Hi n4pgamer. I don't want to be a downer, but if your goal is to make a game why are you making your own engine as well? And why are you doing all the programming solo? Even if you're a very good and experienced programmer, doing all the programming for both an engine and a game can take a very, very long time. Even a simple one (RPGs are actually really damn complicated, you'll soon find out). I know this because I built an engine and game for a slightly more complex 2D top-down RPG with the help of dozens of other programmers over the years. It was a ton of work, and if I knew that at the start I would have used an existing engine to get to a working game more quickly (although at the time I don't think there were really any open source engines like that out there).
Can I suggest you take a look at the code for Hero of Allacrost or Valyria Tear (a fork of Allacrost using the same code). All the code is open source (GPLv2) and you can easily take it and then make necessary modifications to get the code to support the features you're interested in. The Allacrost code is well documented too, which you can find in the project's wiki or by running doxygen on the source files. It uses SDL, OpenGL, and OpenAL libraries, just as you desire. As an RPG lover I really want to see more projects like this be successful, and I really feel that not starting from scratch will help you shave off years of development time.
We share our content on this site for others to use. If you search for "Allacrost", you'll run across some. We'll be sharing more of our artwork here in the future as we get our current art to a more finished state.
Likewise, we make use of permissible content that we find on this site. You may see art from other projects mixed into Allacrost. And you may also see some Allacrost artwork being used in other titles.
Even though I'm primarily a programmer and game designer, I've created some artwork for Allacrost as well. You can see some things that I've done in my submissions.
Although this post only calls our artists, we do need programmers, composers, and other types of help as well. If this project is interesting to you and you want to help out, take a look at the link in the "Joining" section in the top post to find out more information about joining us in another type of role.
Thanks! We welcome all feedback, questions, and comments so don't hold back if you have something to say.
If you want to play it yourself, visit our download page for instructions.
I also updated the About page on our website to describes several of the game's core features and how they enable us to meet our major goals. I did this after receiving some feedback that people visiting the site for the first time still didn't understand what we are trying to create and what's special about it. FYI, our three pirmary design goals are:
Prioritize efforts on developing engaging gameplay and a compelling narrative
Eliminate tedious and micromanagement mechanics that are commonly found in RPGs
Make battles interesting, challenging, and requiring of a high level of strategy from the player
Our next release is planned to be in September. I'll try to remember to update this thread when that gets published.
Here's a video I uploaded tonight demonstrating our vastly improved map editor. I spent the past several weeks giving it a major overhaul and I'm very pleased with the result.
Well I'm about two weeks away from finishing work on our map editor. It's working great now and is a lot easier to use than it was before. Doing this took longer than I thought it would, but it will pay off in the long run. After this work is complete, I'm going to produce a video demonstrating its use. We never got anyone interested in doing map design work for us, so after I finish that video I'm going to renew efforts to find someone for that.
We did manage to find an artist who did some amazing work for us in a very short period of time. We've had a couple people interested in joining as programmers, but so far no one has made a commitment. Kind of bummed about that to be honest, as I enjoy working with other programmers more than working by myself.
Here's a rough outline of the next steps that we will take and a conservative estimate on when things will be completed:
- Finish map editor work and demo video [End of January]
- Create and script remaining maps [End of February - Mid March]
- Publish development snapshot release [End of March]
There's still a handful of features, artwork, etc. that needs to happen after that, but the main goal right now is to get something playable out there that we can use as a milestone to continually improve until we have something polished enough for an official release.
These are just the walking animations and do not include that 0 position standing frame as illustrated in the sample image. Sorry for the confusion. I just pulled the sprite skins directly from our FTP where an artist had put them.
Good question noway. The reason is simply because Tiled didn't exist when our project was started. We already had a working editor and didn't have any reason to change. I considered moving to Tiled a while ago when I was evaluating our options, but we use a special feature in our game that tiled doesn't support, so the choice was between improving our editor or hacking up our own version of Tiled to support that (not to mention we use a different file format). I think our sister project, Valyria Tear, was considering using Tiled at some point as well, but I'm not sure what their current plans are with it.
