Harmonia Warders development blog.

Basic menu and improvements to the battle engine.

2010-08-30T13:16:00.001+02:00

This past week, after wasting my time playing videogames because I'm lazy and procrastinating, I actually kept working on Harmonia Warders.. I have some updates to post and a few screenshots (nothing spectacular) with what I've done so far.

I was able to add the HUD menu in game, it is the basic and normal menu that every jRPG has with status, items, equips etc etc. So far it doesn't look good because I will actually have to put real graphics and not placehorders, however it is functional and very versatile...

As you can see from these screenshots, these are the actual main characters of the game but I won't say more because I don't want to spoil it yet.. Due to a particular story gimmick in the game, you can't have more than 3 characters at the same time in battle and you can switch them with each other only in particular pairs. For example, Michael can be exchanged with Viviane only, Mint with Katie and Jack with Oberon. I know it sounds stupid but, in my opinion, it actually works best this way and the combat will be even more dynamic. Alas, I won't say more anyhow.

Another nice fix I put in the game is the battle system, even though it still lacks monster AI, I was able to put more than one character in battle, switching their order in the menu and make them fight against the monsters.

Now I'm either going to work on the full menu (all the options and entries) or perfect and finish the battle engine (with monster exp, full skill choice and monster AI). Either way, the game is really going well and I'm satisfied with what I've done so far, I hope to be able to keep the ball rolling...

Anyways, off onto the next update, stay tuned.

Cheers!

Portals, portals, portals! No, this is not Valve...

2010-08-20T03:02:00.000+02:00

I am glad to say that today I was finally able to fully add the portal feature in my game. No no, nothing groundbreaking and nothing taken from the famous videogame. It just mean I was able to transition from one map to another and viceversa. Basically I just added the door functionality in my RPG which is something awesome, at least in my opinion, because since it got integrated in the editor (v2.1 now, lots of bugs fixed) it is really easy (and fun) to make maps linked to each other.

After testing and rejoying over my small but big success, I started jotting down the basis of my HUD and game menu. It will be a classical menu à-la Final Fantasy with normal party information, player status and stuff like that. Now I just created the class and tomorrow I'll probably try to fill it in and make it work with some nice placeholder graphics, who knows.

Also I will have to add a new video of the Tile Editor because I'm actually proud of it. I just fear the time when I will have to complete all its functionalities... Meh, I'm not good at this job, I should probably go work at McDonald's...

Nevermind.

Cheers!

More concept art and the portal editor...

2010-08-19T02:15:00.000+02:00

Hello my readers..
Today, after days of mindlessly drawing, reading tutorials on how to draw, and getting used to my tablet, I was finally able to come up with a result that I would consider pretty good for my abilities... It's still not perfect, but it's closer to what I imagined the finished product would be.

I'm going to post here the concept art I drew these last days and you can clearly see its evolution (Actually attempt #2 is better than some other attempts..). This was really helpful to me, cause now I am able to draw Viviane's face without having to follow a tutorial step by step, watch a youtube video on how to draw eyes (Those eyes.. ugh, I hate it) and I am able to draw different expressions while still giving the same resemblance to the face... which is something not easy to do.

I'll keep practicing like crazy... This needs to be perfect (and it's actually pretty fun!).

On a more serious note, about programming... I am glad to say that I was able to introduce multitasking in my Event engine and now I am able to run more than one scripted event at the same time (provided they don't conflict with each other). For example I can move a character somewhere while another character changes position and another one changes animation. This is really useful if I want to get some cool fighting scenes or dramatic entries (which will happen).

Now I am working on adding a portal feature to my maps, which is basically a door/teleport tile that allows me to load another map when the character steps on it. In theory it's actually pretty easy, but it's more harder than it looks because I have to completely re-write the TileMap class to incapsulate all the informations needed for the new maps as well (like NPCs, Events etc etc). So far I've almost finished the TileEditor for those portals which did give me some troubles... It's currently at version 2.0 and it's no-where close to the end. I will have to add NPC support, treasure boxes, event adding (not event editor... that's already completed) and something more maybe (like support for multiple forelayers or moving sprites like water tiles).

This was a nice update and I'm pretty satisfied of what I've done. Probably next time the portal feature will be up and working, who knows? Let's keep our fingers crossed.

