Test #2:
Test #3:
Last VA clip for a while, recording starts in February.
Update on battle, the unit size changes are nearly done. We’re wrapping up a final loose end, but from there I’ll be playtesting the existing battles to see how it works.
It was a pretty big change and I’ll share gameplay footage of the larger scale outdoor battle soon.
Once that’s done – the battle system will be pretty much stable for a while.
Just a look at units that take 2x2 space. The average unit will be that big.
Level Design
Added clouds to Bethany. Plus music – it’s a vibe.
BUT I am hearing how my maps are soulless, generic and have too much open space. This is why I am a programmer, not an artist lol
So, my artist is taking over. We’ll be redoing all our interiors in Bethany, then redoing the fort interiors. Should take a while.
We started with the blacksmith:
Other than that, I’ve been:
- Doing a shitton of script editing to prepare for voice acting recording
- Wiring up multi cell units (bigger units) into all our battles
Almost at the 1 year anniversary of this devlog of me mostly talking to myself, it’s great lol.
Got some love from reddit:
Hopefully more battles coming soon, but between voice acting and level redesigns – it’ll be a while!
If you’d like to lurk and see the game come together: Mystery Babylon
1 Like
Another day, another level redesigned:
Concept Art
Our concept artist recovered from Covid 
Final Renders are in:
5 Likes
Wow, those are some really cool concept arts!
1 Like
NPCs and NPC AI
Working on bringing the town to life. Shoutouts to the creator of Exit Fate, those sprites he gave me leave to use are coming in extra handy right now (or we’d be stuck waiting for 30+ NPCs to be made). We still do have to make a good deal of custom NPCs, maybe 10-12 more to fill up the town.
World Map (8/24)
We’re getting there! This thing is like the best jigsaw puzzle ever.
Level Design
The fort interior levels are getting a redesign.
This redesign will likely take another week or so more, but since my artist has taken over level design, I have no doubt it will look dope asf.
Combat
While the level redesign is going on, it’s sort of been a blocker towards more testing on our unit sizes.
But, I’m planning to create a playtesting scene for the big outdoor battle – see how it performs on a bigger outdoor map with lots of big units.
Finger crossed that it doesn’t need optimization, but if it does – it’ll get done.
Battle Sprites
Without being too spoilery, I’m working on the next set of enemies for the demo. They’re bandits:
Also working on 3D models for those concept art characters, so we can complete their battle sprites.
On that note – I am totally looking for pixel artists.
Portraits
There are a TON of portraits to do, esp since nearly everyone will be voice acted. Our portraits are 178x178 plus structured a bit differently than FE portraits.
Example set: https://imgur.com/a/fMGjJIn
Basically, there’s a few key facial expressions I use to animate a believable talking animation. Plus a few others to illustrate emotion, but we mainly just use talking frames and neutral (mouth closed frames). Really, you are just changing the mouth on each frame.
Then, there’s the 3 eye frames: open, squinting, and closed to animate blinking
The usual portrait artist has those 4 sets of battle animations to do, and I can’t really leave him with a pile of portraits to do…
NPCs
Got a few leads here, but if anyone is handy with smooth battle animations – then these 4-5 frame walk/run animations should be cake. Though, they are higher res.
These are ofc paid – I’ll ask for a fixed price per portrait set or animation.
Suppose I’ll put this in the Commissions Listings too, later.
3 Likes
Battle System
Year 1 is complete!
This past year has had a main focus on programming – budget wise.
Referencing Tyler Glaiel, the programmer for Mewgenics:
https://twitter.com/TylerGlaiel/status/1482119639182102533?s=20
He’s right! I’m not really a beginner, but the time it takes to build the system you need for an RPG is pretty staggering, especially if you’re coding them from scratch without any or minimal plugins/prebuilt solutions (like an RPG Maker or SRPG Studio, which are both viable options too).
In the past year of programming focus we’ve completed:
- Dialogue & Cutscene System
- World Grid Systems + Pathfinding
- Non-combat exploration and NPC AI
- Dueling Feature from Suikoden
- Tactical Battle System
- Inventory System
- Loads of UI – Main Menus, Inventory UI, Pause Menu, etc.
- Save/Load System
All of which make up the basis of the RPG’s game mechanics.
So, going forward – the main focus will be on art!
I’ll be experimenting with our art to make it a bit less colorful, more muted to go with the mature theme.
I’ll share results later.
NPC AI & Level Design
Still iterating on this. I got basic NPC roaming AI wired up, adding sounds where I can. Had the fireplaces animated.
https://twitter.com/TylerGlaiel/status/1484714936202760194?s=20
I feel this. This is probably where our game currently is – and the art style should improve dramatically by next year.
