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Anthology

Personal Unity Project
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Information
What is it?

Anthology is a mobile, turn-based RPG that utilizes a variety of quick-time events in combat to turn the tide of battle in the players favor.

Design Goals

  • Improve my own design and programming skills by creating something wholly new, from the ground up.

  • Create a mobile RPG experience with mechanics that drive and reward engagement, without feeling punishing for those who want to be more hands-off

  • Create a platform where separate self-contained and interconnecting stories in a shared world can be developed and sold piecemeal as DLC.

Process

    Having long since found myself frustrated with few RPGs making use of a timed hit system like Super Mario RPG did during my childhood, a spiritual successor of sorts was the obvious choice for me. As I thought about how I could use a timed hit system in a more unique way than SMRPG, I realized the touch screen on mobile devices would open up far more possibilities. From there everything kind of fell together in my mind. An RPG of disparate stories sold individually would allow for a more traditional monetary model than is normally seen in the mobile market; something I'm not convinced is impossible. These stories being separate also allows for a lot of narrative flexibility and variety. I'd also long wanted to learn C# and since Unity is a great mobile engine, so that was an easy choice as well.

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    While I started off following a lot of tutorials, I've long since progressed to doing things largely self-guided. The art may all be placeholders found online, but all of the systems and content have been designed and programmed by me. The below is a list of some of the features that exist or are currently planned.

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​Implemented

  • Touch-screen joystick movement

  • 5 characters

  • 7 enemies

  • NPCs

  • Wandering NPCs

  • Turn based combat

  • 6 types of standard quick time events​​

  • 4 status effects

  • Limit Break with a special rune-trace quick-time event

  • Quests

  • Inventory

  • Spawning

  • Loot

  • Vendor

  • Party menu

  • Party switching

  • A variety of item and spell types

  • Dialogue

  • An arena system with back to back fights with high score tracking

​Planned

  • Saving

  • Additional status effects

  • Additional quest types

  • Pathing NPCs

  • Cutscenes / scripted events

  • A system for plugging in and selecting various DLC stories

  • A system for unlocking and keeping characters from one story to use in another

Playthrough
Lessons Learned

What Worked

    So far I'm quite happy with how the various touch screen combat interactions work, although I still would like more variety. In the end it will really come down to numbers adjustment, but they do feel good to hit and make combat more engaging. Secondly I'm overall pretty happy with how I've built things to be plug and play on the editor end. I can easily create a variety of enemies, heroes, spells and items all in the editor. This has really sped up iteration time when it comes to content design.

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What Didn't

    When I started this project, my programming experience was rather lacking. Nearly every system has gone through a refactor or redesign as my initial implementation had flaws or simply wasn't future proof enough. The next biggest challenge has probably been in UI design. A mobile screen is quite a small space and that space is not only for visual information, but is also for touch screen input. Because of this a lot of my early UI was immediately deemed unworkable and UI as a whole is still undergoing revision with an eye on streamlining information and readability.

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What I learned

    A whole lot of C# for starters. I really can't overstate how much I've learned about programming from this project. Beyond that, I've learned a lot about UI, level and combat design as well as sprite animation and general Unity tools.

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