Cheers!

I'm a master at art... no, actually not.

2010-08-17T17:50:00.000+02:00

Here I am my fellow followers...

I spent the past two weeks working on the concept art for the game, getting down the plot, scenarios, dialogues (actually, just the characters...). Also, I bought a Wacom Tablet (Bamboo Pen, always wanted one) even though I don't know how to draw, so I'll learn and be able to draw the art for this game myself...

I will obviously get some help from the outside, but this is my project and I will get it done.

After working with guides on how to draw (yeah, I'm THAT bad at drawing) I got some improvement and I was able to get on the paper (on the screen actually) my first personal concept art for Viviane.. It's not the best but looking back at my improvements, I've already done a lot from stick figures..

I still have to fix the eyes and the personality.. add shades and everything but as a first try I guess it passes...

Now I'll go back to study drawing theory,

Cheers!

I'm back in action... maybe?

2010-08-11T03:02:00.000+02:00

Good day followers... I'm back in action and ready to go on with my quest to program this RPG.

No, I haven't abandoned the project, I know I keep doing this it's just my way of dealing with things... especially since the game is just a hobby and real life stuff always comes first..

Also I've been quite involved in a few other stuff (like 2 jobs and university exams) that took away most of my time. I got back into gaming with some games I had missed from the past 6 months and I had some catching up to do. Right now, though, I'm back in action (God only knows for how long..) and I'm planning to completely write down the whole story and dialogues before going on, I want (and need) something to work on since the basic engine is going on steadily and it is pretty stable already. I want to get something done because I don't want this to become an abandoned project yet.

I will release it, I swear to myself! Since one of my troubles was looking for a graphic artist I've opted for the cheap option I had.. I'm going to buy a tablet and try to work some of the arts myself. I know a few people who can help me out and give me hints and I'm not bad at pixel arts already (been doing the sprites so far..), I hope I can manage this.

Lastly, I hope I still have some followers or just people who wander on and off this blog, because I won't disappoint you guys, I will get this project done one day... and that will be the best day of my life probably.

Cheers!

Rebuilding the Tile Editor + Tile Engine - Part 2

2010-01-28T18:35:00.000+01:00

Welcome back my friends. This is the second part of my huge changes applied to the tile engine.

I'm glad to announce that I was able to modify the TileEngine to be faster and easier to understand, I was finally able to implement ContentLoaders to help me manage the project inside Visual Studio. Now, if I want to load the whole map level (which consists of a .map file, each .layer file + a collision layer + a forelayer + all the used tiles) I can just reference the .map file inside the project and the Load call will take care of everything.

The new content loaders were a bit of a pain to create, however now they work pretty smooth and most of the loading speed is based at build time and not at the load calls inside the game, making it a bit faster to load levels.

Soon I will have to implement a warp feature inside the tile engine, not too difficult actually, to load different maps depending on the position of the player. As of now, I'll have a little fun with the new features I put in the game, seeing if I can get something nice to show up for you guys (few people to be honest..) impatient to see a piece of the game.

Cheers!

Rebuilding the Tile Editor + Tile Engine - Part 1

2010-01-27T02:22:00.000+01:00

Hello my followers..

Today I've entangled myself into a very unpleasant task. I noticed that my TileEngine, taken almost directly from Nick Gravelyn's tutorial, was incomplete and was lacking a few important features I may need in future for the game. Especially the Tile Editor was full of small bugs, references to directories and stuff like that. It was nearly unusable.

That is why I decided to completely rebuild it from zero. The appearance is almost the same (save a pretty nice toolbox at the top) but the underlying classes, file parsing and functions are all improved/modified. I decided to use a completely different set of classes and project/solution because keeping a lot of different projects inside my own Harmonia Warders solution, in Visual Studio, was making it a real mess (and the two versions, PC and Xbox360 were not certainly helping).

I had to re-write from scratch the Layer, CollisionLayer, TileMap leaving only the required functionalities. I took out all the NPC support, collision detection etc etc that is needed in the game itself since it's just an editor.

I also changed the save/load functions from a simple .txt file to an XML file with linked tiles (so I won't have to manually load them into the projects on VS) and a fixed folder structure. I won't use a different structure anyways so I see no real reason to make it more complex than it actually is.

