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"West"


"West" is my first attempt at an RPG for the Xbox 360. "West" was just released to the Xbox Live Indie Games marketplace on (Or very close to) November 3rd, 2010.

From the xbox website itself!

Code wise, "West" took me about 3-4 months of work, while at school, and also involved countless updates right up until November. To summarize a lot of things:

"West" works basically by reading a bunch of maps stored as XML documents. We load textures for the sprites and events on the map, and then the player controls and interacts with "Events" on that map. "Events" are written as XML at the bottom of each xmldocument within something like <eventstart>*Stuff*</eventstart>.

The way events work, is that they all follow an interface, IEvent. When we make events all follow this pattern, we can actually string any number of events, of any type, at a particular series of coordinates on the map at something called a "Trigger". And we can activate these "Triggers" via any defined manner, such as "Button", "Step", and even "Automatic". So, in this sense, this engine actually works (to the user) in a very similar fashion to RPG maker.

Bacon?
(RPG Maker 2003).

In "RPG Maker", we design maps (Which I'd assume are stored in something like an XML document, one per map). We can also define events with different trigger types, that follow a list of events, including ones that I've adapted. I figure I should list them all below.

1) Conversation (300+ stored in an XML document)
2) Conditional Branch
3) Switch (Effects what the conditionals are based on)
4) Move trigger (North, south, east, or west. NPC's also animate if they have the texture references, while they move).
5) Teleport (Moves hero to new map)
6) Trigger battle (Battles, monsters stored in XML)
7) Rumble controller
8) Fade in, fade out
9) Music "Cue" change
10) Play sound event
11) Have hero join the party
12) Pause
13) Heal heroes by X amount
14) Give heroes X amount of money
15) Box in/ box out. (Used in tense situations to add drama)
16) Hide trigger
17) Return to main menu
18) Show Vendor screen (With defined items).
(There may be 1-2 minor ones I'm forgetting).

Since basically everything in the game is defined in XML, the entire game can essentially be deleted and remade into a new game just by editing XML files. This includes redefining items, monsters, battles, and really anything else in the game.

Using the IEvent interface, it also makes it very easy to add new event types too. So if I develop, say, a weather event, I can write in the code to show weather effects, and then the triggering of this event should work, given that the code to draw rain or snow is written properly.

Begin!
Anyway, "West" is better explained further at www.bertius-games.com. That's the website I've used to display the information of the game to the public, and just leave this personal website to describe the actual functioning of the game in code.

Took a long time, but I've finally got my first Xbox game published, and it's an RPG! Didn't think I was going to be where I am now 10 months ago.