Game 8 - Post Mortem - JRPG

My Game 8 is "JRPG".  If you want to join in either with the same Genre or your own, use the tag 12Games12Weeks on Twitter and/or itch.io, I would love to see what you create in this time also!

MVP 

JRPGs are heavy on the story, but for game mechanics (MVP focuses on the needed mechanics), they are basically the menu/turn based combat.  However I would like to use this to work with game state management, so will look at implementing a simple quest, world/town map, & combat state.

Extra Challenge

• From Alex -> add a Rubber Duck Sound to the game.

Results

Took ~10 hours of work to complete. Working out the combat state machine was the most challenging part.  Once I had that working adding the world map and quest took relatively little time. You can find the game here: https://adroitconceptions.itch.io/12games12weeks-8-jrpg

What When Right?

• I completed it... ;)

What When Wrong?

• I worked on the UI logic before the underlying combat data logic... ended up having to throw out an hour or two worth of work and redoing parts of the state machine.
• I didn't add a inventory/loot/etc system as that would have added many layers to the complexity (even more game state to track)
• Didn't give the player the ability to target attacks, the extra states/information to work that out would have taken more time then I wanted.
• The lack of a pause menu/Item menu means no exit button.

What Lesson(s) Did I learn?

• State machines are amazing when done right

What did I take away?

• JRPGs combat mechanics are more complicated then they look.
• I could use some experience building better state machines. - I didn't have any enter/exit actions to my states so my states were frequently of the xEnter -> x pattern were xEnter was a 1 frame state to handle the "Enter State" logic... and often the "instate" logic was little to non-existent (responding to events).

Milestones/Workflow/Tool Usage

• Battle UI
• Character Data Storage classes
• Battle logic flow
• Battle logic flow
• battle logic flow
• battle logic flow (yes lots of steps to it)
• Programmer art for character & world map
• world map state logic (was super simple compared to the battle logic)
• Quest text/state/logic

What would I do if I was to work further on this (Expanded from an MVP to a full game)?

• better art
• more enemies
• more weapons
• FXs (both visual and audio)
• Scene transition FXs - the hard cuts are jarring.
• add puzzles
• Inventory system
• more quests/areas
• Save System
• A story with character development and arcs.
• better audio