The more interesting add-on I put, which is what mainly led to believe I needed a new TileEditor, is a nice ForeLayer. What is a ForeLayer you may ask? It's a ForeGround TileLayer. It's a normal layer that, in the draw function, will be drawn AFTER the characters, sprites, monsters, npc have been drawn. This way I can simulate a bit of prospective and make the NPC/Character go behind a house, or behind a tree or show clouds (with an alpha channel) or other stuff. It's really nice in my opinion and really needed to make a tiled RPG feel more "lively".

Today I've only managed the code for the Tile Editor, tomorrow (or as soon as I have time) I will modify/implement those functions inside the actual game and, who knows, a somekind of promotional video might pop-up if I can get it done nicely enough.

Thank you for reading, keep tuned for the Part 2 of this update, coming soon!

Cheers!

A new video..? Not much to show.

2010-01-22T20:08:00.005+01:00

Hello my followers...
Today it's been a pretty bad day for development... I've been one whole day trying to figure out a new error (Exception unhandled) in my Content Processor for my Event class... Apparently it just decided to stop working and Visual Studio 2008 went on strike and decided to stop every builder/debugger ever...

After spending a whole day figuring out what the problem was, I found out that my project was building a different source code (which I have yet to understand what it was...) than what it was supposed to and whatever changes I was applying they weren't even read.

What I had to do is to delete the whoe Content project, remove every assembly related to it and restart from scratch (well, I copy+pasted the sources...). This at last made it work... but only after 8 hours of hair-ripping debugging (Which wasn't working).

Sometimes I hate computers, I seriously do.

Anyways, since I haven't posted much in a while and I came back to this only a few days ago, I decided to hand out a new video and a screenshot of what I'm currently working at.

The video shows the Event Editor I use to code the event scripts in my game and the screenshot is an Xbox screenshot of a running event (the one I was changin in the video).

I know it's not much and the graphical assets are all missing (Tell me something I don't know..) but it's still something I go proud of.

Enjoy the screenshot and the videos. To the next update!

Cheers!

Video:

Screenshot:

Events, Xbox360 and a step closer to spaghetti code.

2010-01-20T22:42:00.003+01:00

Hello my lovely followers (so few followers actually..)!

Today I have a nice update for everyone. Since I pretty much disappeared for a while, with Christmas holidays, ET and exams at the University I had no real time to work on the project, however today I came back to it with a nice update and new features ready to be used!

1) I was actually able to deploy the game to the Xbox360 through the Trial membership (I love being a MSDNAA student!) and, after having fixed a few graphical glitches due to the change of resolution and some annoying bugs, the game is perfectly working on my small (very small...ugh) TV at 720p. This, to me, is awesome since I honestly never thought I was ever able to see my small game (even if incomplete and pre-alpha version) on my Xbox360, makes me feel really pro and one step closer to a real AAA game.

2) I stopped the development of the Battle Engine since it felt almost complete, I will have to add implementation for skill animations, attack animations, items support + animations, monster AI (scripting... ugh!) and multi-character support, however the backbone of the engine is done and it's very versatile, I will have no real trouble adding those features once I have them planned.

3) I started working on the event engine for scripted events on the TileMap screen and.... it's awesome! I was able to get it ready, loaded and running in less than 4 hours (still have to implement some functions thoguh) and that is a record time for me... Since I've never coded a script engine before and it was my first approach. Now I'm able to write simple and easy to write files with commands and instructions to the NPCs on the map to perform all the various actions/conversations available... To be honest, I really squealed like a fangirl when I saw an NPC coming on the screen, from offscreen, walking happily toward the (X,Y) point of choice after I told him so. I was so happy that everything was working that now I feel a new adrenaline charge to dive in the project once more and try to finish the backbone engine for everything as soon as possible.

Thank you for reading this, my friends.

Cheers!

PS: Next time hopefully I'll post some new screens from the game... maybe.

The battle engine and its miracles...

2009-11-21T01:00:00.000+01:00

Today I was able to go further in my battle engine and, surprisingly, it's working pretty well. With an event driven GUI-like interface it's getting easier and easier to go on... however some things keep me amazed and wondering... Sometimes I don't even remember stuff I myself have added in.

