, and hopefully, a lot of it will translate nicely into tutorials for you guys! I do want to do a tutorial course on dialogue systems, starting from using instance variables right up to a branching JSON system. It's going to take a while, but I think that's the next batch of resources I'm going to write, so keep an eye out for those!
Anyway, a quick word about Twitch before signing off:
There are no live streams next week!
I'll make sure there are some reruns queued so the channel won't be silent, but nothing live until Tuesday, November 19th. See you then!