Making a Small RPG | Hacker News Reader

Making a Small RPG

jslegenddev.substack.com

243 pointsibobev38 comments

For those of you who, like me, have no graphical chops whatsoever, I can't recommend Liberated Pixel Cup assets enough:

https://lpc.opengameart.org/

There's also a character generator with plenty of options to choose from:

https://liberatedpixelcup.github.io/Universal-LPC-Spriteshee...

I can counter-recommend Kenney's game assets, it's got sprites, buildings, terrain, backgrounds, top-down, side-on, isometric... Lots of variety for different genres and settings, too.

https://kenney.itch.io/kenney-game-assets

Remarkable, they're licensed CC0 https://kenney.nl/support

I always wondered why art is never licensed like software. There is a plethora of free software but I thought very little similarly licensed art. In fact, I think it's just that I wasn't looking. There's lots of it around.

Thank you for sharing.

Nice!

A couple of years ago, I tried something in that direction[1] using Phaser[2], and it was quite fun. I used Tiled Editor[3] to create the map and some pixel art that I purchased from itch.io.

[1] - https://story.tuzemec.com (not very mobile friendly)

[2] - https://phaser.io

[3] - https://www.mapeditor.org/

Tiled is really great. I'm using it in a project that I occasionally poke at as well, only with Love2D, and as a sidescroller sort of project. I was impressed by how easy it was to set it up to work with my game in spite of how generic it is.

The functionality to export directly to lua source files was a particular treat, though there are probably situations where you'd want to still just use json or one of the other formats supported by Tiled even when working in a lua project.

Anyone trying to implement the Tiled API probably needs to reference this: https://eishiya.com/articles/tiled

It's a bit vague in some places (I'm still not exactly sure how parallax is supposed to be implemented) but absolutely worthwhile.

I'm not sure if it's the proper method, but I actually did implement parallax in my project, though I just did it by essentially creating a layer which I marked as parallax and then had my game draw it with a parallax offset from the rest of the map depending on the camera position.

https://doc.mapeditor.org/en/latest/manual/layers/#parallax-...

These docs do seem to go more in depth about the canonical values related to parallax that Tiled offers though.

yo im up here https://i.imgur.com/2wlE1FS.png

> These were by far one of the most time intensive art assets to make for this project but I’m happy with the results.

> This was another time intensive task but I’m happy with how they turned out.

I kind of read past these comments (and a couple other similar ones) at first but looking back I realized how nice it is to read something like this. It's like, yep, I did something that was kind of hard and took a while, but it was worth it because I feel like I did a good job. I feel like this is something that's sadly getting replaced by "Well, this isn't the greatest because AI did it for me, but who cares, at least it was quick."

Fun article!

Anyone else looking for a rocket propelled grenade guide?

I was expecting an excerpt from the Anarchist Cookbook

See previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=jslegenddev.substack....

Awesome. I while ago I was playing around some JS graphic/game engine/frameworks and came across Kaboom (now Kaplay) and it stroke me as a really different approach to the whole thing. I am now again playing with it and it's really impressive and fun.

Also, thank you for you tutorials. I have stumbled on some of them too.

And I thought it was about rockets.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqEMSzFDTLg

https://www.military.com/defensetech/2015/10/12/raytheon-dis...

I have spare black powder. Time for a weekend project.

I bet "spare black powder" is one of those sentences that automatically puts you in some kind of list at some 3 letter gov agency.

It's fine, my country only has 4 letters gov agencies ^^

"Señora Benitez venga con nosotros... Que? A mi no me importa cuántas letras tiene nuestra agencia? Inhalar tanta pólvora a debido de afectarle el cerebro!"

That's funny but nope, not this country either. Anyway my stock is below the legal limit.

In my head I had already envisioned a bundle of matchsticks being lit and launched out of a pvc tube !!

Next step, programmming and RPG with RPGs in RPG.

I made a small Role playing game for a random game night. No code required, just a printer, a few friends, some beer or wine and the ability to not take things seriously. Highly recommended. [https://rodyne.com/?p=2855]

the google docs link is broken

i scanned the site and pdf. looks cool

whoops! sometimes I'm my own worst enemy.

Anything along the lines of Dragon Quest would be greatly appreciated, Nintendo recently re-mastered Dragon Quest 1 and 2 as the formula is so impressive it still holds up

I never played them, though I played Squaresoft games of that era. What is the formula?

If you ever want to play them, jump straight to Dragon Quest 4 on NES. It's the evolutionary perfection of the JRPG formula of its time. Basically what the article describes (turn-based combat, overworld, menus, extensive story, free exploration, no handholding, secrets). The storytelling, even if linear, is the most attractive part of them.

If you prefer 16-bit, SNEs has Crono Trigger, still a cult classic (innovator for multiple endings), or the whole Final Fantasy series. Sega Genesis has Phantasy Star IV, also an evolutionary improvement of the series.

Great! I've made web-based map editor for such web-based games (exporting maps to JSON): https://www.spritefusion.com/

The author should disambiguate his title. I had to click to see if the post was about making a role playing game, or a rocket propelled grenade.

I was more interested in reading the data structures and tracking of concurrent, interrelated quests, than the graphic assets.

Thanks for sharing. Hadn't heard of Kaplay. Loved how you broke-down your process.

I also enjoyed your pixel art tips for programmers.

Interesting read, no doubt, but the whole thing seems to be building up to this cool mash-up of concepts from a myriad of RPGs only for it to end up being… Undertale redux.

Not a bad job in the slightest, but fairly underwhelming.

I'd love a 3d version of this

I think "3D" and "1-2 month project" are incompatible. 3D is a big mess to do anything, whereas it's easy to blit some sprites.

Yup. Collider/mesh math is where the really esoteric, fun-killing bugs start to be introduced. 3D is cool, but on another level (hehe, literally).

Just use spheres

They had us in the first half, not gonna lie.

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