Saturday, February 28, 2015

How to Make an RPG: Questing Section

Hello, I'm writing a book about making 2d pixel art RPG games like Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger or Phantasy star. Check it out and sign up to be notified when it's released here: How to Make an RPG the book.

Adding triggers to the town map in the quest section. Art not finalised!


It's about time for another progress update. I've starting recieving some of the art back for the combat section, which is great. I'm going to wait for it all to come back before I update all the examples. Then there's definitely more art I'll need to buy for the later sections (and places I've missed). Here's some of the art:

This shows the final monster of the arena from concept to finish.

I've had a few emails asking about how it's going and updates. For day to day updates follow me on twitter @howtomakeanrpg . I tweet about what I'm currently working on and send out screenshots.

As for overall progress the book is split into 3 main sections
  1.  Exploration
  2.  Combat
  3.  Quests
The good news is, I'm in the final Quest section. The combat section needs a little more content too. Once I'm done with questing I'll have the first draft.

The remaining tasks on questing are (not in order) :
  • Shops
  • 3 small "cutscenes"
  • Save game system / save points
  • Random encounters
  • Simple quest tracking
  • Front facing menus (start, continue) etc
  • 1 dungeon puzzle
  • Add triggers to the overworld map + dungeon
  • Add some triggers to the NPCs in the town
  • Final art (though I can do a first draft w/o this)
  • All the stuff I've forgotten
Once I have the first draft, I need to revise it, then I need to do some front matter, update all the images I've not written and then we're ready to go. I'm half debating if it might be worth doing a kickstarter to help get the word out and also to raise funds to add more art to the book (at the moment there's only the bare-minimum for the examples - pixel art is actually quite expensive! :D).

Once the book is out I'll update the landing page and also probably add a small blog to the main page for supplementary material. I also want to add a contact seciton (as I know it's a pain to find an email for me at the moment! dan@how2makeanrpg.com should work I think:) w/ the 2 replaced to 'to' )

That's where we are, so I'm going to get back to coding up this weapon shop! :D