Planet Stronghold: Warzone dev thread

[Lonestar51]

Isometric RPG? Not that I am against it, but is Ren'Py the best starting point for it?

[jack1974]

It wouldn't be the whole game, only during the missions. And it wouldn't be an isometric world with animated characters walking around and so on. Something like the first game sector exploration, but instead of using the ship it will be done at "closer range" and in isometric view.

[Lonestar51]

Still a lot of development work, as Ren'Py does not support such maps out of the box. (OK, maybe I am wrong, I did put a few hours into learning the basics but not more.) On the other hand, it makes it easy to write dialogues, and has save/load and other stuff in the framework. Well I can see why you stick to Ren'Py, I just wanted to read how you did arrive at your choice. (Though generally I thought that having a framework for Isometric stuff and adding a dialugue system is more difficult than the other way round - but then I judge by the result not the tool. Based on what I have seen so far, most likely I will judge it will be worth my money and time.)

[jack1974]

It's mainly because Ren'Py uses python which is light-years ahead of any other language (IMHO of course). I wrote a blog post about it some time ago: blog/2012/01/professional-developers-look-at-renpy/

[Aleema]

Building an entire RPG on Ren'Py may not be the best choice to begin with, so what's a few more mini-games?
It's actually not a lot of development work. This system only took a day to establish and more time will only improve it. It's the alternative to the original PS1 system of using a spaceship to zoom around the desert side, looking for battles. It just has a different point of view (isometric instead of top-down). So really, it's not anything to be worried about.

[jack1974]

As I posted in that blog, the only thing that is not really possible to do well in Ren'Py is things with a lot of movement on screen like a shoot'tem up (though with the Sprites class is possible in theory). But for any 2d game, no problems. Loren's code was already probably the most complex game ever made in Ren'Py (brag-mode on)

[Elmsdor]

Planet Stronghold will always have a heart and home. Hell, it was splashed all over the /chans way back then.

Heh, I missed that shuttle zipping across the desert, and the big ass map.

This Isometric colony looks interesting. I would love to expend a few brain cells to make things work.

Cheers

[jack1974]

Just played the new build of the iso map and is really promising. There's still quite some work to do, but I think I can already say that you won't be disappointed!

[jack1974]

here's a work-in-progress image of the isometric system. Of course lots of stuff is temporary, there will be other buttons, etc etc. Cheers to Aleema for her job on this one, I really like it

[Lonestar51]

Looks great!

What do you think will be the size of the map in the final state? 5 by 5 may make sense for some tutorial mission, but I would like to have it more sprawling.