I have recently began working on a new game which I have wanted to work on for while. It is a 2d, open world RPG where you travel all across the large map gaining power along the way. I plan on updating this devlog every Sunday with progress from the past week as well as taking in any feedback that is left! The project currently doesn't have a name so any name ideas are appreciated.

I started the week off by working on a tileset for a dirt path that I then later turned into an auto tile in order to create the map more efficiently. I also later on worked on some grass and other pieces of shrubbery to scatter everywhere. 

I also made a few sprites for some trees as well as an archer and bow. The bow can rotate around the player meaning I don't have to draw or animate arms which is a huge time saver. I wanted to get the rendering working nicely so that things with a lower Y position render over things with a higher Y position so I made that as well as a different version that won't constantly update the rendering because I didn't want it to be too laggy.

Another large thing I worked on this week was the first enemy. It is called the angry flower and is passive until attacked, then it will start shooting pollen at the player.

 I made a spawning system where if you are within a certain range of the area that can spawn the enemy it will have a chance to spawn up to a maximum amount of enemies every 5 seconds.I also made an area called the flower field for the angry flower to spawn in.

It has been a while since I posted the first devlog so sorry that this one is a few days late. This week I worked a lot on the map and making somewhat of a combat system. I started off by creating a new auto-tile which I can use for adding shadow all over my map. I also created a few more shrubbery tiles to help fill the empty space. Talking about the map, I also started making a basic layout for what the forest area will look like. It will have 6 main areas all with smaller secret areas and winding paths connecting them. It gives me a lot of space to create unique enemies for the player to battle.

Another big thing I worked on was the beginning of the stats system. I don't remember if I explained this in the previous devlog but my RPG will be focused entirely on combat and to get stronger, the main way is by gaining stats. There won't be levels just ways to obtain any of 5 stats. These include strength, endurance, psychic, elemental and elemental resistance. I made a script that I can put on anything to give it health and all of these stats. The stat system also handles the killing of enemies and playing a death particle when this happens. It also has a function that can be called by the main enemy script to despawn the enemy when the player is too far away.

This past week I also decided to get the basics of a dialogue system down so I started working on signs. I made a sign which I can place and it will check if the player is in range, then the player can use space to interact with it. When interacting with a sign, the player can't move or use abilities. I can edit the dialogue using a script and it allows me to add several lines of dialogue, change the image displayed, and the name of who is saying it.

The final big thing I worked on was a new enemy, the goblin. Goblins are the first totem enemy in the game which will add a new variety of combat. A totem enemy is something that isn't made of natural things like plants of rocks, this means the angry flower is a normal enemy and the goblin isn't.  Totem enemies are regularly summoned by their totem type so a goblin totem will spawn all of the goblin types (there will be 3 types of goblin). The sprite for this totem isn't done yet so I haven't set up this spawning type currently. I spent quite a while working on making the goblin be somewhat smart with it's pathfinding so that took a few days however it should now be much faster for me to create enemies!

Unfortunately, I was quite busy this past week so I couldn't get much work done on the game however I did manage to get some decent work done on the stat system. I made it so that shooting your bow would reward you with strength and taking damage will give you endurance. If you don't take any damage you wont receive any endurance to stop you from afking. I made a little pop up above the players head whenever you gain any stats to show you what you got and how much of it. In order to stop the number of gained stats from being too long I also made a system to shorten a long number (eg, 121356812) into a shorter one (121M).

The other thing I started working on was the first menu: the stats menu. When in this menu the game will pause and you will be able to view each of your stats and your total power. It will also show you each of your stat multipliers! I have currently finished only a few stat icons so the elemental and elemental resistance are currently filled with the strength icon.

nice! I really like the artstyle!

This game has finally been in development for a whole month and so much progress has been made. Anyways this week I was rather busy as well however I managed to get a lot more done than last week. The stats menu is what I began working on first was finishing off the stats menu. I redesigned some of the sprites as well as making sprites for the elemental and elemental resistance stats. I lightened the menu shadow as well and added a small sidebar, you can click the sidebar's buttons to navigate across different menus. There is also a display for each stat amount and for each stats multiplier. The final thing I did with the stats was making it so that defeating enemies will reward you will small amounts of stats.

