RPG Project

The goal of this project was to attempt to create a 2D RPG with an original story.   I started the project in July 2015 as a way to improve my coding in Java and to learn the basics of Game Development.

Presently the game is in a very early stage of development with preliminary work having been completed on the following areas:

• Basic movements
• Camera
• Collision detection
• World rendering
• SpriteSheets and animations
• NPCs

Basic Movements

            At the moment the protagonist is able to move in four directions, it is planned that the player will be able to move in eight directions in the finished game.

Collision Detection

            The collision detection is handled via a box surrounding the player which is used to prevent wall-hacking and to ensure enemy encounters occur.

World Rendering

            The world is tile-based with only the tiles displayed on screen actually being rendered. The tiles all have a canWalkOn variable, which determines if the player is allowed to walk on them and thus be ignored by the collision detection box.

SpriteSheets

            Every element of the game is extracted from a SpriteSheet. The same process is also used to create Animations.

NPCs

            For now, the NPCs can only move randomly, and they use a XML file to store their dialogs. If the player is close enough, they are able to interact with them and they will stop moving for as long as the interaction takes place.

How to play

            You just extract and run in it Eclipse as your project for now ! Later stage will involve a real launcher, promise !

Controls

• W, A, S, D for movement
• Enter to speak with NPCs
• Pressing I should soon display the inventory

Yet to be done

• Inventory

            This is the next step and should be what I'm focusing on right now. Not much to say, it's an inventory.

• NPC Interactions

            As the game was envisioned to be an RPG, NPC interactions ought to appear somewhere. For now NPCs can display simple lines of dialogue, but there are plans to make them react to the player's actions. Multiple answers to a question are not a priority, as it is not one of my favourite focuses of modern RPGs, but could be added later on if needs be.

• Combat

            Little work has been done in terms of developing a combat system t. As I see it, combat will not happen randomly, think Persona 4 instead of Dragon Quest 8 if you want. A strategic focus is desired to encourage the player to only fight when they have desirable conditions. However a combat system is unlikely to be implemented for some time, as the decision as to whether combat will or will not be turned based is yet to be made.

• World Rendering

            I'll be honest, I'm more into hand-crafted worlds than randomly generated ones. This time, think Magical Starsign instead of Persona 4 or Oreshika. So, for now, I do intend to create each map manually.

Resources used

A lot of the artwork for the game was taken from OpenGameArt and used in order to test the code.