Another laptop to the laptop-god to adorn his laptop throne.

Hey there, I haven't written in a little while but I'm still pushing forward with my next book howtomakeanrpg.com.

My SSD drive died last week, which means a week of far slower work. It's pretty frustrating but I made do as best I could with traditional pen and paper. I've been working out what chapters I'll tackle next and how to present the a simple combat formula.

Trying to keep progress up even without a laptop.

A while back I stopped writing the book and instead ran ahead just writing the code. I created all the ingame menus and some related systems. This last few months has been integrating those menus and system into the book code and writing it all up. It's not been as fun! RPG's have so much UI, so so much. I really want to get into the meat of the combat but everytime I think I'm there, there's more UI that needs writing first.

The Combat section chapters current looks like this:

1. Intro
2. Stats
3. Levels
4. Party
5. Equipment

Recent progress has included a small combat test map, the player can walk around the map and talk to NPCs. The NPCs can be recruited into the player's party and then investigated using the in-game status menu.

Today I'm continuing the Equipment section.I know it's going to feel quite cool when you can find weapons and armour on the map and equip them on your characters.

Yesterday was setting up my laptop again including the build system for the engine. I hate build systems. It's somewhat working but not as well as I'd like. The biggest offender is FTGL, the font library, it's build system doesn't seem to be very mac friendly, package managers seem to fail to install it and even worse I've modified some of the code, so I could have better text alignment. I think ripping it out and replacing it maybe prudent at some point. For the book, it's not going anywhere, it's far too easy to get distracted as it is!

By the end of the day, the equipment menu should be totally in and functional. I'm thinking the next chapters will be Combat Flow, Enemies, Combat State, AI.

All these systems translate into 3d nicely.

Once I've finished the chapter I'll find an artist and commision some art so it doesn't look terrible :)