This post is to introduce the game I'm working on and to be a permalink directory to my devlogs!
Pitch and Influences
Chronicles is a Nethack-like set in a persistent, non-procedural world with Into the Breach-inspired tactical combat. It attempts to combine some of my favorite things about games with bits and pieces pulled from the Ultima series, Morrowind, Dragon's Dogma, Divinity Original Sin, Darkest Dungeon, Disgaea and Shadowrun for the SNES.
It's also set behind the graphical restrictions of late-80's EGA graphics cards. Every pixel in the final frame buffer renders one of the 16 colors for the current palette selected from the 64-color EGA color space. The resolution is an apocryphal 16:9 but for fun the pixel size ratio is still 1:1.37.
The aesthetic goal is something Richard Garriot might have made in 1988 if he had a faster PC.
When Can I Play It?
The first release was a playtesting demo designed specifically to test the game's combat system. This was a standalone game consisting of multiple combat encounters to "solve." The Combat Mechanics Demo was made available to volunteer testers 10/30/2023. With that milestone over, it's on to the larger game!
If you didn't get a chance to playtest and would like to be considered for future playtests, you can email me at britown.cohost@gmail.com
Dev Blog
Here are perma-links to my (major) dev posts, but I also post random snippets and musings to #chron4 which you could follow if you were into that!
π: Long-form Dev-Blog π€: Short-form Update π½: Video or Gif πΌ: Screenshot π: Audio
- π 5-31-24 Design Tweak: Dodge Locking
- π½ 5-28-24 Elemental Tiles System
- π½ 5-22-24 Light, Vision, and Fog of War
- π½ 5-16-24 The World Map
- πππ
- π€ 1-23-24 Happy New Year! Game Design: Fast Travel and the Faction Turn
- π€ 11-28-23 Announcing Milestone 2
- π 11-3-23 Combat Demo Post-Mortem
- πΌ 10-15-23 Cross-Platform Builds
- π½ 10-4-23 Enemy Position Ghosts π»
- π€ 9-30-23 Playtesters Wanted!
- π½ 9-28-23 Enemy Behavior Pt. 3
- π 9-12-23 A song!
- π 9-11-23 Tracker is feature-complete π₯³
- π½ 9-7-23 New Tile Sets
- π€ 9-5-23 Final Actions Refactor π€
- πΌ 8-31-23 Rich Text!
- π½ 8-23-23 UI Popups!
- π€ 8-12-23 Talking about EGA Emulation
- π 8-11-23 The Big Chronicles Audio System
- π€ 7-25-23 Throwback: PNG > EGA Encoding
- π₯³ 6-28-23 Happy Birthday!
- π 6-20-23 Enemy Behavior Pt. 2
- π€ 6-2-23 Enemy Behavior
- πΊ β
- π½ 5-9-23 Boom
- π½ 5-6-23 Animations System
- π½ 4-19-23 Combat UI Iteration
- π½ 4-12-23 Many Abilities!
- π½ 3-27-23 Cooldowns and Cost
- π½ 3-22-23 Teleport!
- π½ 3-9-23 Turn member UI
- π½ 3-3-23 Whew! A long break! Abilities UI!
- π§ β
- πΌ 11-27-22 UI UI UI
- π½ 11-20-22 Push Actions
- πΌ 11-15-22 Some New Art!
- π 11-14-22 The Big Complicated Actions System
- π½ 11-3-22 GameState History
- π€ 10-π-22 Linear Code Musings and follow-up
- π½ 9-12-22 Targeting System
- π€ 9-6-22 Games are Hard
- π€ 8-14-22 Immediate-Mode UI System
- π 8-8-22 Combat Puzzles Devblog
- π½ 8-7-22 Combat Puzzle Gifs
- π½ 8-1-22 Turn-Order, Pathfinding, and Palettes
- πΌ 7-26-22 More Map Vibes
- πΌ 7-21-22 A Cool Map in the Map Editor
- π€ 7-18-22 Asset Pipeline Introduction
- π₯³ 6-28-22 Project Start!
- Public Trello Board (Now defunct)
- GitHub repo for the old original engine
