It’s been about 3 weeks since my first blog and I’m happy to report that there has been a ton of progress made on the project. The game has taken a slightly different direction that I initially planned, and I think the gameplay will be much more enjoyable this way.

As I began this project I found and downloaded many different text-based RPGs – Eldrum, BurniedBornes, and a few others that have seen success. I decided to ditch the grid-based combat in favor of a 1v1 turned based system (think Pokemon) that BuriedBornes pulls off very well. Additionally, I really like how BuriedBornes has a simple combat system – 1-5 abilities the player can use in battle with ability cooldowns to prevent spamming overpowered moves. I’ve pulled a lot of inspiration from the game design of BuriedBornes as you can tell.

However, BuriedBornes is a roguelike rpg where you crawl through the dungeons to see how deep you can get before you die. Death is permanent and nothing you acquire in the dungeon item-wise stays with you after death. I’d like my game (that I’ve still yet to name) to be more like a runescape MMO where you progress your skills, acquire items, grow more powerful, and fight in PvP arenas.

As a unique element, players will obtain abilities from the items they find and equip. You can choose 5 abilities from the full list that your equipment provides, and change them at any time outside of combat. Poisoned daggers will give poison abilities, fire tomes will allow you to cast fire spells, blessed tunics allow the player to use healing abilities. I think it’s a fun system and something that I haven’t seen before.

Outside of combat, the player will be able to explore regions – inside the regions will be one or more towns where they can shop for items, change abilities, and obtain jobs or quests (still figuring that out). Players can explore the region wilderness outside of the town to discover dungeons for good loot, or resource areas for non-combat skills.

I’ve spent a lot of time on UI work, just to understand what is possible on screen and get an MVP for the visual layout. I’m using a lot of AI generated artwork for mob images and ability icons. Over the next week or two I’ll be going the other direction and working on the underlying combat systems to get a working gameplay loop.

I think that sums up the progress so far. This has been a huge learning curve as I’m building this fully in SwiftUI and have never touched iOS development before. The more I learn the faster I can build, so I’m looking forward to the progress we’ll see on the next dev blog. Finally, here’s a screenshot of the current combat system: