I’m spending time here and there working on Codex Magnus but I’m honestly struggling a little. One issue is that I’ve started playing DDO again and that’s a major waste of time (of which I don’t have much) but more than that I am having trouble deciding how to move forward. There’s not much to the game as it is so you would think that picking a feature to add would be simple, but for some reason it’s not. It’s like everything that’s left to do is so big that I’m having a difficult time figuring out how to break each piece into manageable chunks. Here is a partial list of things that are left to implement:

• Battle system
• Inventory system
• Dialog boxes
• State management system
• Save/load games
• Dynamically loading/unloading map chunks
• Map ports (for interior locations or moving from one major area to another)
• Lots and lots and lots of art

I’m sure there are even more things I’ve left off this list but that’s plenty. When I look at an item like “Battle system” it’s difficult to imagine how to create a very first step, much less a finished product. Plus I’m still fighting with Phaser a pretty good bit. I still believe it’s just my lack of experience with real software development but looking through the examples for Phaser 3 and going through the documentation can feel like falling into a black hole. Specifically, I’m trying to figure out the plugin system. The Phaser documentation says it’s really powerful and useful, but so far it’s been mostly a headache for me. I’ll keep plugging away, but it’s frustrating how slow the process is.

I have a new version ready to go but have been lazy about releasing it. I’ll really try to do that this weekend, and maybe doing so will get my motivation back to where it needs to be.

As I said a few weeks ago I have decided that my original plan was just a bit too ambitious. I still very much want to create a browser-based role playing game, but I have decided to go with a 2d game that will hopefully be more manageable for a single developer. I’ve gone back and forth a number of times but I’m writing it here so that I will stop waffling and start coding: the game will utilize Phaser 3. There, I’ve said it so now I’m committed. At this point I honestly don’t like Phaser all that much. It does some cool stuff, but the documentation is a bit of a mess since there was a relatively recent major version change from 2 to 3, but it’s actively maintained and will clearly do everything I want it to do, I just have to figure out how to make it work. I feel a little bit like I’m jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire because I became frustrated with the 3d game due to my constant fighting with the pipeline I was using, and I’m afraid that Phaser may end up presenting many of the same challenges, but hopefully it will start to make sense once I’ve committed to using it and have spent a significant amount of time with it.

I will get into the plot of the game in a future post but the core story is about a young man who gets caught up in a world of danger because of his father’s involvement with a mysterious, powerful book called Codex Magnus. The story will be mostly linear and will the game will feel very much like the older JRPGs like Final Fantasy II/IV and Secret of Mana.

In an attempt to familiarize myself with Phaser I plan to write at least a few tutorials on it and post them here. Hopefully this will force me to really examine the documentation and understand it so that the tutorials will be useful and development of the game will be easier.

This is an exciting time and hopefully things will move fast, so stay tuned.