RPGs and Tactics 2018. Part I: Already released.

I decided to post my yearly overview of released and upcoming RPGs and tactics in English this time. Some explanations before I proceed further.

This list will only included games released, or announced for 2018, and only those games that I consider to be of interest to me. This means it mostly consist of turn-based and/or isometric RPGs and tactics, though sometimes I make exceptions for high-profile games or titles I consider to be interesting because of something else. However, there will be almost no mentions of non-tactical JRPGs, as I’m completely uninterested in the genre and can’t provide any comments on it, as well as most action-RPGs, including AAA titles. Oh, yeah, and the list is text-only, but with links to game’s site, for the sake of brevity.

Projects that I consider to be the most interesting are marked with ☆ sign.

With that in mind, let’s recount what titles have already been released in 2018 at this point.
Continue reading →

Open Horizon 7.5th demo

The main feature of this demo is location convertor, currently works for AC5, ACZ and AC6. Others will be supported (I hope) in the future releases. This is not the final version of this demo, still working on features, please help me with testing.

What’s new:

  • Location convertor — height map, geometry and textures
  • Campaign mode

I’m still working on:

  • Difficulty settings
  • Example campaign
  • Ground units

Not included in this release:

  • Trees, clouds, location render settings (sun position, specular amount, etc)
  • Optimizations. Current version produces unoptimized data in terms of speed and size: inefficient formats, lacks texture compression, instancing, etc.
  • Location objects collision data
  • Optional objects

Download early version: Demo 7.5 alpha2

Update 3 Jan: fixed location loading, menu, low start height in free-flight mode

How to use location convertor: drop the tool near DATA.TBL and DATA.PAC (AC5, AC Zero) or DATA.TBL, DATA00.PAC and DATA01.PAC (AC6), run the tool, wait until it finish, copy locations/ to Open Horizon folder. This version of the tool cannot operate on .ISO files directly, so you have to extract it first. Note that XBox360 disc’s content does not appears in windows explorer and requires additional extract tool.

AC6 location progress

Looks bad without lighting, fog and color correction, but at least everything is in place and not broken.Update: And when I thought everything is going fine now, I saw this:The height of this area is exactly 9999 meters, so it’s not a bug, just some weird special case I need to take into account.

A site to store mods

You can share your custom decals on  Open Horizon Booru

    1. Take screenshot of your decal ingame
    2. Upload your decal zip to https://catbox.moe/ for example: https://files.catbox.moe/st31e2.zip
    3. Add post to the booru with a link to the uploaded file in the Source field

Decal creating guide: How-to-create-custom-decals

If you have problems with posting or just feel lazy to create an account, you can send your mods me and I’ll post it

Campaign mode


Menu in Open Horizon is now lua-scripted, with the ability to load other scripts from campaign/ folder. And that means that all the power of lua can be used to create custom campaigns with their own logic. Example campaign will be included in the upcoming demo.

I wish THE Ace Love iDOL: Live Combat M@STER! was a real thing.

I’m going to release new version of Open Horizon this year.

RPG Combat Prototype

A few of my colleagues and me decided to try our hand at creating an RPG. Now, this is a long process, and we’re presently at the very beginning, and none of us are experienced game designers. So the only way to go is to prototype, iterate and playtest.

Today, I invite you to test a combat system for this RPG. It looks a lot like JRPG/Dungeo Crawler combat, but I tried to make it a bit different from the usual fare in these genres, by putting emphasis on difficulty of each combat, instead of dungeon (a sequence of combats) as a whole. So, health and mana of all characters are fully restored after each battle, like in many modern western games.

The test is quite simple: you have to fight 5 battles of increasing difficulty until you defeat a boss. This should take less then an hour, I believe (and so there are no save/loads). I’ve been working on this for some weeks in the evenings, so don’t expect much of it, especially visually, but I think it should be playable enough for more-or-less experienced players now. The test is programmed in C++, but is compiled for web via Emscripten.

I welcome all feedback you can give: what did you like, what frustrated you, what was funny etc. Please do not hesitate to write a comment to this post, or drop me a line by e-mail.

Play RPG Combat Test v0.1

Return of Dr. Destructo for Android released!

More than year has passed since the release of Return of Dr. Destructo, my remake of ZX Spectrum arcade Island of Dr. Destructo. Soon, the work began on the mobile version of the game, but I only finished it now. Go ahead, and give it a try if you own an Android phone or tablet!

Download Return of Dr. Destructo Android for Google Play

What’s new since the desktop release (besides the necessary adaptations to make the game playable on mobiles):

1) Planes now have super-weapons, including powerful bomb, bullet spray, mines and the ability to freeze enemies.

2) 5 new planes! Each with its own look, speed, turn rate and super-weapon

3) Tutorial to make things smoother for new players. Hopefully, this will do away with the confusion some players felt about the goal of the game.

I also have some further plans for this game, but I’m not ready to announce them yet, as I want to see if there is any interest in it first. Google Play no longer gives you any organic traffic, as the new games do not appear anywhere in the store, so I’ll have to fight tooth and nail for every player.