I've just spent 20 minutes looking for the place I told my game to select the party during a healing spell. I swear I didn't remember putting that in and later on I just found out it parsed the type of skill and added the player party to the list of "enemies" instead of the enemies themselves. That's how intelligent my GUI is, I'm really happy.

Now I just have to add in some animations for both skills and players and the battle engine should be done with... that's a huge step, seriously.

Next I'll be posting a small video of it done (hopefully), so keep tuned for even more!

Cheers.

New possible addition to the team?

2009-11-12T15:11:00.001+01:00

Hello guys, today I have great news. Probably the project will now speed up a little bit and I have to apologise once again for the lack of updates as of lately.

I've found someone who could, probably, be a nice addition to the team regarding the graphical aspects of the game, I'm already "using" her for characters concept art and she'll take on pixel art as well... I have great hopes for it.

Plus, even though university (and Dragon Age: Origins *cough cough*) is keeping me really busy, I've managed to add some new stuff and polish a little more my skill system / battle system. Nothing great from this update about the game, however I'm slowly moving on toward my target and I really hope I'll be able to release this game soon (aka less than 1 year...).

Cheers.

...done organizing?

2009-10-27T19:17:00.001+01:00

At last, I'm done commenting all the code I've written... I'm only missing a last part regarding the battle system, but that is because it's roughly incomplete and probably due to changes soon, so I'll avoid commenting/explaining that since it will change soon.

Today I, also, was busy with installing and trying out the new Beta 2 for Visual Studio 2010. Too bad it doesn't support XNA GS yet, so I cannot make use of it for Harmonia Warders... well, VS 2008 is awesome already, so no loss.

Now it's time to tackle again on the battle system, I have to get this done, it's dragging me down so fast that I almost have no energies for anything else...

and still need artists. I hope someone *looks up* sends me an angel to help and draw all my images, but that won't work I bet, don't know just why though...

Organizing the style, boring...

2009-10-26T21:06:00.003+01:00

Hello everyone,

Today felt the urge to just re-read the whole code I've written so far and... I have to say I'm impressed with the amount of work I've pulled out and I still have to do, it's really huge. Some parts of codes to me seemed obscure and not really clear, even though I was the one that wrote them... and that is understandable since I had not touched them for a couple of months, especially the ones around the TileEngine (which, as I said, I took from Nick and slightly modified).

That is the main reason why I realized I do have to keep my code clean and well commented, to save troubles later on, when I have to come back to what I've already written and change/polish/optimize it, it really bothers me when something is unclear and entangled, spaghetti code is a bad thing and generally leads to bug and glitches, which I'd rather not have in the final product.

Exploiting the awesome feature of Visual Studio 2008, I've just started adding comments and a small documentation on my code, for every line of code, member, method, class, whatever... It is a very boring task but, in the end, it is very rewarding because the end-product seems really professional and it is easier to be modified and re-used for later projects as well... and who knows, I may also leak it around the intertubes for people to use it on their own projects... as long as it appears good, working and clean enough.

So far I'm not even at a quarter of the way done, so I'll keep on going and commenting everything I have to, while sipping a nice cup of fruity tea and watching my awesome Opeth DVD on the Xbox360 in the background. It's very mellow and relaxing, the perfect mood to get a nice job done.

Everything will probably be done tonight or tomorrow night at most, then I'm back to coding... That battle engine won't get completed on its own (yet... hehe)!

Cheers! ~Morgy

New rush kicking in

2009-10-18T19:05:00.003+02:00

Welcome back Morgy!

Thanks Morgy, I'm back!

Yeah, that's it, I'm finally back on this project. Since university kicked in (*ahem*Aion*ahem*) I didn't have much time to program and I felt kept out of my own project. I found it harder and harder to go back to it, but I promised to myself I had to complete this, especially if I want to even try to participate in next year's DreamBuildPlay (if there is one). That (and a lot of boredom today) is why I finally managed to get my head focused on this and read back to pages of code I wrote and now I'm back kicking, programming the game once again.

