Sunday, July 15, 2012

Felinity Progress

You thought I was dead didn't you?

Not in the least. Lots of work has been done on Felinity. I'll admit I did have a fall out midway into continuing work on it where I got depressed about the gameplay. But fear not, I found a story change that will allow me to enhance the gameplay to match traditional party based RPGs!

So what has changed?

Felinity was originally 1024x768, 1:1 pixels. Tile sizes and most people were 64x64. This proved beautiful, and unwieldy. I'm a decent artist, but by no means am I an artist. So what did this I do?

I downsized. Tile size has been reduced to 32x32, and the view is zoomed by 2x. This creates a more pixelated view (more akin to the 16 bit era). the upside to this is now it's much easier for me to create art for Felinity (at least the map). About 4x easier. It also allows for me to draw on work people have already done (32x32 is FAR more popular than 64x64).
The new face of our protagonist
Also done was a new wpeep format. Wpeeps are the people who populate my map, and the way I was doing before was naive and inefficient. Now wpeeps are packed into more compact spritesheets, and this has brought down the amount of space they require by 4x! Combined with being 4x smaller (64x64 -> 32x32) the memory savings are huge! I suppose now that I've saved 16x the space, I suppose you'll expect me to add 16x the amount of people to make up for my lack of updates? So demanding aren't you!

Original


Super Packed


Also added is a fully functioning Character Panel. This allows you to view all of Tandy (and other party member's) intimate stats as well as use certain abilities of of combat, or just see what certain abilities are.

My, how you have grown Tandy.

Tandy's Techniques

Another excellent thing added was the ability for Felinity's scripting to have branching! Currently all branching is handled through Yes/No Dialogs, but is certainly not limited to just that. One of the major advantages of this is for players to have ways to back out of sleeping (and not using up cardboard boxes) or to create more branches in the story and dialog. This is, by far, the most exciting change.

Tandy has important decisions to make now.
On the battle side of things, I've implemented debuffs as well a wide variety of them to be used in conjunction with any ability. Currently we have:
  • Stat modifier
  • Disable (stuns)
  • Physical Damage over time (reduced by mitigation)
  • Magical Damage over time (not mitigated)
  • Healing Absorbs (prevents N amount of healing)
  • Reduced Healing (reduces amount healed by N%)
  • Silence (can't use Techniques)
  • Disarm (can't use Attack or Skills)
Poor Tandy has so many Debuffs on her

I have a decent start here, and I'm open to more debuff possibilities in the future. They were truly a joy to code.


In addition, I back-ported all of Felinity to iOS/iPad and merged the codebase. So now 1 workspace builds both Mac and iPad! Felinity Engine was always designed in mind with being played on the iPad.

There have been tons of minor changes, that still add so much depth to the engine.
  • Multi-size wpeeps (large people) with proper depth sorting. 
  • Attack points in combat to allow smaller or larger enemies
  • Script and Map Trigger support for playing sounds
  • Ability to modify character stats via scripts
  • Scripts can directly modify the contents of the tilemap (the use of this in Felinity was to have breaking branches that Tandy falls from)
  • Abilities are more extensible and promote reuse. I also added about 8 cool ones

Anyways, my apologies for the long delay between updates.