When I decided to make a turn-based JRPG for Android in 2010, my initial thought was that it would be simple. After all, being turn-based, it wouldn't have complex physics or real-time issues and the simple art-style would make it a breeze.

Obviously, having never attempted to develop a complete game to release before, I had no idea what I was talking about, and indeed that game never went further than a moderately-successful demo.

Making games being fundamentally impossible aside, the key misunderstanding I want to highlight here today, is the disastrous assumption that turn-based games have simpler logic.

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Thank you to all the people I've met and interacted with here on this site, I hope I see you around!

The fruits of all of my labor with regard to asset editors and combat actions results in it being fairly trivial to add huge numbers of different types of abilities. It feels really good to just pop open the engine, write no code, and throw together a few systems into a new ability.

Here I made a ninja-smoke escape ability in just a minute or two. I greyed out the firey explosion graphic I had made before using the new in-line palette swaps to make a nice smoke explosion and then leveraged existing teleport animations to make a quick and dirty smoke bomb.

Enemies calculate their own FoV and also can't see through smoke just like you can't, so leave some smoke tiles behind and you have a great getaway!

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I've been having a time getting doors into the game over the last few weeks. After a failed attempt with the wrong methodology and several refactors I think I have it in a good place now!

Doors are special in ways unlike other actors in the game:

• They can be attacked and killed (thank Barrels for paving the way for non-creatures actors for that)
• They can be interacted with in a special user interface way.
• Other actors can cohabitate the same grid-space as an open door, something previously explicitly disallowed in the engine.
• And they also block line of sight when closed!

A ton of extra systems and refactors have gone into making these doors work, but a lot of that work is going to benefit the next goal which is other interactable actors like item chests!

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