Abandoned TRPG (with source)

A couple years ago I started trying to put together a turn based tactical game with RPG elements, along the lines of Final Fantasy Tactics and such. Eventually I got overwhelmed with the scope of the project and dropped it, but recently there has been discussion which leads me to believe some others might benefit from seeing how I was going about it.

All sprites and UI are placeholders. Really the whole game can be considered a placeholder as if I were to pick up the project again I would probably do a ground up rewrite in a different engine. The most major issue I was hitting was that using the standard “room” system in GMS for both display and game logic was making everything more complicated with an isometric grid, especially as I was considering adding different height floor tiles.

Anyway, if you have any questions or critique let me know. This is Fluffy Animal Tactics:

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Trying to figure out how the isometric movement scripts worked hurt my brain, but it was super cool to see the inner workings of a system like this.

Are the NPC sprites ever seen in game?

Yeah, the awkwardness of converting the squashed grid projection to screen space and back was a chore. You could do it the easy way and use a grid aligned projection, but I wanted the diagonal look. I think the best option there would be to have the game logic use a top down view, but have a display control object update sprites in screen space every step.

The NPC sprite was going to be used for the ally when I got overstuffed status working the way I wanted. There is currently no code to change sprites based on status.

How do i open the file?

It’s a GameMaker Studio project file. You will need to import it from the file menu there. It was generated with v1.4.9999 but v2.x should be able to open it also I believe.