Continued improving Arthurian Studio. I’m iterating through the current state of the editor, seeing where there are still gaps to create a great creator-friendly app. Some of the things done today included:
- Restructure ‘World’ sidebar item into ‘Config’ and ‘Maps’ children for better navigation.
- Add “Load Project” button to the Sidebar bottom to allow opening different project files.
- Implement ‘NPCPickerModal’ for visual selection of initial party members.
- Implement structured “Tilesets” editor, including selecting image files from local filesystem.
- Rename Mob Types to Creatures across user interface
- Reorder sidebar modules to follow a logical development flow: Scenario, NPCs, Creatures, Items, Interactables, World, Cutscenes, Appearances, Tilesets.
I also moved tileset definitions from .arthurian project file to data/tilesets.json; this is the only current item that will require updating the oax6 engine to load an additional resource file, but I think it’s worth it.
As part of making the tool as user friendly as possible, I added short explainers to each module to remember what each one is for, but more importantly, I added a Quickstart page which should eventually grow to be able to guide users into the process of creation; it is backed by a markdown file I’m going to continue building for completeness.
Ultimately, the idea is to write an updated “tutorial” and then retrofit it into the app itself so that it’s self-guided; so a lot of work today went to this: writing and structuring how I would like different types of creators to approach the engine.
This has changed significatively since we started the project; I don’t think now that the engine itself will be used a lot by JavaScript developers themselves; instead I’ll aim for game designers.
The idea is to make the tool useful and approachable for a wide variety of creators, giving a clear message that they don’t have to invest themselves heavily into setting up the visuals, and will instead get access to a lot of infrastructure setup they can use to just build their worlds.
- Users of the OAX6 Foundations Pack
- Create scenarios using the existing assets as a foundation
- You want to create a game using the existing graphics, extending or repurposing the list of creature types and objects.
- You want to focus on bringing life to new NPCs, the world they live on, and tying everything together to provide the player with a story.
- The base project template contains a complete setup with tilesets, creature and item definitions, you will build on top of them.
- Extending the OAX6 Foundations Pack
- You want to extensively edit the list of creature types and objects provided on the base project template, or want to completely redefine it.
- You want to focus on creating a complete new universe, over which you will them create a working scenario.
- In this case, you will also use the Creatures and Items module, but your intent will be different: instead of doing small tweaks over the existing data, you will be creating new definitions.
- At this point, you’ll very likely also want to dig into the next level: Visual Customization.
- Create a Universe Pack
- Visual Customization
- Defining and using new Tilesets and Appearance Sets
I also pushed this to github at https://github.com/slashman/arthurian-studio/
Still no release- Needs a couple more rounds of improvements and then it’s off to the hands of the long time dwellers of the OpenArthurian discord to see how they feel about it!
Slashie's Gamedev Adventures 