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Jrpg - Blog Posts
Psuedo2D
A dump of some things. I briefly mentioned how I had rewrote the game in Godot 4. During the transition I decided to give up on pure 2D and just make a 3D game that looks 2D... so in my own words, pearlessential is now a Psuedo2D game. Here are some captures from early in the transition.
An attempt at VFX
This took a lot of time to make and I'm pretty sure I'm gonna scrap it. It's pretty cool tho, it's entirely 2D (part of why it took so long to make...)
Equip/Augment UI Mockup
Probably my favourite mockup to date. This is where the player will configure their party members. A battler can equip 1 weapon, 1 armor set, 1-2 artifacts depending on class and 4 techniques. This amounts to 8 possible things to customize around the endgame. On top of the equipment possibilities, the player can also augment 4 attributes (SPD, STR, DEF, MAG) on each of their characters using attribute points scattered across the world.
Results Screen (In engine!)
This was like the last thing I added before terrain bugged me out so much that I decided rewriting the entire codebase and switching to 3D would be more enjoyable than trying to get it to work
Terrain
So walking around a flat world is fine, but my game is isometric so having terrain feels like a must. too bad it's a pain in the ass to implement. I spent months on this and in the end, it wasn't good enough. It wouldn't play well with other props like trees well, The player could glitch it out and clip through it, render order and collision was abhorrent and it couldn't stack on top of itself. I'll be honest the whole reason for why I switched to 3D in the Godot 4 version of the game is because a fake z axis in 2D isn't very fun to implement.
Some of the collision shapes I had to setup
I drew them out so I could turn them into tiles for the tileset
Anyway, word of advice to anyone who wants to make an isometric game, make a 3D game that looks 2D not the other way around.
Super annoying lag bug
So this is a bug I've had for awhile, and thanks to level switching, I know it's sorta localized to scenes. But it has nothing to do with scene contents. I ended up porting the game without figuring out why it happened, I'm trying really hard to keep my code clean to avoid replicating it again lol.
Inventory UI
I did get to implementing it before porting the game over, but I realized the box to the right of the list could probably look a bit better, so it needs some tweaks. As I mentioned earlier I decided to port the game to Godot 4 which I thought would be fine since the project is mostly art and not much code. But then Godot failed to convert the old project. I still believed it would be fine since there was only a handful of features in the game anyway and it wouldn't take too long to rewrite them from scratch. Plus I could just look at my old code. Then I started the rewrite and... rewriting code is really boring
Super Fancy Location Indicator
That I will probably redesign since I want to redesign the pause menu...
Level Switching
Super important feature since I can't put the whole game in one scene without gigabrain code turning things off and on as needed. It also lets me teleport the player within a scene which is nice
Level Switching Bug
I figured it out eventually but this was too funny not to share
Tower
Doing the bricks on the bottom was heck. I guess this is a good time to tell you this specific one won't be in the game... not because it's bad or anything but because while porting to Godot 4 I switched to 3D. So now I have to model the bricks on the bottom... heck. At least you'll be able to jump from rooftops to rooftops... hopefully
Inventory UI Part 2
So uh scroll bars and the scroll container node suck. I just kinda hate them. This is probably the first time I got them to work the way I wanted lol. I also got it to do this which I think was pretty cool:
Inventory UI
Slowly putting it together... It's just undergoing a few hiccups, totally not bugs arising from my janky programming skills
Dialogue Choice
This was super cool to implement, but now I'm having trouble designing dialogue trees and other narrative stuff. Writing is hard
More Pause Menu
I don't utilize Godot's built-in stuff for UIs very well which results in silly issues like this. Will I take time to figure it out properly? Maybe. Will I continue to use hacky, janky, fixes. Certainly
Inventory Update Notices
Pretty minor, the inventory backend was the harder more impressive part. I really need to work on animations for lifting objects lol
More Damage Popups
good job me
Damage Popups
The whole point is to provide context on what important modifiers might have applied to the damage. I've overhauled the battle system a bit since so they don't look like this anymore but yea progress...
Pause Menu
I kinda of want to tweak it a little, don't mind the placeholder icons lol. As for what I've been doing up until now. I was working on this back in March and uh since then I've been tweaking the game here and there. As for the lack of posts... I just got lazy I guess.
Lifting
less buggy than push... sorta
Pause Menu Implementation
I decided to stop tweaking the look and actually start putting it into the game. Exporting assets is a lot of work so I just kinda put placeholders in...
Csprites
Csprites, aka Combat Sprites are the counterpart to isosprites. They show up in the battle scene. I don't really like the look of them and I dread coding for some reason. So lets redraw them. new base
Test sketch
alice head
yea she frowns underneath the mask
looks okay I guess, but still feels off, might redraw again later... (I did redraw them again later, I know since this work was done months ago)
