Hey! I've been working on a project for about a week now and wanted to share my progress and my plans for the next few weeks.

I pretty much instantly knew what I wanted to make once Haver was drawn in the raffle, a game based on PS1 era JRPGs, with fixed camera angles, a world map and turn based combat.

I'll be working with Unreal Engine 4 for a couple of reasons:

• I work as a technical artist at a small indie studio using UE4, so I am very familiar with the engine.
• I have no real programming experience, so blueprints are a lifesaver.
• I have over the years collected a bunch of asset packs from the Epic marketplace.

It's quite a bit ambitious and I have no idea if I'll actually get it done in time, but either way I've been really enjoying the challenges.

What I have so far is:

• Fixed camera style exploration
• Free camera world map
• Main menu screen w/ all functionality
• partially done game menus

Here is a recent build playthrough: 

Using UE to make a retro looking game might seem silly, but stripping the visuals down isn't that big of an issue.

Example of the "Retro" filter on/off

So a big part of the project has been nailing the PS1 vibe, the retro filters aren't 100% accurate to the technical limitations of the PS1 but just meant to feel like those games did, there are a few extra elements missing such as better texture warping (currently only present on some assets in the world map) and once I get to creating my own assets such as character models it should all start to come together.

I've been using a few different asset packs so far to populate the levels, I won't have time to make a lot of high quality assets that really sell the pre rendered look in the fixed camera areas and one of the pros of going for a retro look is that the inconsistencies in the asset quality is not as noticeable.

Current thoughts:

The game is super menu heavy and I haven't touched the UE widgets in over 2 years, I feel like progress has slowed down considerably but I'm still making progress though, A lot of the preliminary stuff needed for the combat system ties into all the different menus so I am starting to feel  a lot more confident in getting the combat up and running once I finish up the remaining menu functions.

So what is next?

I still have a lot of menu functionality to add, once I power through that I need to get started on the Combat system ASAP, I'm 100% sure I'm going to hit every wall possible there and it's going to take some time figuring out how I handle it in general, I have a good idea of how I want it to function but I don't want to spill the beans until I know for sure how much of it is in scope.

Further down the line:

once I have all my systems up and running I need to work on content, assets such as character models, character portraits,  visual effects and environments and then the scenario aka writing dialogue, scripting the cutscenes etc.

I already have a good idea what assets I need and how I want the story to unfold but I'll talk about those once I have a better idea of how much time I have left after all the system work.

So yeah, super exited to see what everyone else is making, if anyone has any questions feel free to ask me anything!

I hope to give an update every Friday but I might shift to just giving an update once I hit major milestones instead.

Hey everyone, It's been a while since we updated the diary but we have a lot to share since last time.

First of all, Morage1 has been helping me out with characters and he's done an amazing job so far.

We still have a few characters left , Dark Schippie Dues for example.

Aside from characters, we also have most of the environments ready:

And more! don't want to spoil everything...

On the gameplay side, we have just about every system working, most of them are still very raw and incomplete though so I don't want to show them off just yet.

Combat took a lot more time than I had hoped it would, I knew it would take up a lot of time getting all the functions in, and there's still a few elements that aren't done yet, the framework is there though, it just needs a lot of polish and bug fixing at this point, it's going to be a very simple system with a very limited pool of actions during combat.

We have the first couple of cutscenes in as well, they aren't too fancy given the time left but they work.

In hindsight, making all these RPG systems from the ground up mostly on my own probably wasn't a good idea as a first jab at a game jam, I really wouldn't have been able to get this far without Morage1 help on assets but it's been a lot of fun experimenting with all of the different parts of development I usually don't touch.

We might have one last sort of "post mortem" on the game before uploading it, so stay tuned!

Hey everyone, It's been a rough few weeks working non stop on the project but we finally have our final build for the game!

the name Project Endgame came from my original idea for the story, where you would play the epilogue of an RPG with all the characters at max lvl.

when I was about 2 weeks into the project I scrapped the idea because it seemed a bit convoluted and I wasn't sure I could do it justice.

when I rewrote the story I still kept a lot of the same ideas but adapted them to be the first chapter instead, the name didn't really make sense anymore so I came with something more fitting:

the title of the game is Final Blade

The story itself is very derivative of a bunch of JRPG tropes, I wanted it to be a little cheeky and melodramatic but still have some heart to it, I hope you enjoy it for what it is.

Combat:

The game has a very simple turn based combat system where turn order is determined by character stats, players can use basic attacks, use a small list of skills as they level up,  and use items they find in the environments to heal or restore mana in battle.

You could technically level all the way up to lvl 99 but only the first 10 levels give you new skills to use in battle and the XP requirements get exponentially bigger.

I was going to include a bit more enemy variety and some other stuff in combat but realized very late that the way I set up most of my data containers wasn't going to work in the final version and had to refactor a big part of the combat system to handle it in a different way, the combat system is mostly the same as intended but I had to cut out random enemy encounter variety and simplify enemy behaviors quite a lot.

The game is generally not that difficult, but in case you die you don't really lose any progress, you just get sent back to the world map.

The game is also very unstable, I've been debugging it based on all the game breaking stuff I've found myself but I'm sure there's countless ways to get soft locked I haven't found, thankfully the game isn't too long so in case you need to start from the beginning due to being stuck somewhere or combat just completely breaking you're only losing a few minutes of progress.

I'd like the Thank Morage1 for helping with the assets, he did a really good job with the characters and weapons.

I am aware of a few big issues with the build and I'll try to fix them later today but the current build is probably the final one.