I have been on a real Ryuji Sasai kick lately with playing all this saga 3 and mystic quest, and i felt like arranging the other good battle music from this game. turned out fire imo it needs some cleanup but it's not bad for a night's work
Hood morning and greetings from Coobsoft HQ ! sorry that i've been slim on the updates, usually it's like me to update on this more frequently, been really quite busy both at home; and in the kitchen.
First, a video. and a disclaimer for that video - couple of small bugs in this recording. with the timing of the callout banner, and the tile streamer, but they've since been sorted. it's not to be taken as any indication of quality, and the interface is subject to change probably once or twice more before it's finalized.
For some time during this endeavor i've been trying to wrap my head around how to really tackle custom animations in battle without leaving you guys (or me) being tied down to just the 32x32 and 48x48 "single actor anchored to the center of the screen/the center of an enemy" system i had. it didn't have the depth that i feel like real games have, and it just looked kinda tacked on even if you tried to be creative and worked around it.
Back in the day for animation choreography, RPGMaker had Effekseer or something else on the later versions. GBS, and RPGSoup do not. but nothing to fear!
I set out to make a solution and this is what i came back with. it's not by any means final so bear that in mind. I promise I will take a good video of how it works in time, but it's changing like, every day - and a full tour would be wasted since it'd be outdated in a week. I give you my word when it's through, I'll deliver a full walkthrough on my YT, for anyone to use as a resource. god knows there just aren't enough good tutorials, amirite? 😂 I'll make sure to give you guys the whole cribs tour, complete with DVD Extras! ALL THIS SAID, here's a quick rundown.
in your scripts menu on the sidebar, you'll either already have, or make an animation and choreography library. There are two events.Define Clip, and Define Choreography.
Define Clip, is just defining an animation for the battle engine, using the sprites we have in the sprites folder. it's your bread and butter. here you define default behaviors for a single-segment of animation. simple stuff, just its visual effect, its size, amount of frames, and its sound if you want one. these will be used to build bigger attacks out of.
Now, the Define Choreography event: Flavortown. That's what this is. Those clips that we were defining a second ago? This is where you'll use them. This is where you'll define the actual battle animations behavior, and where you'll put those "blocks" together.
You can make some pretty long and cool effects with this. You can apply multiple effects per "beat" as i'm calling them (segment was considered, but i just like beat better, feel free to go in the code and change it if it bugs ya i don't mind =P ).
You can add both raster and palette effects, timing them pretty much however you'd like, and can have effects carry through every beat, or time it to end with the beat. As long as they overlap in a way that makes sense, you can overlap the effects as well! In the API if you change motion path to free, you may place the animation at any coordinates you like, and then apply the one of the included motion paths to it while it's bound to a defined rectangular region (it's x, y, width, height) of your choosing.
i am doing my best not to just include 1 or 2 movement options for attacks, then tell you guys "welp the rest is up to you, use the custom option" - as this is for everyone, not just experts and not just newbies. As you can see, i've been up to my eyeballs in RPGSoup. I'll post more as the situation develops. Soup's finna be FIRE.
for a quick status indicator, the engine is probably a hard 90%, the demo is more like 60%.
i'd like to release them at the same time so folks have a whole project to pick apart and learn from.
AH, and as for a name for the actual game that demos the RPGSoup engine - "Fever Dream Saga" is about as on the nose as you can get, right? i love it.
Stay tuned!
Coob, President of Coobsoft
P.S. - I still have a few things up my sleeve, too!
still rough like my usual first posts about a feature, but after a long night into the morning i've made a bit of headway into the lighting system for caves and stuff. according to Uni it tests clean on dmg! you'll be able to call this event in any scene's init script, control its radius, and whether or not it has a dithered ring.
check one more thing off my SoE:GB list, i think i'll do it like this in gothica and antiqua!
Hey everybody, just gonna sit this here and let it speak for itself, some sfx need to be added, and for the life of me I cant explain why Lumina hit one enemy heals 4 guys then hits the other lol its supposed to be one then the other, but this is much much closer to what I would call "ready".
Cant wait to see these guys replaced with whatever cool or goofy stuff you guys make lol
been workin' on a proper "what kind of place is the player standing in?" layer for the world map (and other scenes). it started because i wanted regions for battles on the world map. a taller order than it sounds, but i think i got it licked.
at first i tried defining rectangles, and that's still an option if you've only got a small area you want to mark as a feature. but for scalability, stacking 61 random rectangles is about the quickest way to end up with a five minute build... if it builds at all. 😅
RPGSoup can now treat areas within a scene as semantic world features by reading a second indexed color image. you create the image, drop it into the world_features folder with the corresponding scene name, and the build process assigns feature ids to each tile-sized area.
at runtime, the engine can use those features to change the player visually or mechanically. right now it can adjust movement speed, partially obscure the player for a "walking through forest" or "stuck in the sand" effect, or hide them entirely so it looks like they're walking behind the background. it can also swap encounter tables or apply optional bg effects like subtle scx/scy scrolling or palette changes.
the immediate use case is, of course, encounters. but the exciting part is that this is a general-purpose system. other plugins and systems can simply call get world feature and react to wherever the player is standing. *sigh* i can already see myself making fishing lmfao
droppin a quick update,
Put together a "PHS"-ish party swapping mechanism for RPG Soup, you can also reorder your dudes here (now you'll be able to reorder your active party also just by pressing select at the root menu)! A small but very important mechanic for a rich rpg you notice when its missing haha
All weapon families now have sheets for them, i'm excited to share, as well! I'm finishing classes and wrapping it all up for release after that I think!
