RPG thing

If you've been a patron for awhile, you'll know from time to time I try some game development related things. So for a few weeks I've been exploring the idea of a turn-based rpg, it's been a lot of meandering, trial and error, exploring a lot of different options. I originally was trying to make something in rpgmaker mz, thinking it would be easy to use it as a base for what I wanted to do and modifying things as needed.

It uses Java Script which is a language I used only once in a full stack development class, so already it wasn't off to a good start for me. I dug around the code, figuring out how stuff worked, making some minor changes to test things, got some custom stuff working but everything I wanted to do would have required rewriting how a lot of stuff is done so I gave up on rpgmaker. The Java Script source was inspirational nonetheless

Then, I turned to adventure game studio, a game engine I'm much more familiar with. It took a bit but I got a bunch of systems working and the framework for a battle system. Unfortunately, I ended up writing a lot of custom systems that I thought I could have used the built-in version of due to issues with how I was using them.

For example, I thought I could use the provided keyboard movement and character follow commands to make an RPG style caterpillar system, but the follow command makes characters follow you in anyway the game decides is a good path(not like in an rpg). And the character movement in AGS is jittery when you move the camera with coding. But it looked nice:

Here's a video showing the progress I did on the AGS version:

https://youtu.be/5KTZzE41Kjs

But I was feeling like there was some stuff that would be a big pain to do to work around limitations of the engine (such as characters' origins being the bottom center of their sprite, no matter what. Or drawing sprites being over ridden by waiting). So I switched to game maker studio... which I did reluctantly because there's so much you need to do from scratch before even getting started on anything cool.

Here's a video of most of what I have so far in game maker. I've dropped the idea of using the mouse in gameplay, which seemed neat at the time but unnecessary.

https://youtu.be/2WCW4CIwD04

So yeah it's not much and it looks pretty horrible and unimpressive for now... (also don't be confused by this mess of a video clip, combat will be dragon quest style turn based where you can probably see the characters at the bottom of the screen)

A snes/ps1 style RPG has a lot of systems that need to work together before actually making something that resembles the gameplay you want. There's field navigation, a camera that follows whatever you tell it to look at, a caterpillar system that needs to blend between following the player and being controlled by the game logic, an action system to tell the game what stuff it should day when told, a waiting system to block stuff from happening while something else is happening, some kind of event system to handle action timing, menus that can navigate to and from other menus... that's not even talking about inventory, stats, the battle system itself, a save/load system, dialogue boxes, text wrapping in dialogue boxes... at least I'm not writing my own tracker/midi music player nooo thank you.

How the heck did those geniuses make Chrono Trigger!?

Keeping it all organized and not a mess has been drawing way too much of my attention- I've been trying to be as meticulous as I know how to about naming, keeping track of things and such. I haven't done much animation because I've felt a bit of that programming spark again, which I haven't felt since I got my dumb degree. But a lot of debugging has dried up some of my enthusiasm and reminded me why I don't like doing this for 8+ hours a day. so I'm going to get some animation stuff done (that bronto double ended toy thing more specifically).

I apologize for this diversion may/may not go anywhere. I don't know if I'll post updates on it here,