Axel is an open source library that makes flash game development as easy as possible. Axel takes advantage of Flash Player 11′s Stage3D in order to offload all the rendering to the GPU in order to gain huge performance boosts over the typical flash display list. As of Adobe Air 3.2, Stage3D is also supported when building your games for mobile devices. This means exporting your flash games to iOS and Android has never been easier!
Axel was created to be great for making games quickly, with all the basic game logic solved for you already. Sprites, physics, collision, tilemaps, and particles are just some of the things provided for you. Axel was heavily inspired by Flixel, so if you’re familiar with Flixel, you’ll be able to jump right in. Axel is well documented, with comprehensive tutorials and open source example games for you to learn from.
Check out Axel at http://axgl.org! It’s complete open source and released under the MIT license, so feel free to browse the source on Github! Axel development is extremely new and still in the testing phases, so you’ll be one of the first to test and help shape a brand new library!
I didn’t get any work done on For Fate this weekend, since I spent every working moment working on a prototype for a Stage3D hardware accelerated flixel-like game library. However, since I haven’t posted in awhile, I thought I’d post a screenshot of the temple.
Temple of Destiny
Want updates on games I’m currently working on? Follow me on twitter! I often post updates and screenshots of things I’m working on before I post here (and sometimes I don’t update here), simply because it’s a much quicker and more casual environment. It’s a nice place for me to talk about things as I’m working on them, without having to go through the hassle of a blog post.
As an example, here’s the current state of the very first map you’ll see in For Fate that I posted this weekend:
Odin's Fall
I don’t think I’ve given too much information on For Fate yet, so I wanted to give a higher level overview of the various things I’m planning for the game. I’ve been working on various systems, planning things out and so forth, so now is as good a time as any to talk about it. A lot of this is subject to change, and perhaps I’ll do more overview posts as I get more things locked down, change my mind about features, etc. So here goes!
Story
Kal and Elle have long waited for the day they can visit the Temple of the Makers and read their destinies from the Book of Fate. The book, granted to the citizens of the world by its Makers, contains a destiny page of every person to be born into the world. High Law states that upon a citizen’s 16th birthday, he or she may travel to the temple to read their fate. As Kal and Elle reach their 16th birthdays, they travel to the Temple to read what the Makers have in store for them. While Elle finds her fate to be more frightening than her worst nightmare, Kal finds his fate blank. Circumstances set them out, each with a mission: Kal to discover his unwritten destiny, and Elle to protect herself from her unwanted Fate. Their paths lead them through war, death, and a secret of the Royal Family. Only together can they conquer their fates and uncover the secrets of Project 4f7.
[Disclaimer: This is a brief introduction as the story currently stands. There is an incredible amount of flesh out before anything is written in stone.]
Battle System
The battle system will consist of a typical turn based battle system with a party of up to four characters at once. As you explore the world you’ll see enemies wandering the map, and upon touching them you’ll engage in combat. A lot of monsters will be avoidable, some will wander aimlessly, while others will attempt to engage you if you get to close. This allows you to attempt to avoid monsters if you choose. However, the battle system is intended to be a fundamental part of the game, and attempting to avoid all monsters will result in your party getting crushed from lack of power.
Casting an Icicle spell
Moves are based on a modified version of an ATB system. Each character has an active time bar that fills. Once full, your character will be eligible to attack. However, rather than waiting until your bar is full, pausing all ATB bars, choosing moves, and then continuing, you can immediately choose the attacks for your character before the ATB bar is full. This allows you to queue up all the moves for your characters ahead of time, so they are ready to unleash the attacks as soon as the bar is filled. This drastically speeds up the pace of combat, making it feel more faster paced. If a character reaches a full ATB and has not yet chosen moves, then the ATB bars will pause. This allows you take all the time in the world to plan out your attacks without penalizing you for not being able to decide on moves fast enough, but still gives you the freedom to queue ahead of time if you know what you want to do.
Each turn you will choose multiple attacks for your characters. This system is heavily influenced by the battle system found in Final Fantasy XIII. Each character begins the game with 2 command slots which you can fill with moves. Basic moves will use only 1 slot, while other moves will use multiple slots. An example of this is early on you might choose to fill your bar with 2x slash attacks (each using 1 command slot) or 1x icicle spell (which does aoe damage, but takes both slots for the turn). As you progress through the game, characters will gain more slots (the current planned maximum is 6 slots, and I expect skills to take between 1 and 3 slots each).
For each character you’ll be able to define 3 command sets. This is a preset of commands that you can use to quickly fill your command bar. This allows you to define a set of moves that you use often, and choose that set for the turn with 1 click, rather than choosing all the spells every time.
Skills will range from single target magic damage, to heavy aoe attacks, to buffs to your characters, to heals, to attacks that deal damage over X number of turns. See the character system for more information on skills.
