I want to make a mini RPG for #1GAM June. Later release the game as a complete project. The game/story is not decided yet. I wanted to make some progress building out the systems.
The basic features planned so far are :
A Character profiling system. Strength, health/mana, damage, agility, luck.
A branchable skill system.
Drag and Drop Inventories, with loot.
Stackable Quest system.
Dialog system where dialogs can be read from text files. Formatted more like comic book scripts.
Can you help me by suggesting any other important feature that should be included?
Also, I’m quite undecided whether to do it with 3D Look and feel or 2D (sprite animation) look. Though the systems will be same for 2D or 3D, the looks can matter a lot too.
I wanted to have a poll on what you want to see. 2D or 3D. Please vote and let me know your choice.
I vote for 2D! more charming than any 3d RPG ive played since…hell i dunno:P
and yeah the looks matter, i’d avoid pixelart and use bitmaps and animate the characters in smoothmoves or something simular, its fast and painless(most of the time)
as for the feats, i think that list seems pretty solid for a minirpg already, i’ll wait aorund and see what others say!
Your current proposal has too many stats! You’ll be stuck designing stat interactions above all else.
Really in an RPG there are three basic stats: physical attack, skill/magic power, and HP. I omit defensibe stats because all they do is provide diminishing returns, thus extending the time to kill for a given entity (which, additional HP does anyhow.)
I support a luck stat as a modifier to d100 rolls though, to keep things mixed up for the player.
Finally, do yourslef a favor and pick 2D. A 3D RPG will take you far beyond one month to build.
It is easier to build in terms of graphics. U avoid doing models, rigging them, animating them, building all the props and assets in 3d and getting them textured aswell. this is a very hard 1man job.
When i do characters for 2D i spend maybe 2-3 hours designing them in PS and splitting them up for animations, then 1-2 hours for animations (basic like attack,jump,walk)
Textures i also do rather fast fo the actual enviroment so i can probably dash out 5-10 textures a day, these can be repeated ofcourse in several places so u can build maps.
in 3d This is atleast 1 weeks work for one guy getting a character done. Then u gotta ofcouse build the levels…i tried 3d, NOT for me.
Spine is horrible to work with, use SMooth Moves. Spine wasnt as userfirendly as i’d hope, videos on SM is also alot better covered. Atleast back then.
Smoothmoves lets u swicth textures on bones for each frame, hide them and so on, very fast to work with.
Smoothmoves seems cool. Also the animated prefab is independent of Smoothmoves software. So, If I make any animations with it, those animations can be distributed.
Right? Or am I wrong? You need Smoothmoves to use the animations.
It’s less than you think it is. Even assuming an average sprite size of 64x64px (what I’m dominantly using in The Hero’s Journey, end shameless plug here), bear in mind that you’re never actually using all 4096 pixels at any given time; at most you’re using half of that, and even then you’re not going to assign all of those pixels by hand; that’s why Mankind invented Photoshop/The GIMP/Graphics Gale. You will find the line and fill tools to be doing the brunt of the work, with the pencil tool etching out a few fine details.
It’s easiest to start with lineart, which you then color. Avoid using more than eight colors (I typically choose three main colors, then make a really dark one and a really light one, for outlining and highlighting, respectively. Very rarely do I make an ‘intermediately’ dark color for lowlighting.)
I recommend animating your lineart first, before coloring each frame, finally. That’s one of my lessons learned from re-exploring pixel sprites in The Hero’s Journey.
Now the opinions are squarely divided. So, the forum is as undecided as me.
I guess it’s a personal choice, really depends whether you are a 2D artist or a 3D artist.
I still don’t have the story and the character. It will take some time. So, let me start with the systems first, may be with some spritesheets from OpenGameArt.org. Then later on I’ll switch to 2D or 3D. In the meanwhile we’ll have more votes in the poll.
@Asvarduil : The Hero’s Journey looks great! Keep up the good work. I guess you’ll find some code snippets during this development which you can use there.
Also, if you see any good public domain spirtesheets please give me a pointer.
Nice I’m just starting to get involved in 1gameamonth too. Good luck with this, sounds cool!
I’ve used Spine and Smoothmoves and like them both. I found Spine to be more performant on mobile, but if that’s not a concern Smoothmoves is nice because it’s built right into the editor. I’m pretty sure even though the smoothmoves animations are unity animations, they still require the smoothmoves.dll to function.
So, the forum is as undecided as me.