Starting from scratch, sort of...

You know, it's hard to make a 3d game - animating all the characters, keeping resources at a minimum, dealing with engine issues... But, I'm making it through. HITH was supposed to be a full 3d, 1st person RPG, much akin to Skyrim or Dragon Age in its scope, albiet with a little more of a low-poly flare.

I guess, these last few months, I've had a change to think about my game, the years of different resources I've purchased along the way, and I've decided that... while I still want SOME 3d, specifically for terraining and such, I'd actually prefer an isometric styled RPG, once that allows me to see the world from above, and interact with it in new and exciting ways, much akin to games like Diablo and Runecraft.

Now, while most isometric games that are staples are hack and slash style games, it's good to have the good old fashioned Dragon Quest/Final Fantasy side-view battles, something simple, allowing for a little strategy without button mashing and the damn-near algebra people calculate when dealing with some of these games. 

Luckily a few years ago, I ran across a great spriter/animator as he was just getting into making RPG game resources, called PVGames (or Pioneer Valley Games). I fell in love with his graphics, the sprites of humans and such blended perfectly with old ideas I had for having an RPG game that looked pre-rendered, and when added to game engines like Enterbrain's RPG Maker, I was esctatic.

However, I had some problems with creating my maps, terrain, showing layers above some layers and not above others, I was limited by my huge swath of graphics and a horrid Ruby engine that seemed to choke at any semi-transparent PNG file that I placed in layers on my game, and several projects rose and fell during that time.

Enter RPG Maker MV and Pioneer Valley Games new "Medieval Series" - Even better graphics? larger graphics, higher resolution? And yet, limited tilesets, unless I wanted to use 3rd party programs to create the meticulous maps I wanted, and then of course, we were still working with 2d, meaning no matter what I put on my maps, I'd still only have ONE view, one angle to see everything.

With Smileboom's Smile Game Builder, I finally realized, that all the basic primitives I needed were already in place in the engine, and that it wouldn't require a lot to create a basic layout, texturing and more for my 2.5d characters to appear lively in a 3d world, and that with the Unity Exporter, once I'd moved everything from one engine through, I could bring it to the Unity Engine, swap out a few graphics and have all the shading I wanted!

So, today, I started my vision.... Unfortunately, before I can even begin to build the game, I need to have all my characters changed over for the template of the Smile Game Builder Engine. Luckily, every sprite I need is ready for me, it just requires that I do a little cutting and pasting to get things the way I want them.