The second thing I did was actually getting around to finishing the goblin totems. I wasn't happy with the design of it originally so I redid it and it now fits in and looks much better. I made an animation to show it charging up as an indicator for when it will summon a goblin. When ready to summon one, after charging up a green puff of smoke shoots out from the orb and it eventually pops into a goblin and the totem reverts back to being normal. I made a script which allows me to easily set the chance for an enemy to spawn and how often it attempts to spawn an enemy. It also doesn't go above the total enemy cap for that specific enemy. 

I don't have any images to show for this yet but I spent some time working on the main story for the game and it goes into some detail about what you will actually be doing and some background lore about why you are even this archer defeating enemies. This story will also feature a larger map and many interesting NPC's and systems. I'll start with the quests. You can accept quests by speaking to the villagers and they will reward you with things like stats, materials and other cool rewards. There will be a few types of quests including but not limited to, slaying quests, collecting quests and a few other kinds. The rewards you receive and what type of quest it is will depend on what NPC you speak to. 

The next large system will be abilities! Abilities are a simple way to majorly boost your strength and add a level of depth and strategy to the combat system. You will be able to unlock abilities through nearly anything including advancing in the game, completing quests and obtaining stat milestones. There are also 2 main types of ability, the passive and active ability. Passive abilities are always running and active abilities require you activating them. Each ability will also have 5 tiers for you to upgrade and you can only use a few abilities at a time.

I didn't get too much real work done on the game this week but a lot of ideas and things that needed finishing were finished so I would consider it as some good progress. If you have any suggestions please feel free to tell me! 

I quite like the overall graphics of the game

It has been 2 weeks since the last update, sorry for missing last week, I was ill and didn't get enough done to do an update. The first thing I did was animate the twigpy so it is now a finished enemy. It  has 3 animations, a spawning animation where it sprouts from a mini tree. An attacking animation where it swings its head to shoot a leaf and finally a moving animation where its roots shuffle. Next, I worked on the village, I spent a while fixing the rendering problem so now you correctly render inside and outside of the houses. I made a new tile for a doorway so you don't walk through walls and I added a shadow to the floor tileset so it is different from the walls and a shadow outside of the buildings to make it fit in. The village design I have is split into 2 parts with a river and I layed out the right side of the river for now. 

The other thing I did was make a chest system and a few chest variations. The basic chest is a wooded chest with an iron frame and there will be a rarer variant with a gold frame instead. There is also a boss chest which is red with a gold frame. I might make a unique boss chest for each location in the game to add more depth. I animated the chest opening and now if you are in a certain range and click space the chest will open and the items will poor out. The chests will reset to be reclaimed each time a new in-game day comes around to make chest items infinite. I also designed a new basic bow and made a shooting animation!

Once again sorry for missing the last update and if you have any ideas feel free to comment them!

It has been yet another week and yet more progress has been made on the game! First, I worked some more on the inventory as it was missing quite a lot. I began by adding a box around each item and removing shadows from them. This made it easier to tell each item apart and it looked better in general. I then started work on an information box that will pop up each time you click on an item. It will show various stats about the item you clicked on including its name, description and even damage stats. If you have 1 or more you will also see an equip button to change what item you are currently using. The information box also changes depending on if you clicked on a weapon or not.

I also made item stacking now work so if you have several of an item you will gain bonus stats! To not make it too overpowered if you decided to obtain many of a single weapon, the attack speed reduction is capped at - 2/3 of the items attack speed however there is no cap for the damage bonus. I also redesigned the wooden bow and I personally think it looks a lot better than most of the other art so I am considering redoing some of the art such as the player and a few tile sets. If you have any thoughts on this feel free to tell me.

The final thing I did this week was add a new weapon, it was mainly for testing purposes with the inventory but I quite like it so I will probably keep it. This new bow is called the polloninator and it has a damage stat of 1.25 and and attack speed of 1.5. It shoots slow moving projectiles which send off smaller pieces of pollen which will make it a good weapon for crowd control. It will be a craft-able weapon from the carpenter and it will require a rare drop from the angry flowers or a more common drop from furious flowers (a stronger angry flower I plan on making). 

It has been almost 4 months since I started working on the RPG and I am so happy with how my game dev skills have improved over that time however I am going to take a small break from working on the RPG. This doesn't mean I won't continue development in the future or I am burned out from working on it, I simply want to focus on my pixel art. I want to improve my art skills more so that I can make better looking and feeling games in the future. I also realized how unrealistic it is for me to make as much content for 1 game as I had planned so I will also need to rethink quite a lot about the RPG. I hope to post some regular updates on how my art is going and making some sample scenes for what could be added to the RPG / new games for the future. 

Good job with what you did, and good luck!