Trying to get a feel of the starting area, and most importantly how much the player can see. The original Shining force displayed everything in a 12x12 grid, but was also rendered 4:3.

Having a flashy combat sequence is one of the best parts of Shining Force. Inspired by Darkest Dungeon, I wanted to try to pull the camera in and make combat more personal. This video was a test of the Unreal sequencer to see what it might look like.

The first pass at our battle system. The basic flow is in, allowing the player to position, attack and end turns - after which the enemy moves and attacks. Although Shining Force never had a combat forecast, I always enjoyed that feature in newer SRPGs.

We also have some camera work to show off. It was a bit tricky trying to figure out how to get Unreal to both attach a camera to a character but also prevent the camera from showing things outside the play space. Using a camera mod does the trick though.

First 5 minutes of gameplay! Everything is pretty much prototype, but much of the work here is just getting all the systems connected together to a sequence that actually starts to resemble a game.

An early test on swapping sprites to simulate the movement of a wave. Unreal is pretty bare-bones when it comes to swapping out tiles, so we had to get pretty creative to even achieve this result. Unsure if we will use it, but was a fun test!

Brand new icon, courtesy of @AnthropeArts! Let's go!

I loved the way Shining Force opens, with someone opening a book and acting a bit as a narrator that leads into your epic journey to become a hero. It goes without saying that this game needed to start in a similar fashion.

The final video shows the end result of a few months of work, chaining together a series of scripted events that ultimately results in a battle sequence being started.

The past few months has been a flurry of building out the pipeline for creating scripted events. Mundane things suddenly become complicated when trying to generalize solutions - such as displaying a portrait during conversations!