Hi everyone! I’ve been putting off sharing anything about the game until it was Visually Presentable, but finally accepted this is still years away. So let’s document the progress as it happens. Alright, let me channel my best nintendo direct impression:
My Cool Playdate Mech RPG (working title) is a game of Strategy, Romance, and Giant Robots for the Panic Playdate video game console. Set in a sci-fi world of space feudalism, where great Noble Houses wage civil war over scraps of imperial periphery, create your own Mech Pilot and assemble a ragtag team of Nobles, Mercenaries, Pirates, and more! Customize your fleet of Mechs and take it into tactical, turn-based battles, both planet-side and in outer space. Strengthen bonds between your squadmates by having them fight side-by-side on the battlefield, and in the off-time get to know them through visual-novel style story scenes. Forge frienships, rivalries, and maybe something more? Mount your Mechs and shape the fate of the galaxy in My Cool Playdate Mech RPG (working title), coming to Panic Playdate at uhhhhh some point. Like 2029 or something
Screenshots (literally all of the visuals are currently placeholder)
Ok enough of that bit. MCPMRPG(wt) is an SRPG, chiefly inspired by Fire Emblem and Lancer. It has character creation, grid-based tactical combat, build-crafting through equipment, and cross-unit relationships (both player-companion and companion-companion). It will have dialogue options for role-playing purposes, but most likely no significant branching in the story.
I’ve started on this project in May of 2024. Been wanting to make something for the Playdate since basically it’s announcement, and wanted to make something mech-related, and playing Fire Emblem Fates at the time I thought “Here is a simple and exciting idea – Fire Emblem + Mechs! It’s just a series of stand-alone maps with straight-forward turn-based mechanics, how long could it possibly take? Like 2-3 years tops?”. Turns out, unfortunately, a game even of this modest complexity still takes one person working part-time like 5-6 years (and that’s still an optimistic number at this point).
By the end of 2024 I’ve had both combat and dialogue systems pretty much working. And since then I’ve been stuck making everything else around it! Menus, turns out, take a really long time.
List of what’s currenty in the game:
- Main menu
- With the ‘Press Any Button’ message! Surprisingly satisfying to implement one yourself, makes me think about video game conventions, how arbitrary they actually are, and yet how we continue re-create and perpetuate them. Every ‘Press Any Button’ screen in every game before did not magically appear on its own. A human looked at other games, thought “we need one too”, and diligantly re-crafted it from scratch in the image of those other games. I kinda love that
- Save/load menu
- With support for multiple characters, manual saves, and separate categories of auto-saves (before starting mission, before deploying to combat, start of each turn)
- Basic character creation
- Currently you can enter your name, mech name, and choose both third- and first-person pronouns. A handy preview demonstrates an example sentence to show how those will look in-game. Editing your character’s visuals will happen at some point.
- Mission selection screen
- Currently just a list of names of available missions. At some point I plan to make it more visually interesting
- Mech equipment management menu
- Unit can equip a number of weapons, Systems (passive-ish bonuses, aka perks aka feats etc.), and a Frame (determines stats + can come with pre-installed Systems)
- Relationship menu
- Check relationship levels and access unlocked scenes
- Combat
- So many things implemented here, attacking, aiding, pathfinding, status effects, enemy ai, VFXs, etc.
- Cutscenes
- I’ve ported my dialogue system from Godot to Playdate, and so can use my Dialogue Editor to write branching dialogues. Additionally I’ve implemented a veeery simple scripting language to direct simple cutscenes (move units around, move camera around, etc) and integrated it into the dialogue system.
List of things curiously still missing :
- All of the art
- All of the sound
- All of the writing
Whoops! Turns out I made the rookie mistake of getitng stuck in pre-production hell and am yet to start actually making the actual game. All the visuals including UI are currently placeholder. Current mech sprites are by blobertson. I did technically have some writing done – world-building and a rough outline, but those hardly count.
Thank you for reading! I have several posts planned about technical and design aspects that I found neat, and will try to log my future progress as it happens.