Release v0.0.9-alpha is now available in the Downloads section – a lot of new things this time around! The major new features in this release include an Enemy Editor and Battle Editor along with a basic combat implementation, as well as conditional expressions and scripting within dialogue. See below for a full list of changes.
I have been trying to take a “broad and shallow” approach of sorts. My goal is to create very basic implementations of as many core features as possible up front and then loop back through and flesh out the features in more detail, add more options for customization, etc. This will help get my overall vision of the tool out there, and since I am still experimenting with certain aspects it will make it easier to adapt to changes. Unfortunately, this means that in these early alpha versions there may be issues with backwards compatibility between releases, but I hope to have these sorts of things locked down once the software reaches a beta state. Please bear with me, and thank you for your interest! Any feedback is greatly appreciated.
New Features:
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Enemy Editor: Initial implementation allows you to define a few basic properties for each enemy (name, voxel model, and item drop). For this release, the enemy will just always drop one of the item specified.
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Battle Editor: Initial implementation allows you define the map to use for the battle as well as a list of enemy types to spawn and a minimum/maximum count. A random number between the minimum and maximum value will be spawned. In the battle map, you will need to define a group of tiles with the name "player_spawn" and "enemy_spawn" to indicate possible spawn locations. To initiate a battle, add a character to your map, then right-click and go into the properties dialog to mark the character as an enemy and pick a battle to launch. A new "start_battle" scripting function was added if you wish to manually start a battle from within a script.
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Combat: Initial implementation is turn-based tactical combat. For this release, the player and enemies can move one tile per turn, and optionally attack if an opponent is on an adjacent tile. Pressing space or attacking will end your turn. Attacking an enemy will automatically kill it and give you its loot. The player and enemies will also play their "attack" animation if one has been defined with that name. Likewise, an enemy's "death" animation will play if defined. Once all enemies are killed, the player will be returned to the previous map.
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Support for conditional expressions in the Dialogue Editor. This can be used to limit the player's available responses based on conditions, as well as to branch the NPC's dialogue based on conditions. A "conditional expression builder" dialog was added to the Dialogue Editor and Script Editor to aid in defining a condition.
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Support for scripting within dialogue. In the Dialogue Editor, you can now specify a script to execute if a player selects a particular response, or a script to execute at the time of an NPC response or message being displayed.
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Dialog Editor now has a new "reference" response type. You can use to loop back to an earlier point in the dialogue. To do so, define a unique value in the "ID" column of a response you wan to go back to, and then click the "Add Reference" button the toolbar to select that ID. When the dialogue reaches this point, it will then jump back to the response with that ID.
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"Set Global Property" scripting function to set custom global values. These global values can then be compared in a conditional expression in a later script or dialogue.
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"Remove Item" scripting function to remove an item from the player's inventory.
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Ability to specify a voxel model as a "light source" and adjust the light's properties (similar to adding a light in the Map Editor). Anytime this voxel model is added to the map, the attached light will be automatically added with it. This is useful for objects such as torches that you will always want to cast light.
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Map Editor now supports a variable tile width per map, for example having tiles that 8x8 voxels instead of the default of 16x16 voxels. Added this as an option when creating a new map to specify the value (Width of Tiles in voxels).
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New “Replace Color” functionality in Voxel Editor. User the eyedropper feature to pick the color you want to replace, then click the "Replace Color" button on the toolbar and choose a new color.
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Added buttons to the Voxel Editor toolbar to shift the entire voxel model up, down, left, right, forward, or backward.
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New animation type in Voxel Editor: "Ping Pong Once". This is the same as Ping Pong except it only plays through once.
Bug Fixes:
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Properly escape double quotes within dialogue text when saving to JSON so it doesn’t break the file.
Fixed an issue where loading a second map from the initially loaded map would fail.
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In the "Add Group", "New Resource", and "Save As Resource" dialogs, changed the name field to a single line text field instead of multi-line and allow pressing of the Enter key to submit the dialog.
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Correctly set the player’s spawn tile as occupied when loading a map so NPCs won’t walk over top of the player if the player remains in that position.
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In Voxel Editor, when duplicating or deleting a frame, the properties panel is now refreshed so the Start Frame and End Frame values/ranges are updated appropriately.
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Fixed an issue in the Voxel Editor when deleting the next to last animation frame. The editor wouldn’t properly show the final frame after deleting the current frame.
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Fixed loading of the player in-game so you don’t see the model pop up out of the ground occasionally.
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