Hello everyone, my name is Matheus, and I'm the programmer for Reverie Knights Tactics. As the development slowly wraps up and we squash those last few remaining bugs, I thought it'd be interesting to share some of the experiences of building our game.
RKT is the first large production I was a part of, and there was a lot to learn from it.
Originally the game was planned to be a traditional turn based JRPG, similar to the earlier Final Fantasy titles, but as we were planning out the game, we thought that having it be a grid based RPG would allow us a lot more room to experiment and introduce interesting gameplay mechanics. Such a change presented a myriad of programming challenges that had to be sorted given the massive increase of gameplay complexity, but it was also a great opportunity to really expand on our production goals.
Most of these programming challenges derived from design questions that had to be answered during development as it evolved, and sometimes, things did not work out as well as we'd hoped, and we'd have to pull back and re-evaluate the implementations, which is no big surprise given the iterative process of game development.
But perhaps the biggest challenges with making a game was implementing those invisible backend systems that we take for granted, or are very simple on the surface, such as save systems, gamepad support, cinematics, and dialogues. Turns out, things get complicated and edge cases are a thing when dealing with a multitude of systems.
For cinematics and dialogues especially, the biggest struggles were to allow them the flexibility to interact and update many different facets of the game, accommodate the different requirements for the scenes we had, as well as having the different systems communicate with each other to create the sequences you will play through the game. However, as our requirements changed or expanded, and more complexity was required due to our desire to present the world, characters and story as best we could, we've reached a point where we can comfortably handle pretty much any scene we could come up with.
There is also a lot that could be said about the design of the combat itself, but perhaps that is something for another time. I would like to thank you for taking the time to read this write up, and I hope you enjoy our game. It's been an amazing journey, and it feels strange to be reaching its end, at least for the time being.
Have a nice day,
Matheus – The one and only programmer on RKT
Don't forget to wishlist Reverie Knights Tactics:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1399690/Reverie_Knights_Tactics/
And if you have not yet, try the free Prologue:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1638140/Reverie_Knights_Tactics_Prologue/