Bright Red Skies - Monthly Devlog (May 2018)

Bright Red Skies is a story driven apocalyptic tactical turn-based RPG where one decision can alter the entire story. It takes place after a world war occurs in a fictional world and nations become divided. The main draw of the game is the going to be the varied storylines that happen based on the player's action. The idea is that playthroughs are relatively short for an RPG (4-5 hours) but there will be many significant divergent story paths where the player is able to replay events that leads them into seeing the conflict occur at different places throughout the entire continent.

In terms of the gameplay, it will play out as a tactical turn-based RPG on a hex grid. Each entity on the hex grid represents a "squad" which comprises of a "leader" unit and up to three "member" units. The leader determines a majority of the stats of the squad while a member adds minor boosts in the squad's stats. More importantly, a squad gets one ability (other than move, basic attack, use items, and defend) and this is determined by the leader. A squad also gets a passive ability for each member in the squad. For example, if there were a unit that was a sniper, having them as a leader might give you a snipe ability to make a long ranged attack, but having them as a member might give you a passive +1 range for the squad.

Some other things that have been prototyped are the dialogue system, player menu, and item shop:

To prevent the player from doing any backtracking (to stop any story paradoxes that might occur), when the player moves to the map screen, they move along a predetermined track where random and scripted event can happen:

When the player is within a town/city, the game plays like a point and click game where you have to click direction arrows to move around:

First attempt at a cutscene:

So, I believe that a lot of the core features have been prototyped now it's just a matter of making sure that the code is bug free and working as intended. Currently working on serializing all the data to JSON so that I can modify scene data fairly easily but realizing that there are some constraints such as Dicitionaries not having complex object keys.

The goal is to get a small working demo by the end of 2018 so if you want the latest updates be sure to follow me on Twitter where I post the newest stuff!

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