I do fully support Tiled though and I think it is an awesome tool. I just wish that it came sooner than it did so we could have made use of it.
You can build upon the sprite models I uploaded here:
http://opengameart.org/content/2d-sprite-skins-walking-animation
The sprites are suited for a 32x32 pixel game, but probably wouldn't work well for a 16x16 one (unless you want giants).
Hi n4pgamer. I don't want to be a downer, but if your goal is to make a game why are you making your own engine as well? And why are you doing all the programming solo? Even if you're a very good and experienced programmer, doing all the programming for both an engine and a game can take a very, very long time. Even a simple one (RPGs are actually really damn complicated, you'll soon find out). I know this because I built an engine and game for a slightly more complex 2D top-down RPG with the help of dozens of other programmers over the years. It was a ton of work, and if I knew that at the start I would have used an existing engine to get to a working game more quickly (although at the time I don't think there were really any open source engines like that out there).
Can I suggest you take a look at the code for Hero of Allacrost or Valyria Tear (a fork of Allacrost using the same code). All the code is open source (GPLv2) and you can easily take it and then make necessary modifications to get the code to support the features you're interested in. The Allacrost code is well documented too, which you can find in the project's wiki or by running doxygen on the source files. It uses SDL, OpenGL, and OpenAL libraries, just as you desire. As an RPG lover I really want to see more projects like this be successful, and I really feel that not starting from scratch will help you shave off years of development time.
I wanted to add a few more notes here:
Thanks! We welcome all feedback, questions, and comments so don't hold back if you have something to say.
At the end of last month we published our first release in quite a long time. I made a walkthrough video with commentary if you'd like to watch it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EX9K1kCF0M
If you want to play it yourself, visit our download page for instructions.
I also updated the About page on our website to describes several of the game's core features and how they enable us to meet our major goals. I did this after receiving some feedback that people visiting the site for the first time still didn't understand what we are trying to create and what's special about it. FYI, our three pirmary design goals are:
Our next release is planned to be in September. I'll try to remember to update this thread when that gets published.
Here's a video I uploaded tonight demonstrating our vastly improved map editor. I spent the past several weeks giving it a major overhaul and I'm very pleased with the result.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Su31AWg3t4
Well I'm about two weeks away from finishing work on our map editor. It's working great now and is a lot easier to use than it was before. Doing this took longer than I thought it would, but it will pay off in the long run. After this work is complete, I'm going to produce a video demonstrating its use. We never got anyone interested in doing map design work for us, so after I finish that video I'm going to renew efforts to find someone for that.
We did manage to find an artist who did some amazing work for us in a very short period of time. We've had a couple people interested in joining as programmers, but so far no one has made a commitment. Kind of bummed about that to be honest, as I enjoy working with other programmers more than working by myself.
Here's a rough outline of the next steps that we will take and a conservative estimate on when things will be completed:
- Finish map editor work and demo video [End of January]
- Create and script remaining maps [End of February - Mid March]
- Publish development snapshot release [End of March]
There's still a handful of features, artwork, etc. that needs to happen after that, but the main goal right now is to get something playable out there that we can use as a milestone to continually improve until we have something polished enough for an official release.
Looks very cool. It reminds me of Dragon Warrior (aka Dragon Quest) 3 for the NES.
This is fantastic, thanks! I think we can make use of this in the next release of Allacrost. :)
These are just the walking animations and do not include that 0 position standing frame as illustrated in the sample image. Sorry for the confusion. I just pulled the sprite skins directly from our FTP where an artist had put them.
Good question noway. The reason is simply because Tiled didn't exist when our project was started. We already had a working editor and didn't have any reason to change. I considered moving to Tiled a while ago when I was evaluating our options, but we use a special feature in our game that tiled doesn't support, so the choice was between improving our editor or hacking up our own version of Tiled to support that (not to mention we use a different file format). I think our sister project, Valyria Tear, was considering using Tiled at some point as well, but I'm not sure what their current plans are with it.
I do fully support Tiled though and I think it is an awesome tool. I just wish that it came sooner than it did so we could have made use of it.
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