Interview with Aura

A painting by Aura

The first time when I saw A Lill’ girls Tale by Aura, I was amazed by how beautiful the levels are. And her game has to offer even more. A nice story, and some real game puzzles. You definitely need to check out her game. But first, an interview…

Can you tell us a bit about yourself? How old you are, where you live, how you spend your days, etc?

I am 24 years old. I’m living in Germany and I love to paint, write, sing also. So currently my art is what I’m living of… Continue reading

Interview with Project Glaive

Following the first interview with Cynic-P, Project Glaive was also nice enough to answer some questions. The game Baby Quest: Adventures gives a new perspective on playing as a “hero” (you should definitely check it out!). Next to making games on my RPG Playground platform, he also makes games using other tools, and documents it on the Project Glaive blog. Continue reading

Release 0.21: Let characters walk

Finally I have the release that everyone is waiting for: characters that walk! And not only NPC’s. You can let your hero or even monsters walk to a certain location.

This functionality opens a lot of cool possibilities, such as letting a guard block an entrance, and moving him out of the way once you have a certain item or password.

Screenplays can also become more dynamic by letting characters move to certain locations.

So how do you use it? Like this:

Actor1 walks to 5,-2

Which means: Let Actor1 walk 5 tiles to the right and 2 tiles to the top.

The first number is left and right. If it is negative, you walk to the left, if positive, you walk to the right. If you don’t want to walk left or right (only down for example), it must be 0.

The second number is up or down. If it is negative, you walk up, if positive, you walk down.

To give you some examples

  • Walk 2 tiles left: Actor1 walks to -2,0
  • Walk 3 tiles up: Actor1 walks to 0,-3
  • Walk 1 tile right, and 3 tiles up: Actor1 walks to 1,-3

Just experiment with it a bit and you will get the hang of it! :).

In the future I will make this way easier (just selecting the position you want to go to with the mouse). But for now this is it.

Release 0.20: Pixel movement

Wow, it took more than a year to finish this release. But don’t worry, it’s finally here! And I promise that the next release will be finished faster.

So why did it take so long? Well, I completely rewrote the movement of the characters. They can now walk with pixel precision, instead of being bounded to walking on the middle of a tile. I also improved the camera movement so it’s way smoother now.

I used the Box2D physics library for this. Which also enables some other cool stuff for the future. For example when you would hit an enemy, it can be swiped back and push other enemies aside.

Why do we need this?

Well, pixel precision movement, and 2D physics, open a lot of possibilities for the future. The most important one is probably making cool, modern action combat. Like in the game CrossCode shown below:

crosscode_fight

Why do we need it now?

Because it had to be in place to support other functionality, such as letting NPC’s walk to another location. This last feature has been requested by a lot of you. But before I implemented that, I fist needed to put this pixel precision movement into place.

So what is next?

The features you have been requesting so many times: new actions!!!

  1. Make NPC’s walk to a certain spot
  2. Make NPC’s disappear
  3. Lock doors
  4. Let the player choose a response

So head over to http://rpgplayground.com and check it out!

Release 0.19.0: Invisible actors

Yesterday I got a new comment on my how to make role playing games video for RPG Playground, which asked for a way to ‘talk’ to signs, so the hero knows which way to go.

I’ve been thinking about this before, because certain tiles just beg for interaction. Just take a look at the picture below for some examples:

Various interactive object tiles
Various interactive object tiles

Continue reading

Release 0.18: Screenplay tokens

The new RPG Playground release is ready! This time you can extend your screenplays with tokens. This probably doesn’t mean much to you, but let me explain. You hero can receive tokens, and at another time you can check if the hero has some token. For example, a conversation can change the second time you talk to an NPC:

if hero lacks token "knows lisa"
    lisa says "Hi there, you must be new in town. My name is Lisa"
    hero says "Nice to meet you! I'm Bart"
    hero receives token "knows lisa"
else
    lisa says "Nice to see you again Bart!"

Continue reading