[Progress] Turn Based RPG Battles - nearly there!? (Patreon)

It's getting harder to show meaningful progress via gifs that all look kind of the same at a glance despite loads of new significant code being added. So instead here is a list of a few of the things knocked out recently and the things left to go.

There's many checks and conditions and expected behaviors that you take for granted in a turn based combat system. It gets easier when your system is totally linear, one turn after the next where everyone waits neatly in line and the action you select happens and fully resolves exactly when you select it. But the moment you introduce any kind of time, such as for an ATB system or actions with delays or interrupts you suddenly have to verify a lot more behavior and cover many more edge cases. I've stuck to using said linear system for simplicity and getting this thing Done but I have tried to build in such a way that you don't have to totally start from the ground up to add this kind of complexity. We'll see how that pans out.

I'm not always great at uh... planning stuff. I build in front of my nose and always have done. But while it works for me sometimes, I don't recommend it. Suddenly realizing something like... menus probably will need to be able to scroll is not a pleasant experience!

It's unavoidable on some level, I have never actually written a game like this* before and here I am being expected to tutorial-ize the concept on the grounds of my GML experience and teaching ability alone! But hopefully this just goes to show how hard it is to confidently scope and be aware of *everything* that goes into something you're trying to build, especially when you're building it for the first time.

This all said, everything is going very well! I'm hopeful that it won't take too long now to get the code into your hands. Today is my first day Back At Work for 2023 (my girlfriend informs me today is still a bank holiday for the rest of the UK, whoops. I don't really know or track what those are anymore...) and the list of stuff still to do before I can at least share the code with supporters here is... well, you can see it above really. Pending discovering further, inevitable "Oh yeah!" things, like just today realizing enemies would keep attacking dead party members, we now have a pretty robust and modular little engine on our hands.

Excited by the idea that people might make games starting from this one day!

-S

*outside of a gamejam. When you know your very simple requirements and never ever ever need to scale you can build a lot faster lol.