This Week's News, 3/22 (And SRPG Dev Lore)
Hey. I'm going to try posting regularly on what I'm working on creatively. It's always very satisfying to show my friends, but now I'm wondering if I ought to keep a log of it.
We'll see if this pans out, but here's some stuff in the meantime.
(pretend there's a photo here. I hit the image limit on Tumblr.)
It was awesome. Those who know me have probably seen the photos of me with Tarn Adams and Derek Yu. It was a seriously great event, much more chill this year than usual. I feel like I met less people, but made stronger connections overall.
If it wasn't 11:30 at night I'd draw a picture of bunny me with Tarn.. I wonder what Tarn Adams' fursona would be. Let me know if you're reading this.
I've really enjoyed getting to know devs in the Bay Area. Since I came home in September it's felt really lonely, but in the last few weeks, it seems like everything changed, and I couldn't be more grateful.
This DOOM level's coming along
This is like a 15-20 minute level. That's a pretty long level. If you look closely, you can see I'm revealing a secret to you when you play it.
I'll be releasing on Doomworld, most likely. It's not my first foray into DOOM either, as I made a 5-level WAD in 2020. As a summer project, it was really my first attempt at doing a somewhat long-term project in games, since it took (to my memory) 2-3 months.
Concept Album is coming along, too
Damn that's blurry lol. Sneak peek of some of the collage I'm doing for an album cover.
I didn't do much music work this week, but I am still working on my concept album. A lot of it was just talking to people about it at GDC, without revealing too much.
To be honest, I've been listening to a lot of great songwriters lately, and it's making me want to rewrite a lot of the raps on my album.
What is the album about? I can't say. It's very personal and introspective, and kind of about light vs. dark.
If it wasn't for the damn concept album I'd be working on my SRPG again
I learned so much over the past few weeks, not just from my new pal Nathaniel Jones, but from plenty of other people about Game AI and how to make a strategy RPG.
For context, when I return to this midway through the year (assuming things are still stable enough to just work on games), It'll be my... technically 5th attempt lifetime to make a Strategy RPG engine.
You know, I almost feel like showing you each of the 4 times I tried to make a strategy RPG. Next week's blog isn't gonna be nearly as long, I'm letting myself have that.
So this all started when my Game Systems professor had us play a game called the Battle of Dan-no-Ura. It was an old Japanese electronic board game, and we were assigned to make mods for it. In many ways, it was like a strategy RPG. All units moved on one team's, then another. There were some really cool mechanics related to movement advantage based on turn (water flow) and zone-of-control. Our mods involved a "comeback" system and cards that increased the "drama" by having certain things happen.
But the whole project got me back into Fire Emblem. I played most of the remake of the first game on SNES on our apartment's big-screen TV, while my roommate watched. And to be honest? Aside from a few really tough missions, I felt like it super held up. The simple gameplay, vibrant graphics and strong cast of characters (now considered archetypal and serving as blueprints for many future characters in the series) drew me back into the series in a way I didn't know was possible. I had finished Fire Emblem for the GBA back in 2022, and always enjoyed Advance Wars as well... And spent dozens of hours in Final Fantasy Tactics, which is my favorite game of all time... Maybe I should have seen this coming.
Well, what came next was, my Game Programming Patterns professor wanted us to do some sort of topological grid-based game for a programming patterns final. It didn't even have to be a game- it just needed a few specific criteria like a domain-specific language (DSL) in the code (internal or external), and a few other features like on-the-fly translation. This build doesn't seem to have any of that, but you can see what started to form.
Going into my capstone in the second of the 3 quarters of the school year, I really wanted to try to do an SRPG, but with in-battle gardening mechanics. Here's one of the only prototypes we made, and that it's broken should tell you something about how things were going otherwise.
Started from scratch and achieved the most pedestrian gameplay in a 6-day solo coding marathon. Proud of how fast I worked, but it fell apart fast. This was in like, the last two weeks of that capstone class, which is not when you want to barely be getting something running based off of someone else's tutorial.
I have a lot of thoughts about these first two attempts, but it's getting late and I'll have to go over them someday. But yeah, overscoping and boilerplate and not knowing architecture or doing enough research on architecture, will burn you bad. Also burning out will burn you bad. I burnt out super hard in the middle of my senior year of college.
This was after I got home in September, and is built out of Attempt 2's code. Okay, this also deserves its own like, separate article, because I started trying to do video devlogs during this time, but once again, burnt out hard. Still trying to do Fire Emblem with plants though.
Gave up, burnt out again, released a PICO-8 game on Steam, and now we're in the present.
Yeah, they're from an asset pack- but man, do those characters look spiffy! And behind the scenes, started writing a story i was really excited about. But of course, things went south again.
The new issue I ran into on my latest attempt was trying to polish too much before I got the bread-and-butter (Enemy AI, pathfinding, equipment, etc) working. Also just did the architecture in ways that are really frustrating to debug. This is about when I met Nathaniel Jones from above, who has been absolutely cooking at making the same sort of game, and has been incredibly generous in sharing a dialogue with me, and giving me tips for how to code all these damn systems.
Lately I've been talking with Nathaniel about SRPG dev extensively. Since I'm on break from actually working on an SRPG right now, I've just been figuring out how to ambiently plan to do it next time, which will be technically the 5th attempt. But only once this album is done. So, that's where I'm at.
Thanks for reading through all that. Remember: Fall down seven times, stand up eight.
Let the sauce of the JPEG drape over your eyes.
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