Hi! How are you? Hope you’re well! I’ve been chugging away and have a few updates to share with you.

Dungeon Maps

I’ve made some progress on the first dungeon area. It’s smallish in size, with 6-7 mostly straightforward maps and the revival of the character switching mechanics from SU2k3. Paired with character switching is another JRPG staple: pushable blocks and floor switches. I felt these were a safe starting point. As development continues I’ll add more mechanics to play with as well.

Ambience and lighting are missing; those will come later on (after a demo I hope!)

WIP Menus

I’ve got a small framework in place to handle menus, which are basically a collection of windows under the hood. Some windows can have child windows which adds for some neat logical grouping. This isn’t very far along but it seems to work well. Again, I’m borrowing a lot of design here from 2k3 and some classic JRPGs.The text is really ugly! I use bitmap fonts, and GM’s anti-aliasing is a bit too much, so at some point later I’ll probably end up manually anti-aliasing + outlining the larger stylized fonts.Battle SystemI’ve added the focus system from SU2k3, where monsters prioritize players to target based on how much damage they’ve dealt. This will be integral to planning out battles and mitigating damage. Monsters can now have multiple skills, each with some priority associated with it.JSON DatabasesCharacter, Monster, Skills, Items, etc are stored and loaded from JSON files. I might make a client to modify these on the go in the future, but for now they keep swaths of game data out of code and organized a bit.Up nextA boss battle, save/load data, the first major town, and more menu screens. Thanks for reading. I hope you have a great day.

Hi there! I hope you’re doing well in these crazy times. A couple things are moving forward for this project and I wanted to provide a little bit of news. First, a quick recap of what’s happened in the last few years:

1. In 2016-2017 I tried making my own engine, UmbraCraft. It’s open-source and available on github if you’re interested. This was a great experience, but it abstracted out some of the things I enjoyed more than I realized now (such as making maps) and the editor was more cumbersome to use than 2k3. Oops.

2. In 2018 I tried using EasyRPG – an open-source RPG Maker interpreter. This was great because it was cross-platform, modern, and I even was into rebuilding a battle system on top of their work. But the nagging feeling in the back of my head was the story and assets felt a bit fragmented, so those would need revisiting again.

(Aside: In 2018 I completed and launched Heroes of Umbra on Steam. It was incredibly stressful.)

2.5 I also spent some time with Unity but it felt like overkill, especially for a 2D game.

3. 2020! Post-quarantine. Finally after playing with other engines, I’m enjoying Gamemaker Studio. Here’s a tweet showcasing my attempt at recreating a map in a 2k3-style.

This workflow feels incredibly good. I have a light cutscene system that parses text files. Events can be triggered by collision, interaction, or on map enter. Anyone using 2k3 will be very familiar with the syntax:

show_screen(1)
pan_to(360, 151, 10)
wait(8)
hide_screen(1)
wait(2)
configure_message(false, false, center)
show_message(“Focus…|Take a deep breath, squeeze, and throw.”)
hide_message()

This is a segment of the intro, and does the following (Sorry it’s too large to embed)

I’ve also spent some time tidying up the characters and the story. Gameplay and character development take the stage, but spending the time to come up with a cohesive story up-front will save me some headaches down the road.

Armed with a bit more pixel art capabilities and strong nostalgia for 2k3 character sprites, this is where I landed on the character styles. In general, characters will look and feel much more different than before. (I don’t know what I was thinking giving two of my main characters blue hair!)

I’ll keep sharing more as things move along, thanks so much for reading. It means a lot to me.

June 1st

heroesofumbra:

…Or six short weeks until Heroes of Umbra will be on steam.

The store page was recently approved and I’m so excited to move things along. This has been long, long overdue and I attribute the gray hairs I’m growing to this project, but I passionately believe this will be a good move for the game. I know 2D platformer/rpgs are a dime-a-dozen but my primary goal is to share this project with anyone who might be interested and build a closely-knit community around the game.

I’ll be keeping my hands full the next few weeks polishing the project, fleshing out the community pages, contributing more content, and attempting to find a small audience. If you have any questions or concerns please send me a message. Thanks for your support.💜

The other game’s wrapping up soon! :D