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World
As you progress through the world you’ll visit various areas. You’ll encounter towns, forests, caves, mountains, and more along the way. While there will be a main storyline that you follow as you progress, you’ll encounter hundreds of side quests to complete. Some of them will be incredibly simple, such as exploring a mountain searching for a flower to help cure a character’s illness. Others will be much more in depth, and may span a large course of the game. While these are completely optional, you’ll find tons of story, powerful items, and special bosses as you do these quests.
An example of one of the many detailed maps you'll explore
Character/Class System
At any time in the game you can have up to 4 characters in your party, but you’ll find other characters to join you as you complete both the main storyline and side quests. You’ll be able to swap these characters in and out of your party whenever you are not in combat.
There will be 5 classes in the game (Knight, Archer, Cleric, Wizard, and Rogue). All characters will have a class, and you’ll be able to change your class at any time. When you win battles as a specific class, you’ll gain experience for that class. All 5 classes will have a separate level. For example, you might have a character that is a level 7 wizard and level 3 cleric. Each time you level up a class, you gain access to choose 1 of 2 skills for that class. One example of this is that when you hit cleric level 4 you can choose between a spell that does shadow damage over time to a target enemy or a spell that slightly heals each member of your party. This allows you to customize how your characters play, even if you want multiple characters of the same class.
When a character is currently in a specific class, they gain a bonus. A character who is currently a Wizard might gain +40% wisdom stat, -20% magic damage taken, but also -30% defense stat. You can level up characters as a single class (up to level 10), or level them up in multiple classes in order to mix and match spells. However, your character level (which defines how much stats you have) is separate. So even if you are constantly leveling up different classes you get different skills, your main combat level will continue to rise, and you’ll still become more powerful as you level. That way you aren’t forced into a single class until you max it out.
In addition to class stats, some characters will be tailored towards certain classes. Each character will have a trait which defines a permanent bonus they have. One optional character, might, for example, have a “Wise” trait that increases their wisdom by 10% and mana by 10%. While it won’t shoehole them into a single class, you might find the bonus worth it to focus on classes that rely a lot on spells (wizard and cleric, for example). The main characters will likely have more general traits that will apply to all 5 classes.
Item System
Rather than a typical JRPG item system, I expect to have a very customizable item system. Items that drop will have randomized enchantments (possible in the form of affixes). That way, if you’re fighting in an area and you get 3 Short Swords, you might find that one of them comes with +strength, one with +agility, and the other with +gold find and +haste. I’m also debating other forms to further customize items that you get, such as an enchantment system, to add additional bonuses to items, along with a socketing system, in order to place gems in items to give them further effects.
Not all items will be randomized though. Special items (in particular, very powerful items) will have set stats, though you may be able to customize them through gemming and enchanting. The game will include many dungeons for you to search for these items, some dropping from powerful bosses, others hidden through treasure chests scattered throughout the land.
I’m also playing with the idea of a crafting system. The idea I’m currently playing around with is that you don’t need to spend time leveling up your crafting skill to craft anything, but if you do level it up, you are likely to get better bonuses to the items that you make. This way if you ignore crafting through the game, but want to craft some powerful weapons towards the end, you’ll be able to. But if you invest the time into leveling up crafting, you’ll be able to get those extra little bonuses that may help you defeat the extra powerful boss.
Other
The game will include a large number of goals. There will be a giant collections of achievements to go after, minigames (currently setting my sights on also included a card game that you will discover cards for as you explore the world), side quests, dungeons, and much more.
A house with test dialog/test avatar
While I am actively working on the game, I expect that this will take quite a long time to finish. I’ll probably be taking weekends off to participate in Ludum Dare, and maybe even putting it on hold for other projects (for example, if I feel the urge to work on Diamond Hollow 3 or Trisphere 4.0). However, feel free to ask any questions you have about the game, and I’ll do my best to answer them!
Was walking home today and was thinking about how I should handle the consequences of dying in battle. I’m not a fan of losing everything since your last save when you die, for a few reasons. First, it’s extremely frustrating if you aren’t constantly taking time to save and then you lose a bunch of progress. Second, I have to make the game much easier otherwise I lose a lot of players due to that frustration. And finally, because I think saving is something you should do before you quit, not something you should be forced to do constantly even though you have no intention of quitting.
As such, I think the solution I’m going to go with is that if you saved on the map you are currently on, you’ll return to that spot when you die with all the monsters on the map respawned. If you didn’t, you will simply return to where you entered that map, also with the monsters respawned. However, any progress you’ve made you will keep, including items, experience, treasure chests, etc. This way you are penalized, but there is much less frustration involved. Also, if for some reason you are underleveled, this will help catch you up both by keeping your experience, and by the monsters respawning.
This also makes me want to have an auto save feature (such as after every battle and every map change), but I’m not entirely sure about that. I know a lot of people like the freedom to save back and forth between different save files. Perhaps I will have an option that will auto save to whatever file you loaded/last saved to, and allow you to turn it off. That should cater to both audiences, and by having auto save on by default, you won’t lose a lot of progress if flash suddenly decides to crash.
Any thoughts?
