#112: Party health, paralax map

This week I worked on two things. I added window to the menu that shows the status of your party and I tried to set up things for the future maping.

Lets talk about the window first. I played through the game and recruited new follower. We got into a small fight and he got hurt. I wanted to heal him but there was indication of his health. His health became visible only when I selected the healing item from the inventory.

So I decided to quickly add a new window that shows the health and status of all your party members. You just press SHIFT and new window will appear instead of the character image. You can still scroll through the menu when this window is active and you can close it by pressing SHIFT again.

It looks very basic right now, but it shows you the important informaton (Except for name but I will add that later). I want to improve this window even more when I start focusing on the graphics.

Next thing. I started experimenting with what people call (I think) paralax maping. RMXP and other programs focuse on tileset based maping. But with some edits, you can achieve something older RPGs like baldurs gate or icewind dale did.

In these games, the entire map is just one big image that was made in 3D and then rendered. Many other games did the same thing, like FF7. I did some research and now everything should be ready for me to do the same thing. But ofcourse, less detailed and generaly more shitty.

This is the result of my testing. I rendered this very simple scene and put it in game.

This scene is made from two layers. One is below the player, other is above him. And that is basicaly all you will ever need. You can add more layers for effects like fog and so on if you feel like it though.

Bear in mind that this is just a test. I will be working at the actual graphics much later. It will take a lot of time, but atleast it will distinguish this game from other RM games since very few of them use prerendered graphics like that. I also want to make things look cartoony and not super realistic so that should make things easier too.

And that will be it for this week.