5/21/2010

Fun Shot!



Pressing forward, I've added a few features to my custom map editor for my game.
Including:
* Better toolbar icons (for the meantime)
* Muti-tile select/paint
* Eraser
* Area/Layer Clear
* Layer VIew Toggling - Alpha blending support in wxWidgets is weak :-(
* Toggle view grid and tile indexing/numbers information

This will help me make maps for the game.
I've also started to use the excellent Inquisitor RMXP tileset.

Here's a couple of shots of a map I designed using that tileset and the new features I've added.
Enjoi!

5/14/2010

On The Road to an RPG

During the past couple of weeks I've been thinking how I wanted to handle the RPG aspect of the game.
Since I come from an RPG Maker background, I'm familiar with the event/switch system it implements.
However, bringing this into an MMO aspect was a bit of a puzzle. The answer turned out to be simple, and once I got all the details together I set forth into making a scripting engine for the game.

The scripting engine uses JavaScript and it aims to resemble an RPG Maker functionality in script form.
It was also challenging figuring out how it could handle many players at once, from the rough tests it seems that i can handle the load just fine, but only time will tell.
I'm not sure I should even be blogging about this, since it's part of the backend server and the project is not open source.
However, I find it too exciting not to talk about.

So, now that I'm able to sew together an RPG I've started 'prototyping' the game using RPG Maker XP.
The graphics that RMXP uses are pretty much identical to the ones I've designed to be used by my game. This will make finding an artist and transferring ideas much easier.

There is a mountain of work to do with the software, but I'm working on it. However, it would be great to get some help with mapping, scripting, quest designing and story brain storming. I'm also in talks with some artists that have offered to make the art (tilesets, character sets, sprites, etc.) for the game, but nothing too serious yet.