A Primer for Game Developers. This article is a high- level overview for creating a JRPG (Japanese Role- Playing Game) such as the early Final Fantasy games. We'll look at the architecture and systems that make up the skeleton of a JRPG, how to manage game modes, how to use tilemaps to display the world, and how to code an RPG combat system.
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Note: This article is written using a Java- like pseudo code language, but the concepts are applicable to any game development environment. The slime - one of Dragon Warrior's iconic enemies.
In 1. 98. 3, Yuji Horii, Koichi Nakamura and Yukinobu Chida flew to America and attended Apple. Fest '8. 3, a gathering of developers showing off their latest creations for the Apple II. They were blown away by the latest version of an RPG called Wizardry. On returning to Japan, they decided to create Dragon Warrior, an RPG that was similar but streamlined for the NES.
It was a massive hit, defining the JRPG genre. Dragon Warrior didn't fare as well in America, but a few years later another game did. In 1. 98. 7, the original Final Fantasy was released, spawning one of the best selling video game franchises on Earth which became, at least in the West, the iconic JRPG. Game genres are never precisely defined - they're more a fuzzy collection of conventions. RPGs tend to have a leveling system, one or several player characters with skills and statistics, weapons and armor, combat and exploration modes, and strong narratives; game progress is often achieved by advancing across a map.
Japanese RPGs are RPGs created in the mold of Dragon Warrior; they're more linear, combat is often turn- based and there are usually two types of map: a world map and a local map. Archetypal JRPGs include Dragon Warrior, Final Fantasy, Wild Arms, Phantasy Star and Chrono Trigger. The type of JRPG we're going to talk about in this article is one similar to an early Final Fantasy. They've Stood the Test of Time.
Games like Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger are still very enjoyable to play. If you make a JRPG you're learning a timeless game format that modern players are still very receptive to. They make for a great framework to add your own twist and experiment - be that in the narrative, presentation or mechanics. It's a great thing if you can make a game that's still played and enjoyed decades after it's first release! The Game Mechanics Are Widely Applicable.
Call of Duty, one of the world's most popular FPS games, uses RPG elements; the social game boom surrounding Farm. Ville was basically a clone of the SNES RPG Harvest Moon; and even racing games like Gran Turismo have levels and experience. Constraints Foster Creativity. Much as a writer might be intimidated by a blank sheet of paper, a game developer may find themselves paralyzed by the large number of possible choices when designing a new game.
With a JRPG a lot of the choices have been decided for you, so you don't have that choice paralysis, you're free to follow the conventions for most decisions and deviate from convention at the points that matter to you. It's Doable as a Solo Project. Final Fantasy was almost entirely coded by a single programmer, Nasir Gebelli, and he was doing it in assembly! With modern tools and languages it's far easier to create this type of game.
The largest part of most RPGs isn't the programming it's the content - but this doesn't have to be the case for your game. If you dial it back a little on the content and focus on quality over quantity then a JRPG is a great solo project. Having a team can help with any game, and you might want to outsource the art and music, or use some of the excellent creative commons assets from places such as opengameart. For Profit! JRPGs have a dedicated following and a number of indie JRPGs (such as the ones pictured below) have done well commercially and are available on platforms like Steam. JRPGs share so many conventions and mechanics that it's possible to break a typical JRPG down into a number of systems: In software development one pattern is seen over and over again: layering. This refers to how the systems of a program build on top of each other, with broadly applicable layers at the bottom and layers more intimately dealing with problem at hand near the top.
JRPGs are no different and can be viewed as a number of layers - lower layers deal with basic graphic functions and upper layers deal with quests and character stats. Tip: When developing a new system it's best to start by creating the bottom layers first and then moving layer by layer to the top. Using middleware helps you skip several of the lower layers common to many games. On the architecture diagram above, all the layers below the dotted line are handled by a 2.
D game engine. As you can see from the architecture diagram above, there are a lot of systems that make up a JRPG but most systems can be grouped together as separate modes of the game. JRPGs have very distinct game modes; they have a world map, local map, combat mode and several menu modes. These modes are almost entirely separate, self- contained pieces of code, making each one simple to develop. Modes are important but they would be useless without game content.
An RPG contains many map files, monster definitions, lines of dialog, scripts to run cutscenes and gameplay code to control how the player progresses. Covering how to build a JRPG in detail would fill an entire book, so we're going to concentrate on some of the most important parts. Handling the game modes cleanly is critical to producing a manageable JRPG, so that's the first system we'll explore. The image below shows the game loop pumping away, calling an update function every frame.
This is the heartbeat of the game and nearly all games are structured this way. Have you ever started a project but stalled because you found it too hard to add new features or were plagued by mysterious bugs? Maybe you tried to cram all of your code into the update function with little structure and found the code became a cryptic mess. An excellent solution to these types of problem is to separate the code out into different game states, giving a much clearer view of what's happening.
A common gamedev tool is the state machine; it's used all over the place, for handling animations, menus, game flow, AI.. For the JRPG we can use a state machine to handle the different game modes. We'll take a look at a normal state machine and then we'll mix it up a little, to make it more suitable for the JRPG. But first let's take a little time to consider the general game flow pictured below.
In a typical JRPG you'll probably start off in the local map game mode, free to wander around a town and interact with its inhabitants. From the town you can leave - here you'll enter a different game mode and see the world map.
The world map acts very much like the local map but at a larger scale; you can see mountains and towns, instead of trees and fences. While on the world map if you walk back into the town the mode will revert to the local map. In either the world map or local map you can bring up a menu to check out your characters, and sometimes on the world map you'll be thrown into combat. The diagram above describes these game modes and transitions; this is the basic flow of JRPG gameplay and is what we'll create our game states from. Handling Complexity With a State Machine.
A state machine, for our purposes, is a piece of code that holds all the various modes of our games, that allows us to move from one mode to another, and that updates and renders whatever the current mode is. Depending on the implementation language a state machine usually consists of a State.
Machine class and an interface, IState, that all states implement. Tip: An interface is just a class with member function definitions but no implementation. Classes that inherit from an interface are required to implement its member functions.
This means an interface has no code, it just specifies that other classes provide certain functionality. This allows different classes to be used in the same way because we know they have a group of member functions defined by a common interface. A state machine is best described by sketching out a basic system in pseudocode: class State. Machine. . At the start of the game a State. Machine will be created, all the different states of the game added and the initial state set.
Each state is uniquely identified by a String name which is used when calling the change state function. There is only ever one current state, m. Current. State, and it's rendered and updated each game loop. The code might look like this: State. Machine g. Game. Mode = new State. Machine(). // A state for each game mode. Game. Mode. Add(.
If we ran this code the Main. Menu. State would be rendered and updated first. This represents the menu you see in most games when you first boot up, with options like Start Game and Load Game. When a user selects Start Game, the Main.
Menu. State calls something like g. Game. Mode. Change(. This state would then update and render the map, allowing the player to start exploring the game. The diagram below shows a visualization of a state machine moving between the World. Map. State and Battle.
State. In a game this would be equivalent to a player wandering around the world, being attacked by monsters, going into combat mode, and then returning to the map. Let's have a quick look at the state interface and an Empty. State class that implements it: public interface IState. Apart from that it's all pretty straightforward. Now you know this you can create all kinds of states for all the different parts of your game. That's the basic state machine. It's useful for many situations but when dealing with game modes we can improve upon it!
With the current system, changing state can have a lot of overhead - sometimes when changing to a Battle. State we'll want to leave the World. State, run the battle, and then return to the World. State in the exact setup it was before the battle.