TOEE-style CRPG development

[biggestboss]

Hi everyone, I've been planning out a turn-based CRPG that plays like Temple of Elemental Evil for the past couple of months and have recently started prototyping the systems and mechanics in Unity (please put away the pitchforks). So far, only the movement and party selection mechanics have been implemented. I plan on blocking out the menu settings, inventory, etc. next and combat mechanics after that. Unfortunately, I work a full time job so updates will be few and far between but I wanted to put this out there so that I may be more incentivized to keep making progress.



There was a link to a playable prototype here, but I've removed it for now - waiting until there is more substance to the game.

Thanks for reading this post and I hope you all have a great day.

 

[Harry Easter]

Do you have already plans for a scenario? Fantasy or Sci-Fi?

 

[biggestboss]

Do you have already plans for a scenario? Fantasy or Sci-Fi?

At the moment, I plan on it being like Wizardry 7/8 where modern/futuristic elements kind of coexist with more fantastical stuff and having tenuous narrative reason to tie it together. Everything is subject to change though as the game is less than 1% done.

 

[Harry Easter]

A clear definite goal is enough plot for me :D. Some of the best plots are told by gameplay (like the epic crusade against The Temple of Elemental Evil).

 

[biggestboss]

Not the biggest update in the world but I started blocking out and implementing minor functions for the UI. You can now select party members using their portraits and the portrait UI's now reflect the selection party of your party members. Hotkeys can also activate the in-game menus (press I for Inventory, etc.) although none of these functions are actually implemented yet.



I don't know why gfycat always defaults to the low quality version which throttles the video's framerate, but you have to set it to HD to have it play at 60 fps.

Going back to the game, I'll also need to put in on-screen buttons to activate the inventory and such since I do want the game to be playable entirely with mouse only. I also know that this is decline, but I do want to implement controller support in the future as well but it will be very simple like left stick pans the camera and right stick controls the mouse cursor.

Once these menus are more fleshed out, I plan on having the camera zoom closer to the character that is selected so that the in-game character in the actual game world can be treated as a pseudo-paper doll when changing equipment and such. This was inspired by seeing GreedFall do this exact thing to great effect in my opinion.

After menu implementation, I plan on working on dialogue (current plan is to make it like KOTOR visually with the letterbox bars) and begin turn based combat mechanics after that.

I'll be going on vacation today and tomorrow so there won't be any progress over those days nor will I be able to check on the Codex, so again have a great couple of days.

EDIT: Forgot to say, but the placeholder portraits are from Avernum 3 run through a pixel shader.

 

[Bester]

I see you made selection circles by decals. Looks like they don't work very well with 3d landscapes.

Perhaps consider mesh circles that ignore landscape's depth test (i.e. they're always drawn on top of landscape, but can be drawn behind something that's not part of landscape)? Not sure you can do it in Unity's shaders though.

 

[biggestboss]

I see you made selection circles by decals. Looks like they don't work very well with 3d landscapes.

Perhaps consider mesh circles that ignore landscape's depth test (i.e. they're always drawn on top of landscape, but can be drawn behind something that's not part of landscape)? Not sure you can do it in Unity's shaders though.

Thanks for the tip. I'm more of a front end developer and lack a lot of technical knowledge - for instance, the shader to make that decal appear as an unlit opaque color instead of translucent one is a shader I found from googling instead of writing my own. I'm not quite sure what a mesh circle is but at least it's something for me to look into when polishing up unit selection.

 

[Bester]

. I'm not quite sure what a mesh circle is

It's a 3d mesh in shape of a circle, surprising as it may be.

 

[biggestboss]

. I'm not quite sure what a mesh circle is

It's a 3d mesh in shape of a circle, surprising as it may be.

Makes sense. This is actually my first real 3D game so a lot of this stuff is pretty new to me.

I think the main problem with my current setup is that I am using a custom shader instead of the ones Unity supplies by default for its decal projection which had a falloff component to fade out the decal depending on its depth. I replaced them because they were affected by light and changed into a different color that was almost the same as the grass. I should probably just bite the bullet one of these days and learn how to write a shader so I can get the color I want and get the falloff effect too.

 

[Bester]

There are good opengl tutorials out there. Writing shaders is just one aspect of it, I'd recommend learning opengl as a whole, otherwise you'd still be confused about certain things.