I got fed up with a lot of details about the old blog theme, so I finally got around to installing a new one that I like. This one is less cluttered, and is also much more friendly to posting short updates like this. The old theme required to have a thumbnail, and also only showed short excerpts on the front page which wasn’t very friendly to anyone actually wanting to read posts.
In addition (after some initial fuck ups) comments now work better than before. There is a simple math captcha, and you can also post anonymously without registering now. Hopefully this will help promote conversation (and also save me from the admin panel being full of spam posts pending approval).
Been working some on For Fate lately (World of Warcraft kind of pulled me in again, so I’ve been spending quite a bit of time there). I’ve made a lot of progress on using items during battle, and also in doing that, got some basic framework done to adding particle effects to skill animations (see below for an example of using a potion to heal).
I’m honestly looking forward to when all the basics of the battle system are complete so that I can get back to rewriting the world generation so I can create new battle maps. I’m tired of the fact that all my screenshots look example the same. 
Next on my list is working on the victory screen for winning a battle. Then I’ll probably get around to framing the battle system, such that I can start a battle from the world map and gain experience and exit back to it, rather than simply hardcoding everything.
I’m not dead! (I know you were worried…)
I knew I said I’d try to post more, but somehow that turned into not posting at all. If I believed in following new year’s resolutions I’d make one to post more…
Anyway, my work has been scattered lately. The end of last year saw the release of a lot of high profile games, so that took quite a big chunk of my time. I still haven’t even taken Skyward Sword out of the shrinkwrap though, as much as I’d like to. Also, Ludum Dare 22 took place at the end of December which I participated in. You can view my entry (Arzea) by clicking here (screenshots at the bottom of this post). After it was over, I spent a bit of time improving it and making it longer and I expect to release it soon.
Before all that I had continued to make progress on the For Fate battle system. Hopefully when I get some of the later details ironed out I’ll make a post detailing the battle system in its entirety. Most of the basics of it are done. However, I’m starting to get into areas of the battle system that require dependent systems to be in place. Currently I want to get the item-usage in battle working, but for that I need the entire backend for items and inventory to be in place, which is what I have transitioned to working on.
Anyway, I’ll try harder to post more than once every four months! Hopefully I’ll start having more to show at some point soon, but unfortunately backend systems don’t lend themselves well to screenshots.
Anyway, here are some screenshots of my Ludum Dare 22 entry. I managed to place 11th overall, and 5th in two separate categories:
I’m going to try to be more proactive about posting about my projects, rather than going weeks without saying a word. Even if in the end the posts end up being lame like this one. 
I’ve still been working on some of the systems behind the battle system in For Fate. It’s coming along pretty well, and hopefully I can get all the basics in either this weekend or next.
However I started doodling trying to come up with a symbol for a bloodline in the game, and it kind of got out of hand:
Swastikas EVERYWHERE
I had specific reasons behind the direction of the symbol, though sharing that would spoil things, so I’ll keep quiet on those. However, I think I finally came up with one that I like. Here’s a quick mockup of the one that I chose:
Valion Bloodline
And yes, I am keeping a notebook containing various things on the game, from story ideas, character details, to planning out code. I might at some point just move back to using Google Docs, so I can work on it no matter where I am as long as I have a computer, but I really like that I can doodle and draw diagrams really easily in a notebook.
While it is still in its earliest stages (having only been working on it sparingly in the last couple weeks), I thought I’d post some initial information on my next big project, For Fate.
In short, the game is going to be a full length JRPG, very similar to what you’d find on the SNES (early Final Fantasies for example). The game will be using REFMAP tiles as a base, heavily modified as I see fit. Here’s an overview of some of the features I’m currently planning. Please note though, that these are all very early and still in the idea phase, so many of them will change.
* A large continuous world filled with various environments. There will be no overworld, but there will be different main points (towns, mostly) that will let you teleport between the ones you’ve found, to allow you to get around faster.
* A deep story, spanning many characters.
* Tons of side quests.
* A turn based battle system very similar in style to Final Fantasy XIII. You’ll control all 4 characters in battle, and each will have a command bar allowing multiple commands per turn. It will be active time based.
* 5 different character classes. You’ll be able to advance the characters under any class (and branching into multiple classes). You’ll find various recruitable characters throughout the game, in addition to the main characters.
A very early shot of what the world looks like so far:
Placeholder text, of course.
I have many other features I’m still working on, and I’ll talk about them in the future (and also go more in depth on these features as they become more fleshed out). So far I’ve spent a lot of time working on building the overworld from bitmap files, but I’m planning on instead building using bitmaps, converting to tile layers, and editing them using a tile editor. This will give me the speed of generating large complex maps quickly, but also give me the fine grained control that a tile editor gives me. This weekend I’ve started on the battle system, and I’m making great progress on the attack sequence system and the ability animation system.
Hopefully I’ll have more to show soon!
My name is Lee Miller, and I'm a Seattleite who works as a Software Engineer at Amazon by day, and an Indie Game Developer by night.