hey sorry i been quiet as i've been scaling up the heat on our soup! i've added a few things - until today, rpg soup supported 32x32, 32x64, 64x32, 64x64, and 160x80 (limited to 80 tiles). but i am pleased to report after many hours of work, i have now added another size - 48x48, as well! trying to give ya'll options here. the bigger W's in my book are the shop redesigns which i hinted at wanting to rework previously, and my favorite part, we officially have 8 enemy fights and multi-target spells! (coded currently but not animated because i only have two hands and i got excited when i got these bits of gameplay lined up to show you guys haha)
cant wait to finish this up! i'm gonna do something with world maps too... but i won't reveal that JUST yet.
oh and PS now the limit on colossal is 144 tiles cause i took a broom to vram before the battle starts and streams everything into it now <3
Split up the raster and palette effects for spells and attacks when they call for them! Man it does a LOT for the kinetics of battle, its not easy to make Battle Logs and Combat Resolution look cool haha!
Im making a bunch of effects, and when you define your spells in the big init script, you just choose what spell uses which effect, if any at all! Ill post pictures of what the event editor interface looks like in comments c:
I think ill be ready for Beta 2 before long, if youre interested, shoot me a DM and ill make a list from here when I send demo projects out for people to break and play with! This has been just, the most fun making.
And since this is as good a place as any, super special thanks to any and everyone that's helped me so far!
This is the full result of me using whatever assets I wanted to/drew up/had on hand for the first silly little rpg made with this plugin. I know that this doesnt look like a lot, but behind the scenes this thing is doing a TON.
I used modified version of lucky cassettes border for the menu, and this is currently using Tronimal's GBFX both one and two.
I'm glad i tried it too, eventually i'll experiment with using the 4-cell fighter bgs so the boss can have multiple components, and later i'll make like a minimalist UI, a compact combat log with my tiny icons and my condensed font we'll REALLY be cookin with gas then, i'm gonna leave it here for now and focus on cleaning the rest of this up so i can get this in some hands <3
Hey guys, here's a look at the basic battle framework im building for you guys. This supports 4 small 32x32 enemies, 2 64x32 tall, 2 32x64 wide, or one huge guy, as well as support for 2 small and 1 tall or wide enemy for the battles.
You use define database events to define enemies, troops, their ai, abilities, stats, and rewards in an initial script the same way you do with items, characters, effects, elements, equipment, magic, etc. Random encounters work as well! I made sure those random battles are supported across other scene types than top down too c:
As for all the events ive done my best with the tool tips, and nomenclature, to make em as caveman friendly as possible so you dont have to know how to code to use the plugin, you just supply the assets like usual! (Ive tried to illustrate that idea by using the enemies from the inspiration, FFL3, my little weirdo party, and my gb demakes of the Secret of Evermore alchemy spells!)
The rpg battle side of the plugin is made to work be used together with the menu side to make a cute and very customizable rpg, but you can just use the menu side if you want to make an action rpg or a different kind of battling!
Ive tried to cover everything I could think of that could feasibly be customized, the Coobsoft RPG Soup plugin as ive jokingly named it has become a freakin unit and when I polish out the few teeny graphical issues itll pretty much be done
muchexcite.mp4
definitely past the mockup phase! it's taken me a week to get this far, this thing's been driving me batty. and boy, has it been teaching me the hard way the WHOLE TIME lol.
Item/spell/equipment definitions live in ROM/database style lookup tables, while WRAM only tracks live stuff like item counts, learned spells, equipped IDs, party stats, EXP, money, save slots, and cursor state. i never really realized how tiny WRAM for real is on the game boy
i chose to use the old 1.0 sample level to make it in simply because i didn't want to mess with color if i couldnt even get my concept to work to begin with lol. it's still got some visual bugs in this recording but i wanted to share this as a milestone.
thanks and greetz to the homies in the gbs discord
Coming along nicely, it's honestly faster that i expected it to be!
hey guys, here's a demo of my simple rpg stat handler in action.
it's offers about everything i can think of that one would need in an rpg - from Normal stats, to one for Crit% or ItemFind%, Evade% or whatever you might need that sort of stat for. You can customize sound from the event editor, and if you don't want to or cant draw a menu, just give it a blank background, and tell it the coordinates to draw your stats.
https://cooby-pls.itch.io/coobs-exp-engine
it works for both 4.2.0 and 4.3.0 too! hope it helps out!
Just a little vblank stream plugin I built last night to help a friend who didnt know how
https://cooby-pls.itch.io/vblank-tile-streamer
Don't worry. Kitty's safe. The spells are holograms.;p
now to go back over and optimize it because honestly I can do better for the tile count (my vram started screaming at me as soon as it smelled this scene)
I do not care to discuss how long it took me to make the repeating tile that the floor used because it kept coming out looking like water lol
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Can't wait to finish it today!
Got all the menu/item/icon 16px's done for my project last night, and as I went through it tried my hardest to give the ones that will show up in the list-type pages 8px variants. im really pleased with the way it turned out! Just got weapons, armor, and spells now!
Did my best here, but Honey really wasn't feasible as it since it's a consumable, so it requires at the very least, a 3-color companion for it's 4-color bg version? Between that, the sprite looking bad no matter how i indexed its colors, and how unreadable it was at 8x8, which is the MAJOR bit, it was much clearer to simply draw another variant of the same thing than to remove it entirely.
Really pleased with how they turned out though because the 8x8 tiles will save me SO much headache as now the ingredients list has little images too instead of just being a list! same with trade goods! (this was really not feasible without making the scrolling list with 16x16 bg tiles)
SO EXCITED for yall to see it!!!!
Man I would sell my SOUL to have just one more audio channel