Thanks for reading – more updates soon.
5 Likes
World Map (12/24) 50% Done
This map is so sexy. Two months of 350x350 pieces animated 4 frames each. Final resolution is 2100x2100… which is murder for pixel art.
But, sooo worth it. I hate coding UI (in Unity) but I can’t wait to do this one.
Level Design
Fort Valestone Redesign
Still in the mockup phase. We’re animating doors and creating new props. Might begin actually mapping next week.
Town of Bethany
Most of the work I did this week was on this level. Minor level design updates, sound design, hooking up NPC animations. The game will start here before the fort, so also working on the first cutscene with the carriage.
Shoutout to the owl, she’s pretty plot important.
We’re working on more NPCs and also doing revamps on existing main characters.
Got a better town song, too!
Battle Sprites
Bandit Leader Set (5/7)
Just Critical Atk and Death left to do.
Writing
Planning to start VA recording by Feb 15th. I’m writing the script myself now, had to redirect budget to art and voice acting. Couldn’t find a solid writer to trust or who was willing to revenue share, so it’s on me!
Nothing I can’t handle, though. Writing is pretty fun.
In case there’s anyone who’s interested, I’ll share the WIP script for Chapter 1 – detailing the game’s beginning in Bethany.
Spoiler alert, ofc:
Might catch me writing there in real-time, don’t give me stage fright, lol.
Battle System
The battle I shared last week is in good shape. AI is reacting smarter and I’ve beat the map twice.
There’s more to fix and optimize. Plus, we’re working on revamps for certain characters and adding in-combat battle idle animations… so they don’t just stand still the whole time while on the combat grid.
So, more on this later.
6 Likes
Every time I see a post I get more and more stoked for release! It keeps getting better and better as well! Good luck with the writing and also that town music chef’s kiss. I love that laid back type of music for towns and such, it honestly reminds me of something from Chrono Cross(which I’m currently replaying so that might be why). Anyways good luck with the everything!
1 Like
Level Design
I whipped up a forest level out of storyline necessity. My level design and GIMP skills are growing – was able to recolor our existing tiles to get this warm color balance.
Also, you’ll see the owl. I made a script to handle following the player.
I made another one for a cutscene/guide sort of deal – where the owl leads and you follow.
Duel System
Since the design of the fort interior is changing, I had to redesign the 3D scene using the new textures. Luckily, I found Crocotile which made it easier than stacking bricks Minecraft style in Unity.
Still working on the lighting and camera filters, but I’m happy with how the level came out.
I’m going to get started on mapping the remodel for Fort Valestone’s interior based on the mockup.
Also, I still have to finish the script.
2 Likes
Yo FEU,
Didn’t plan to do an update for a bit, but I need some help.
^
|
|
That’s a windows build of a battle level.
We’ve been working on eliminating lag. I want to know if this lags on anyone’s computer.
EDIT: I work with a gamepad, but controls are same as VBA basically.
Some known bugs
- Sometimes AI tries to attack in positions where they can’t
- Diagonal stairs rendering & movement is broken
Basically, not looking for bug reports but LAG reports.
There’s no win condition if you kill everyone yet, but you will hit a game over if anyone dies.
Not an official demo release, but gameplay should be pretty stable. Higher crit rates for players and hit rate debuffs on enemies are applied here.
Portraits
@L95 Is helping us out:
Got up and running really quickly, dude’s a beast. Looking forward to working together long-term.
Have lots of concept art for upcoming portraits:
Laila – The Tavern Owner
Kid 1 NPC
Kid 2 NPC
Kid 3 NPC
Kid 4 NPC – Aspiring Adventurer
Kid 5 NPC — Aspiring Adventurer
Adventurer 5 NPC
Adventurer 6 NPC
With a bunch more to come. 40+ portraits to do. Having each NPC voice acted means an animated portrait for everyone you talk to.
Short update – please playtest that level if you find time. If it LAGS, let me know. Ideally let me know when/where//under which conditions lag occurs.
2 Likes
Weekly Update
Found some good folks to playtest. No lag, but other issues came up. Thank god lag wasn’t one of them.
Lots of changes this past week:
Level Design
The first piece of feedback was that our level was really dark and hard to read. Generally, I hate really bright pixel art – but in this case, they were right. It’s a night level, but it still needs to be visible. First thing I did was jack up the saturation:
Going into greyscale mode helps to see how readable your level is. Ours wasn’t very readable and lacked contrast.
After that, the next complaint was that our level was too barren. It was really merely for testing the AI algorithm’s performance, but I took the opportunity to improve the level:
We got some flags done to decorate the level. I added stationary archer towers – the units there will fire on any enemies within range.
I’ll have Penelope (the only archer) be the only one capable of taking them out.
