Beginning development on a Suikoden-inspired game engine

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Xelinis
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Beginning development on a Suikoden-inspired game engine

Post by Xelinis »

Due to Konami not seeming to want to please our community with a new Suikoden, fangames are on a rise. However, many of them are of varying degrees of quality, with the peak not being very high at all. Though there are many factors to blame (immature storytelling, lackluster design, etc), one of the biggest issues facing this community is inappropriate tools, the most famous culprit being RPG Maker. While the tool on its own works well for someone fooling around to make an indie RPG with no particular style in mind, it does not lend itself well to designing a game inspired by Suikoden. (I do not envy the developer of Exit Fate, he must have put himself through so much misery to make the game resemble Suikoden as much as it did)

As a personal challenge to myself to better my understanding of game engine development, I will attempt to design a suite of tools useful in designing a Suikoden-type game. This is by no means a simple task as Suikoden II's engine has an incredible amount of detail poured into it such as:

- Moveable objects
- Changing environments
- Terrain effects (such as the dust that SII's hero kicks up as he runs)
- Weather effects
- Custom scripted field elements (like the birds that fly away when you run through them; there are several ways to implement this, none of which are trivial)
- Story Branching
- Time, chapter, and character sensitive quests
- Dialogues based on who's in your party

I plan to keep development of this engine to be very small to keep things clean. Too many chefs in the kitchen is a bad thing, especially at the beginning of such a project. I will be the sole developer initially. Once I'm able to script an animated sprite that can run around inside a square, I will be throwing this up on Google Code for the world to see. Once I have a proper environment compiler setup, I will slowly begin adding more coders to the team. This will be primarily programmed in C and C++ utilizing SDL and I hope to keep platform specific code to a minimum.

I want you guys to keep two things in mind:

1. Between work and my social life, I make no guarantees about how much time I can spend on this project. This project plays second fiddle to both of those so updates will not come often, especially during the early planning stages.

2. I expect this project to result in a series of shell based utilities helpful in designing a Suikoden game. I do not intend to design a graphical frontend for this; if someone else is interested in taking on this mantle, be my guest.


Now here's the big question for you guys; what potential improvements would you like to see to the Suikoden II engine? I'd rather get this out of the way right now so that I won't have to refractor the entire thing later on down this road. Please keep suggestions focused on the explorability aspect of the games such as traveling towns and dungeons as well as traversing the world map. Battle systems will be programmed in as very modular components so planning for those can wait.
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Re: Beginning development on a Suikoden-inspired game engine

Post by thcrock »

Improvements? Well, I can't think of any glaring flaws in the Suikoden II engine. It really works very well. As far as explorability, the advantages afforded to a PC developer (you don't have to stream from a disc) make it possible to introduce seamless towns with no loading. I don't mean seamless transition between overworld and town, but between specific houses and the town itself.
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Hirathien
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Re: Beginning development on a Suikoden-inspired game engine

Post by Hirathien »

Bit better quality on the music, sound effects in general. Other than that, i dunno. Translation errors obviously, but those will probably not even be there, hopefully.
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27x4=108
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Re: Beginning development on a Suikoden-inspired game engine

Post by 27x4=108 »

Well, in Suikoden II you cant run in diagonal.
Sorry for my very bad english! :S
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Raww Le Klueze
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Re: Beginning development on a Suikoden-inspired game engine

Post by Raww Le Klueze »

27x4=108 wrote:Well, in Suikoden II you cant run in diagonal.
You can in the PSP version.
Doctorum Non Urina Singulus.
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27x4=108
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Re: Beginning development on a Suikoden-inspired game engine

Post by 27x4=108 »

Raww Le Klueze wrote:
27x4=108 wrote:Well, in Suikoden II you cant run in diagonal.
You can in the PSP version.
That will be good info if I had a PSP, but i havent. xD

They did more changes? I dont like when they change thingns, but the run thing is probably a good one to put in the new version.
Sorry for my very bad english! :S
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Re: Beginning development on a Suikoden-inspired game engine

Post by Vextor »

Wow, this sounds pretty exciting!
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Re: Beginning development on a Suikoden-inspired game engine

Post by KFCrispy »

are you planning on making a fully usable set of tools from battle system to skills and runes systems? well Suikoden II doesn't have skills, but it's definitely nice to have.... Formations are in Suikoden V as well
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Re: Beginning development on a Suikoden-inspired game engine

Post by thcrock »

Another idea: Suikoden II didn't have dungeon maps, did it? Having a minimap around when exploring a dungeon would be cool. Probably not the type where you can see everything at once - that might be too easy. I like the 'black shroud' effect that many games have, where once you traverse an area it is always explored on the map. Having dungeon maps would make complex exploration less tedious, and likely would enable more branching paths.