Today I improved my battle screen management, adding a BattleSkillList screen for the skill selection. I don't like "hard-coding" everything since I want to keep my classes as flexible as I can, however I had reached a real dead end with this BattleScreen stuff. I had to resort to have one screen of each action type (skill, attack, enemy select, item, etc etc) coded slightly different from the others if I wanted to keep going with this. Probably there was a better solution, but as long as I can get this to work and I don't drawn entangled into my own lines of code, it should be ok. In later versions I may try to revisit it all once again and make it better, but so far it seems to be working.

The real problem now is that I can't do any real testing yet, since I need to plan skills, animations and battles and I'm not in the condition for that (need editors, designers and all that stuff, which I'll be looking for when the basic engine is complete). If you feel like helping me out, with any kind of character art, skill art style and stuff, just feel free to mail me , I'll be glad to include them in the game if I find them appropriate. Any help is well-welcomed.

Revisiting time!

2009-08-28T23:51:00.000+02:00

Since I started reading Jim Perry's book (follow my previous entries for more details) I realized my skill/action structure in combat is a bit flawed and is not as smooth as I thought. To better say it: I found a way better and easier way to handle the problem so I feel I'll have to actually change both the skill/monster structure, editors and the in game code to handle these cases.

That will leave space to the addition of items, special skills and all the other fancy stuff one may see in a turn based RPG.

Time to get to work then, gotta fix that stuff so I can go on with developing this game... It's still going, slowly, but still kicking!

Time to continue the flow.

2009-08-24T11:28:00.002+02:00

Finally today the book I was waiting for has arrived. I have to apologize for not going on with this project for a couple of weeks, however I was really stuck and was too afraid of screwing up something if I continued like this, without a guide or a plan to stick to. Now with the book, I'll be able to follow some guidelines for Harmonia Warders that will reveal, hopefully, useful throughout all the stages of development.

In the meanwhile, while I was gone from this blog, I had the time to think up a physics engine (incompleted) and an AI chatterbot that uses mysql database and a neural map interaction(incompleted as well) which will eventually turn out as useful one day for future projects. As of now, time to get going with Harmonia Warders, this project is not dead and will never be. I will see it to the end, I hope so at least.

Still on hold, keep in line..

2009-08-09T14:10:00.002+02:00

Today's update is a bit useless.. however I felt like writing down something here for the readers...

As you've read the project is currently on hold for at least 5-6 days till I get the book in my hands and actually feel into going on with the project, however I've been keeping myself ready and trying new stuff in C#.

First, my physics engine is working well as I'm building it, it's a bit simple and actually it's harder than I expected.. but hopefully I'll get it to fully work in some time, the real satisfaction is that I'm actually making it 100% myself without taking stuff from other engines (yet).

Another thing I've started reading into is Socket connections in C# and I have to say I'm stunned at how easy it is. Socket always sounded bad and threatening to me and I never actually dared to approach it, however I can say it was way easier than I'd have expected. I've already made a couple of test applications and they work semi-well (problems with IP connections and stuff due to my router...), I'm satisfied with this as well.

Told ya guys, useless update... Cheers!

While waiting for reinforcement..

2009-08-07T22:18:00.002+02:00

Today I ordered online Jim Perry's RPG programming with XNA book on Amazon to help me build and design Harmonia Warders.

Since I've been programming like an idiot this last week, I noticed a decreasing concentration on the project and I've been making lots of mistakes (for example I totally forgot the "target type" propriety of my skill system and I had to re-make the save-load functions of the skills and the editor). Since I don't want to clog my programming flow with mistakes and bad designing that could slow down my project, I decided I'll make a pause from this project till I get delivered the book.

Until then, I decided to have fun and create some kind of simulator for XNA to build up some skill (Especially toward 3D programming which I know close to nothing). I don't know yet what to make, but I was thinking something around electromagnetic physics, currents and those things. Basically because there's not much around that simulates it in games. Sure, there's the whole gravity physics simulator, but that's been done before by tons of people and I don't really want to copy from others.

I'll just go open my physics books and take some formula and stuff, then have fun in XNA and see what I come up with.

Cheers!

My Editors

2009-08-06T17:52:00.004+02:00

Since I've just now completed my new skill editor, I decided to put in here and describe all the editors I'm currently using. I love making editors and other cool external application that help developing my games, it takes less than 1 hour (well, except for the map editor that gave me days of nightmare) and it speeds up the scripting process by much.