Also added loads of trees on the borders of the map for decoration and marked those areas impassible. Huge performance gain, doing that. But, since I doubt combat maps will ever be this huge – I likely don’t have to worry much about lag anymore.
UI
I got a load of feedback from a fellow dev about our UI. Fixed a ton of bugs in there, and added some now UI.
- Unit Info on Hover
- General Battle Menu (when you click an empty grid square)
Still a lot of focus on battle stuff while portraits and sprites are being made. Some stuff coming up:
- Mouse support in battle
- Save/Load from Combat
- Q/E, Mouse Wheel, or L/R Bumper to go to next unmoved unit
Battle Blurbs
I totally stole this from FE3H. In addition to adding new “battle idles” while on the battle grid, I’m adding some VA clips that play when you select a player:
There’s two types of battle blurbs:
Selection Blurbs (when you select a unit)
- Good Health Blurb (when health > 35%)
- Poor Health Blurb (when health < 35%)
Deselection Blurbs (when you cancel moving a unit without moving at all)
Each type has a list of playable audio clips that get randomly selected.
Portraits
@L95 continues to do God’s work. Here’s three of his completed portraits:
Two main character portraits by our other artist:
Between these two, we’ll definitely get all our portraits done before April.
Concept Art
We officially have concept art for all our portraits.
The NPCs by Ayveris:
Adventurer NPCs by our new concept artist, Emir:
For NPCs, these mf’ers are better designed than my players lol.
Both artists are awesome, just got another one to help us hit our deadlines.
That’s about it!
Doing more work on battle system and UI. More portraits are incoming. Couple new sprites and animations.
VAs are getting started. Gotta find a solid audio engineer to make all these different clips the same volume and quality.
Still have some casting and writing to do.
Still have to map that new fort interior…
Getting there though.
5 Likes
Weekly Update
Gonna knock this out today, so I can spend the the day playing Bloodlines lol
Mouse Controls
During the last playtest, in addition to the level’s darkness, having no mouse controls was another issue that got brought up.
I personally user VBA keyboard controls or gamepad, but I have to accommodate everyone. All of our UI is mouse compatible now. Plus we got got a cool little gauntlet cursor:
(I should make it bigger ingame)
Spent most of the work week adding mouse click/hover to everything.
Small sidenote, we did some small updates to this level: animated diagonal banners.
In the process of animating all the flags. It’ll look great and add some extra polish to this level.
Fort Interior Level + Remastered Sprites
We got Teagan’s sprite set completed:
Note: I wasn’t aware I was recording sound at this time. Doing a retake was too much work, so enjoy Pushin P.
Done by @Lucky90Happy. Talented as hell. Will definitely be handling more character sets for us.
Just today, I received remastered sprites for Arthur (MC) and Jacques (playable character). This weekend, I finally got started on mapping the new fort interior level.
Below is a showcase of Arthur’s new style and the new level:
Level Design by @dokitsuart. What a beast. He’s totally designing all the levels and handling art direction – this is hands-down the best level in the game (and the only one he 100% designed, so its no coincidence lol).
Here’s the remastered Jacques sprite.
Arthur & Jacques Remasters by @vnittiart. Between him and Lucky, our characters are going to take a huge jump in quality.
Paired with Dokitsu’s levels, the art quality is just gonna be insane!
Speaking of insane art:
Portraits
@L95 continues to crush these portraits. Crazy detailed art from this man.
3 fire portraits in a week. Man is a force to be reckoned with.
That’s all for this week.
Have to:
- Finish Fort Interior Level
- Continue to Polish off Battle System
- We officially sent out scripts to our VAs, so recording begins this week
More portraits and sprites are incoming. Doing some more battle sprites this week, too.
iight, time to go learn how to patch a rom lol
If yall are twitter ppl, a follow is much appreciated: @CodenameBabylon
3 Likes
Weekly Update
Level Design
Fort Valestone’s interior is being fleshed out. Going pretty well, should be done with the level by next week. Then, it’s just NPCs, cutscenes and dialogue for another 2-3 weeks.
Sprites
Got our first few animations for Kenzo:
Really dope work by @vnittiart.
We’re 3/7 on sword bandit’s battle sprites:
Portraits
@L95 is still killing it:
Keeping it short and sweet! Got a VA session literally right now – til next week!
2 Likes
Weekly Update
Level Design
No new footage worth showing – but Fort Interior remaster is complete.
With that, all major levels for the demo are complete.
That being the case, we’re going to focus on redesigning and polishing parts of certain maps. Starting with the guild hall in the town level.