 

[biggestboss]

Made some microprogress today. I started blocking out the functionality for in-game menus (Character, Inventory, etc.). Next is to hook up the data show that each character's stats display their actual values.

 

[biggestboss]

Hello Codex, I've made quite a bit of progress when it comes to UI and save file progress.

You can download and mess around with the prototype here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GP8KC1VZrOzEMQMpSeK9C8Z-lA0Wnnjh/view?usp=sharing

Here are the basic controls as well:

Feel free to leave any feedback about what looks good, what looks bad, what could be changed, questions about potential mechanics (nothing is set in stone at the moment with respect to stats, etc.), and bugs.

 

[laclongquan]

Do you have trail of their steps? To show where they would have walked through?

 

[biggestboss]

Do you have trail of their steps? To show where they would have walked through?

Not at the moment but I'm sure it's possible to implement. Do you mean something like footsteps in the grass or something UI-related like a colored/dotted line to show pathing while the characters walk?

 

[laclongquan]

color/lightened footstep signs~ Later on if you implement traps on the ground, that would have helped before making decision to move forward.

 

[biggestboss]

color/lightened footstep signs~ Later on if you implement traps on the ground, that would have helped before making decision to move forward.

If you mean something like this, yea I can totally implement something like this in the future.

 

[laclongquan]

I mean as this


Note second 35. each character has a trail of its own as predefined.

Then on the move, if something unexpected happen that affect their trail, it would change automatically. Obviously, there's option in settings to allow "stop when trail changed".

If you take inspiration from TOEE, then your aim should be tactical aspect. In which case, a clear trail of movement is needed.

 

[biggestboss]

I mean as this


Note second 35. each character has a trail of its own as predefined.

Then on the move, if something unexpected happen that affect their trail, it would change automatically. Obviously, there's option in settings to allow "stop when trail changed".

If you take inspiration from TOEE, then your aim should be tactical aspect. In which case, a clear trail of movement is needed.

Ah, I was planning on implementing a pathing trail like this for combat since attacks of opportunity would be in the game. You do bring up a good point in that it should also be in regular exploration as well if there is to be ground based traps like IE games, although I'm not sure if I want to have those just yet.

 

[laclongquan]

Groundbased traps are a must have in tactical game. BG series, Icewind Dale series, Planescape Torment etc... all have them.

How deadly are they is another problem.

 

[biggestboss]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that TOEE itself doesn't have ground-based traps but instead of trapped chests. Either way, I could see incorporating them in addition to the pathing prediction trails (which would need to be implemented anyway for combat) plus having the party stop movement on trap/enemy detection (toggleable in the settings a la Infinity Engine).

 

[Darth Canoli]

It would be nice if everyone followed the selected character by default with an option to scatter the group and set their path individually for ambush purposes.

ToEE was irritating sometimes because everyone chose a different path "randomly" and you could trigger an encounter with the rest of your party on the opposite side of the map because they felt like having a stroll.

 

[biggestboss]

It would be nice if everyone followed the selected character by default with an option to scatter the group and set their path individually for ambush purposes.

ToEE was irritating sometimes because everyone chose a different path "randomly" and you could trigger an encounter with the rest of your party on the opposite side of the map because they felt like having a stroll.

Thanks for trying it out. I was hoping if you could elaborate because I feel like you just described how movement works currently in the game which means I'm probably misunderstanding something.

 

[Darth Canoli]

Didn't try it actually, seemed like it was in a very early dev phase, i was just hoping you would do things differently than ToEE, path-finding wise.

But i'll try it if/when it's relevant, just not right now.

 

[biggestboss]

Didn't try it actually, seemed like it was in a very early dev phase, i was just hoping you would do things differently than ToEE, path-finding wise.

But i'll try it if/when it's relevant, just not right now.

Fair enough. I've got basic RTS controls implemented for the most part, and TOEE's pathfinding is definitely something I would want to improve upon instead of emulate. I have many memories in TOEE of trying to set a destination across the map from where my characters are and having them end up taking very "creative" paths through the map.

 

[biggestboss]

I decided to redo the dialogue interface because I was unhappy with the way it looked in the last post which is now deleted.

It now functions more like Infinity Engine and less like KOTOR: