I'm going to discuss my current project in this thread. First I would like to say I am against too much flexibility, because we already have it. We have C, Java, Python... We have Verge, Sphere, RPG Maker, and others. The more flexible, the more intricate is to do exactly what you want.

For instance, if I want to make a Phantasy Star game, it would be good to have a PS Maker. Naturally, it wouldn't be suitable to make a Final Fantasy game, a Chrono Trigger clone, or even a most sofisticated PS game. But to make a traditional PS game was always my goal and the goal of people from the PS community.

So the PS Maker is going to be a wrapper to the Verge Engine. It allows the user to create a game project. A project consists of maps, entities, characters, enemies, and most important, events. This wrapper is being implemented as a Swing/AWT GUI Java application. After compiling the project, the generated code are made available to run the game (including .maps, .vc, images, musics, etc)

I'm going to detail some of the aspects of the maker, as a lot of things are alredy implemented:

Maps: A map is created using custom tilesets. So, as the tilesets are previoulsy known, the PS maker can organize the tiles in TileComponents. A house is an example of TileComponent: it has a pre-defined number of tiles, some on the first layer, others on the second layer, some are obstructions, others are zones. When the user places a water terrain over the grass, the margins are automatically created in order to adjust the map appearence. And so on. Just like a modern map editor.

Chars: A character is made of: a .chr file, naturally, his name, age, portrait, and so on. And most importantly: the race (ex: palman, motavian, dezorian, numan, machine), the class (ex: hunter, warrior, scholar) and skills (ex: swordmanship, curer, machinery). Based on these traits, the HP/MP, techs, XP table are defined.

Events: An event describes everything that can happen in a PS world. It consists of checks (is flagX on? checkItemY? etc), texts (or prompts) and actions (addItem, addChar, warp, etc). Examples of events: a text box from an entity, a more elaborated text box with prompts, an addItem event after searching some place, some pre-defined events (like shop, hospital, ...), a call to a battle, etc. The battlesystem is implemented directly in the VC code, through.


I'm coding the wrapper flexible enough to make a PS game, but its design has some core classes (again: in Java) that allows some modification to build others wrappers (ex: An Alex Kidd wrapper). Right now I'm working on making the original intended project and release it as soon as it's usable.

I'm open to suggestions, crictics and support.

Rafael, the Esper.