Portraits
Speaking of the Guild Hall, here’s more @L95 portraits in there:
(these embeds expire, so raw link)
(raw link)
With that, he’s done all the adventurer portraits! I’ll share the stills for any pixel art lovers (dude blows me away every time):
Obviously not F2U – as for F2E, I don’t really mind – ask/credit @L95 himself.
Sprites
Knights are getting a redesign. Nyreen’s sprite set is in progress.
World Map (24/24 – 100%)
Four months later… WORTH IT.
That’s it.
For those wondering, I’m planning a new full demo release around mid April-late May. It really depends, but likely closer to May.
6 Likes
Weekly Update
Level Design
Last week, I mentioned we’d be redesigning the Guild Hall. Our environment artist and level designer got going really quickly:
Just now, I was able to get the map finished:
(raw link)
Other than that, I’ve been getting started wiring up cutscenes and NPC dialogue, starting with the first cutscene of the game:
(raw link)
I believe we’ll be polishing off the exterior map for Bethany as best as we can, it’s likely next up for a remaster (though I doubt it will be complete scrap and redo).
Sprites & Portraits
The Knight redesign complete, at least for unmounted knights:
(raw link)
Nyreen’s set is also complete:
Unsmeared
SMEAERED
@L95 has moved onto doing civilian NPC portraits:
(raw link)
Six in a week – what a beast.
3D Models
As you may know, our battle animations are rotoscoped from 3D animations. Before, I used store bought or free 3D models, but since our players are custom designed now – we need custom models.
We have two done so far:
So, their battle sprites are coming soon.
Nyreen and Kenzo 3D models coming soon.
If I ever decide to make a 3D sequel, I’m pretty prepared!
That’s it.
More VA dialogue and cutscenes next week.
Likely more level polish and progress of the fort interior level.
More sprites coming, as well.
We got a new composer on board, I’ll share some of that once it’s plugged in.
7 Likes
Ayyy I don’t know how this is my first time seeing this. You and your team are moving on this. I think the town hall looks stellar! And 6 portraits in a week is insane, kudos to the artist.
3 Likes
Thanks man, we’ve definitely been moving at sonic speed lol
Hoping to finish the demo ASAP and pitch publishers.
Thanks for the feedback, Those Who Rule seems to be making steady progress as well!
2 Likes
Ooh I remember seeing this thread when it was in its infancy!
You sure have come a long way. Wish you the best of luck with your project~
3 Likes
Weekly Update
Spent most of this week:
- Implementing dialogue and cutscenes
- Debugging the battle system
- Working on World Map UI
(raw link)
(raw link)
I’ve gotten most of the VA audio mixed and mastered – so this week I’ll be focused on implementing those various cutscenes and dialogue sequences.
Pretty soon, I’ll be asking you guys’ opinions on the quality of the voice over.
The battle scene is coming along really well – the new knight sprites were plugged in:
There’s more player sprite redos on the way, soon everyone will have an animated idle rather than standing still.
There’s an annoying bug with our arrows after changing to units that are generally 2x2 rather than single cell.
They’re breaking on stairs.
You know how every unit in FE takes 1 space? This makes rendering the arrow easy, because all you have to do is put the arrow sprites in the center of that grid cell.
But now, the arrows spawn in a different position that can vary based on if a unit is 2x2 or 2x3 like mounted units… complicating the situation.
So, we’re looking into a shader based arrow rather than a sprite based one. Fun times.
World Map
(raw link)
Working on this menu.
You’ll be able to use Gamepad RS or mouse to freely scroll around the map and select locations. Mousewheel or LT/RT to zoom in/out.
We got some epic music for this level as well! Will likely plug it in sometime this week.
Sprites & Portraits
3 new @L95 portraits:
There’s an owl portrait coming up that I’m pretty excited about lol. Look forward to it.
If you watch the first video, you’ll likely agree – the Carriage Driver sprite is pretty ugly lol. So, he’s getting a redo. He only walks, whistles, and sits – so his animation set isn’t a big deal.
But, he’s got a good amount of lines – so he deserves to look decent.
Battle Sprites
Sword Bandit (7/7)
Won’t be seeing him in the demo – but they’ll get plugged in once Teagan, Kenzo, and Nyreen all have battle sprites (which will take a while).
Next up is Bandit Archer:
That’s it!
Our VAs have basically completed the 105 page script for Chapter 1 after about four weekly sessions. I’m proofreading and rewriting the Chapter 2 script and we’ll begin sessions again in two weeks when it’s ready.
The demo in early May will be Chapter 1 & 2.
More player sprite redos are on the way. @L95 is actually reaching the tail end of portraits to be done for the demo, which is great.
Still a ton to do, but it’s coming along! I started putting out feelers with publishers again :] A few were really shocked by the progress in a year – we’ll see how negotiations go.
Thanks!
6 Likes