Making a turn based battle system is proving too difficult for me and it's taking too long. Tutors want to see prototype feedback but I'm no way near a position that I would want to send my build to go out for testing. One tutor (Jim) asked me to consider how long it would take me to learn how to do all of this and whether I'm doing the right thing taking on an RPG. After 10+ days of trial and error, yes it's taking too long and I might have to rethink what I'm doing again.
Either way I'll still show what I DID manage to get working.
NPC Customizable Dialogue
I managed to create an NPC that the player could speak to. Once you approach the NPC a button prompt will appear above the players head, pressing this button will fade the screen and focus on a dialogue box that will appear. Pressing the A button will advance dialogue and I set up a public variable where I could easily customise what each NPC says and how many text boxes they have. I liked the text box layout that I quickly made with some simple box colour fills though. The images on the widget would be supported by shadows too which made it look a lot better, characters mugshots on the right side of the screen would share this shadow as well as move between two or three images while speaking.
Battle Transition
Whilst in Field Phase touching or attacking an enemy will slow down time and a custard pie will fly and splat the screen. As the pie covers the screen a separate level loads secretly which contains a stage where battles commence. Once the level has loaded which takes approx 4 seconds the pie slides down the screen to reveal the battle arena.
Turn Based Battle System
Blood, sweat and sleepless nights got me this, a simple turn based battle system. It's so simple but it took me ages to figure it out, trial and error and feeble attempts to search for relevant tutorials.
I made a system that calculates the agility stat of each pawn in battle and determines player order dependent on that stat, higher agility means you go first. A schedule of turns are shown at the top right corner of the screen. Two buttons at the bottom of the screen serve as test attacks. Both of them function the same, you select the button and are then prompted to select which enemy you want to attack. The "special" button was going to deplete a players "Ability Points" which I haven't managed to do yet.
Characters deal damage based on their Power stat and take less damage based on their defense stat. I can freely customise these stats on each pawn easily with public variables I have set up on each character blueprint.
Once the enemies or the player has been defeated the game will determine a Victory or a Loss. If you win you return back to Field Phase, if you lose the game just closes completely at the moment.
What's Next?
There are so many other things I need to implement before I can send the build out for testing and gauging from how long it took me to get this working I would rather be a realist and decide I'm doing something wrong here. Making an RPG at my current skill level might not of been a good idea.
The best projects I've done in the past have been platformers. I would love to research and find out how to make player movement in a platformer enjoyable. I also believe work based around a platformer would be more appropriate for my current skillset and interests. I like RPGs but my all time favourite genre is platformers.
I'll speak to the tutors later and see what my course of action is. If I can change what I want to do, brilliant, I will be able to get more work done than I currently am and become more motivated.
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