It may or may not be a good idea, but if you did implement this it would probably help to plan with it in mind, as you'd have to make the game keep track of all the places that the player has explored.
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Xelinis
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Re: Beginning development on a Suikoden-inspired game engine

Post by Xelinis »

As far as explorability, the advantages afforded to a PC developer (you don't have to stream from a disc) make it possible to introduce seamless towns with no loading. I don't mean seamless transition between overworld and town, but between specific houses and the town itself.
Caching the complete town data upon entering should not be an issue. My only concern is how to present the seamless transition so that it doesn't feel too jerky. But that's a presentation issue so it's no use worrying about that right now.
Translation errors obviously, but those will probably not even be there, hopefully.
Uhh, I think that you may be misunderstanding the intent of my project.
Well, in Suikoden II you cant run in diagonal.
You can in the PSP version.
Now here's a feature that I can integrate early on. My only concern here also goes back to presentation as making a decent looking sprite where the character is facing that direction is very difficult. The sprites they used in I & II PSP for that were hideous. I'm still willing to integrate diagonal movement but I think it's best if the sprite used while moving is that of the character running in the dominant direction he was facing before movement began. For example, if the hero was facing the up direction before he starting running diagonally to the top right, he move diagonally even though it'll look like he's just running upwards. Is everyone here content with this?
are you planning on making a fully usable set of tools from battle system to skills and runes systems? well Suikoden II doesn't have skills, but it's definitely nice to have.... Formations are in Suikoden V as well
The rune system will come standard. Battle systems will be loaded as dynamic libraries so that anyone reading my documentation that's skilled in C and SDL should be able to design their own battle system and just plug it right in with minimal fuss. With skills, while I don't see it as being too difficult to implement, I think that it can wait until version 2. Same with advanced formations.

Another idea: Suikoden II didn't have dungeon maps, did it? Having a minimap around when exploring a dungeon would be cool. Probably not the type where you can see everything at once - that might be too easy. I like the 'black shroud' effect that many games have, where once you traverse an area it is always explored on the map. Having dungeon maps would make complex exploration less tedious, and likely would enable more branching paths.

It may or may not be a good idea, but if you did implement this it would probably help to plan with it in mind, as you'd have to make the game keep track of all the places that the player has explored.
I'm already making loose notes on how to implement the environment compiler and parser modules. With the slightly memory heavy way I'm going to implement this (memory is cheap now, down with tilesets!), I think that rendering a minimap should be fairly trivial. :)


A lot of good ideas here guys, keep it coming!
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Hirathien
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Re: Beginning development on a Suikoden-inspired game engine

Post by Hirathien »

Minigames are always fun to implent, the more there is to do in a game the better.

Sounds like you got yourself a nice deal to work with. Should be interesting to see how this turns out.
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Re: Beginning development on a Suikoden-inspired game engine

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Xelinis wrote:Caching the complete town data upon entering should not be an issue. My only concern is how to present the seamless transition so that it doesn't feel too jerky. But that's a presentation issue so it's no use worrying about that right now.
I know you're not worrying about it, but my idea would be to do away with the 'black screen then house shows up' transition. When the player approaches the door, the town starts to go opaque and the roof goes transparent, revealing the inside of the house. So when you're wandering around in the house, the town is mostly opaque/white, but not completely. These would be incremental transitions based on the player's proximity to the house, so there would be no jerkiness.

The more I think about it, the more it might be complicated to present multiple floors, though. You could easily do the same thing between floors, but it would be jarring because the same area on screen is transitioning.

There's other ways to take advantage of the 'seamless town' thing instead. You could have NPCs naturally go from inside to outside and back as part of their random routine. This goes in with a more general 'enhance townspeople NPC ai' theme. Instead of three guys hanging out in the item shop the whole time, you have each one go there sometimes, and actually go back to their houses after a certain amount of time. Stuff like this goes a long way into making towns feel alive and vibrant. On the surface, it might look like a game design thing and not an engine design thing, but you'd definitely have to put some thought into the 'NPC' decision-making engine to make this possible.
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Xelinis
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Re: Beginning development on a Suikoden-inspired game engine

Post by Xelinis »

KoRnholio wrote:
The more I think about it, the more it might be complicated to present multiple floors, though. You could easily do the same thing between floors, but it would be jarring because the same area on screen is transitioning.
I can differentiate the triggers for when the character goes through a door and for when he goes up some steps. One possible way of presenting going in between floors is effectively 'pouring' one floor's alpha channel into another. As the character goes up a set of stairs, the floor he was on previously will slowly become more and more transparent while the floor he's going up to becomes more and more opache.
There's other ways to take advantage of the 'seamless town' thing instead. You could have NPCs naturally go from inside to outside and back as part of their random routine. This goes in with a more general 'enhance townspeople NPC ai' theme. Instead of three guys hanging out in the item shop the whole time, you have each one go there sometimes, and actually go back to their houses after a certain amount of time. Stuff like this goes a long way into making towns feel alive and vibrant. On the surface, it might look like a game design thing and not an engine design thing, but you'd definitely have to put some thought into the 'NPC' decision-making engine to make this possible.
Really cool concept that I would like to implement, but this is extremely nontrivial to implement. For now, this isn't even on the radar.
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Re: Beginning development on a Suikoden-inspired game engine

Post by KFCrispy »

how about having a larger, swappable party members like in Suikoden V :)
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Xelinis
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Re: Beginning development on a Suikoden-inspired game engine

Post by Xelinis »

I don't believe that would be too difficult to integrate; I'll see what I can do. However, party setups are probably going to be one of the final things I work on for v1.0 so it may take a while for me to get back to you on this one.
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