I'll start with my two new editors: The Monster and the Skill Editor

As seen in this picture, in the skill editor I have a database system that enumerates every skill with a number (ID) and every skill has got different properties, the animation, the animation properties and the Adj values. Those values are float numbers that describe the skill and its damage formula, whether or not it's dependant to a certain stat and how much by it. I have to say thanks to the guys over at the xna creator's club forums for helping me figuring out a nice formula base to use in this. Hopefully it turns out well.

The Monster editor is a bit more simple (I made it earlier, then decided on how to expand the concept) and I think I may get it to look similar to the Skill editor. As it is now, I have to manually edit the database.dat file for every monster and it will become tiring and prone to errors in the long run. However I'm really satisfied by it, you can see the monster entity doesn't have an animation attached.. that's because I decided to put a sub-folder in the monster folder called monsteranimation which keeps track of every image of the monsters, which will have the same name of the monster file, meaning I don't need to list its name as well.

And now... the almighty Map Editor!

As you can see, it's almost all copied by Nick's Editor, I just had to add some more features, like different layout and support for a tilemap (different from his own project), tile width and random encounters flag.
I'll probably have to expand on this concept later on (I fear this, seriously every time I touch that editor, lots of errors and exceptions come up, it just hates me!) when I will add GameEvents, but I'll keep it for later.

If you have any comments or suggestions, be free to express them!
Another day probably I'll put up here the Item editor too, which will be almost 100% similar to the Skill Editor, that is because those two things are almost the same...
Hopefully this was interesting enough for you guys.. Bye!

Battle Engine

2009-08-06T14:37:00.003+02:00

What I'm currently working on is my battle engine. Basically what I decided to do is keep a gamescreen of the battle on the background (with enemies, the party and the skill animations) and then add on top of it a battlemenu menuscreen which navigates through the available commands for my characters.

Then I created a BattleEventArgs Event type to interact between the two screens. This event returns an Action type with datas of the type of the action (skill, item, attack, run, etc etc), the ID of the said action in the database (Item database or skill database, depends on the action) and the ID of the target in battle, which is the index of the entity in the party (both enemy or player party, depends on the type of skill or item, be it healing or attacking skill/item).

Then when I return to the battlescreen, the menu disappears and the battle goes on, it cycles through all the entities on the field to see who's striking first (based on a speed check, dexterity stat) and if it's a player, it brings up the battlemenu, else it runs the enemy AI script (which I have yet to make).

It's a nice battle system in my opinion, I'm only having a bit of problems with cycling through the different options in the menu, as some of them may have a multiple list to access to (skill command -> list of skills -> list of entities to use the skill on. Then return the selected entity and the selected skill..) but I'll work something out.

This is a small video I've recorded of my progress so far. It just shows the basics and I have added more stuff to it too now... You can find the video also at the link in youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uf1xyhHmLt0 (there's also another older video in there..).

Cheers! ^^

First post, bit of introduction.

2009-08-06T00:46:00.005+02:00

Hello my friends, this is my new blog to keep track of the advancement in the development of my new (and first) RPG called Harmonia Warders.

It's an old school style RPG, with 2D tiled/pixelated graphics, developed by me on both PC and Xbox360 (under Xbox Indie Games).

Hopefully I'll be able to get this project to the end and release it because, more than anything, I don't want you guys to play it... I want to play it!

I'm not kidding, I just want to see this monster take life and have fun with it and its characters.

There is not much concept art yet, as it's still all in my head (I lack graphics artists, so far a friend is helping me..) so I can just show you this:
Viviane!
She's the second main character and I can't reveal much more, since it would spoil the fun.

Now, on to the technical part... so far I have managed to get done:

Main Menu - 90%
Tiled Maps Engine - 80%
Battle Engine - 40%
Game Menus - 5%
AI - 0%
Skill/Magic/Item Data - 0%
Monster Data - 5%
Character Data - 0%
Game Script - 0% (All in my head so far)

This doesn't include the graphics..

Graphics - 5%

As you guys can see, I've got a pretty long way to go, but hopefully I'll try to release this before Christmas... Let's hope!