How to Make an RPG : June Update

Hello, I'm writing a book called How to Make an RPG. You can check out the details here. It takes the reader from rendering a sprite to the screen, to a fully featured Final Fantasy 6 style RPG with combat, quests, inventory, levelling stats and everything else you'd want.

The Arena minigame at the end of section 2. Final Art.

The mailing list for the book is now a few sign-ups shy of 2.2k which is good. The first-draft of the book is written and I'm in the editing stages. Editing is proceeding painfully slowly, especially the first pass; as I often have to create diagrams and reword large amounts of text.

Here's the todo:

1. Finish editing the book
2. Recieve all final art and replace it
3. Finish missing text - introduction, lua + engine quick start
4. Small private release
5. Revise with feedback
6. Mass release
7. Revise and release additional content on the blog (click here to view)

Portraits came back, though I've only shown the hero one so far. They're all in the game and example projects.

This month I've been mainly editing apart from one week when I was knocked out with a cold!

• Editing finished for sections 2.3 and 2.4
• Weekly article on the How to Make an RPG website (I wrote these a while back)
• Recieved the potrait art for the characters back and integrated
• The game engine that comes with the book was called "DancingSquid" but the .com was registered and it was quite close to "BitSquid" another (since renamed) engine. Therefore I've renamed the engine Dinodeck and grabbed the domain. This will act as a place for documentation and a place to grab the engine binaries and source code.
• Created and added ~5 diagrams and retook ~5 screenshots for the book
• Reviewed and edited over 4000 lines of text and code

What's the plan for July?

Well the slog of editing will continue, if I'm very lucky I'll finish up to the end of the combat section and be ready to edit the last section on quests. If not I'll probably only finish the exploration editing. I imagine the last bits of art will start to roll in during the month too, so that will need integrating and paying for.

I'll continue to regularly update the How to Make an RPG blog, if only to build up the site as good store of RPG creation knowledge and draw in people who might be interested in the book.

Thanks for reading! For more regular updates follow me on twitter @HowToMakeAnRPG