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Jrpg - Blog Posts
I am NOT stoked to create building textures, but I am stoked to see a textured building... so I guess I have to make textures one of these days.
I love this mini drop-down thing... All it needs is a scroll bar for when I really get crazy with it.
More Inventory UI
Still incomplete but now I can look at the items I have without using the debug console.
Inventory UI
It's shaping up, I think. I sorta hate the list format but like, what else is there other than grid slots.
Shader Bugs
The top image was a bug with my outline shader when I tried to replace it for another since it's not very performant and the second is a bug with my chromatic aberration shader that appeared out of nowhere after an engine upgrade.
I hate shaders so much. It is so hard to programmatically describe visuals. I am so jealous of people who are good at this. I've been getting better but like damn.
Support Action
This is a gimmick I've been looking into, at the cost of a turn you can bank an action to use later immediately after someone else. This seems pretty useless but could be helpful in applying status effects that can combine, I still need to think about it lol.
Platforming
Finally, put these guys back in here. They all have names, although I haven't brought it up much. Up front with the black hair and a weird mask is Alice Nor, Behind her in the poorly drawn armor is Jordan Flibeki, and lastly underneath the large hat is Phoebe Quin. These three are the first of 7 playable characters. I haven't really drawn the other 4 yet but I do know what I want them to look like. You can find the names of the other 4 on my very broken website which is not mobile-optimized -> https://pearlessential.webflow.io/
Snow
Proof of concept, not sure if it will have any mechanical functions beyond maybe decreasing movement and jump speed and removing the ability to dash. I really need to get on making assets for snowy areas... I need to make more assets in general actually. Thank you to the super genius who posted this shader on godotshaders.com. This is practically witchcraft to me.
Obscured Objects
Not sure how well this will pan out but since the environment is in 3D and there is hella depth to work with I want to try hiding some interactable objects behind stuff or in an obscured fashion. Since you can't rotate the camera and the scene is orthographic I need to notify the player somehow that they have stumbled upon something hence the cool x-ray effect when you get close. I could add this to NPCs also which could be interesting.
Result Screen (again!)
All I really did was move it to the left of the screen compared to the one the older version of the game had. I like though since you could technically get back to what you were doing on the overworld while the game celebrates your victory (or uh discusses your loss) of to the side.
Xray Shader
Now it's really hard to get lost behind something. Not sure about the colour... Maybe I should use one from the 4 tone pallet...
Stun
I need to implement health in the overworld to complete this feature. I am also considering a hurt sprite but I'm lazy...
Box
You can lift it, and you can smack it. Maybe I should put more velocity into the smack.
Battle Transition
So I was really happy with this. Then, I spent some time on other stuff. And when I came back, I found one of my shaders was broken... So the current version is a tiny bit different.
Battle Parallax
making this background was kinda hard. I think it turned out alright.
Dialogue Box
Holy shi* the frames on this recording. Anyway, here is my dialogue box! it reads a JSON file with all the lines a dialogue has and plays them with a silly sound that I might change... It has support for some cool stuff although it's not implemented yet since I'm really lazy and suck at writing.
Don't mind the other things in the background... However, if you can't control your curiosity, listen closely. I heard there is a hidden archive on a particular discord server full of other development snippets, including snippets that haven't been posted here!? If anyone asks you didn't hear it from me (plz join, k thx bye)
Liftable Objects
Super quick and basic implementation that just tells the object to follow the player's position with a bit of an offset. I use a ray cast to check if there are colliders where the drop area is and change the drop location to behind the player if that is the case... It uh sometimes crushes you or your party members but that's no biggie, right? It also sometimes gets glitched into things but that's an edge case that won't be abused at all.
You know... looking at it now, it might be a little buggy... But it's fun and brings a bit more interactivity to the overworld/field so I'm happy it's implemented haha.
Wonky Battle Scene Camera
Math is really important in game development. I'm trying to organize my battle scene similarly to how it's done in a PSP game known as Grand Knights History. My version is a bit rough, to say the least... Is it just me or does it feel like the UI on the bottom is sticky?
Water Shader
Shaders are literal witchcraft, although getting this one to work was a bit of a hassle since a lot don't play well with an orthographic camera. Don't mind the jesus tech, It get's patched out later.
Battle Scene
Since I had to rewrite everything while porting to Godot 4, I decided to make some tweaks to the battle scene. The UI changed a bit but float text is mostly the same...
New Chests!
Compared to the 2D ones getting this 3D one up to snuff was a bit of work. I still need to retexture the inside of the top half and add some glow effects maybe. I'm slowly getting a hang of blender and 3D workflows but I don't think I'm ready to do a house just yet... Maybe I should make some variants... I kinda want to make a minecrafty one that's super cuby.
As for why I decided to model a chest instead of billboarding one like the trees... So you can stand on it! I have some level design ideas in mind where a chest or some other small object is required to reach locations but for now, it's still just an idea.
More Terrain Stuff
More models I ended up scrapping. 3D modelling is very tuff.
Terrain Stuff
I had to model this... with a blender! ridiculous.
Level Transition
It's really fast but it might be due to how empty these testing levels are and not how well I coded it lol. I sorta want to edit the shader I'm using to do a radial wipe but glsl is the enemy of mankind.
Party Follow
So following party members are a bit tricker in 3D. The main issue I need to solve is how they handle being obstructed by something they can scale. I sorta want to put jumping into their state machine but I'm lazy so for now they teleport. I had a slight issue where when they teleported somewhere they could crush the player controller into the ground... it might still be an issue I need to test it more haha.
If you were curious about how their path-finding works it's something like this:
A. Determine the vector between the current position and the player position ignoring the y-axis. B. Add vector to velocity to move in the player's direction. C. If one of 6 ray casts reports collision and velocity is close to zero pick another direction to walk in for a while before resuming from step A.
I could use the built-in navigation stuff Godot has but it needs to be baked and I sorta want to avoid that with how much I like to tweak the environment sometimes. Idk it works well enough for now but there is totally room for improvement haha.