University project
C# & XNA Custom Game Engine
C#, XNA & WinForms Custom Game Editor
Velisia comprises two parts – a custom built game engine using C# & XNA and custom game editor using C#, Winforms & XNA. Using the tools that I programmed, our team produced a solid tactical rpg, made up of several levels replete with story cutscenes, tactical battles, dialogue and level progression systems.
Game engine & gameplay Sample
Game Editor/Tools Sample
Story scenes
A few scenes from various climactic parts of the game, these helped underline and emphasise the drama and tension of the story.
Gameplay
A couple of shots of various parts of the game. As a tactical RPG, Velisia employed grid based movement and both single-target and AOE attacks. When battle commences the scene cuts to a Fire Emblem inspired side-on view of the combatants as the chosen actions are executed. Different types of cutscene/dialogue are used during the game to help keep things fresh.
Tools
The tools of Velisia comprise several sub-editors including, but not limited to: a map editor, events editor, battle animation editor and spritesheet animation editor.
The map editor is the main component of the toolset and allows placement/movement/rotation and scaling of assets and actors. Pathnodes can be painted on top of the environment (Velisia uses A* pathfinding under the hood) and can be altered dynamically during gameplay.
The event editor was inspired by RPG Maker, and essentially allows the user to make a stack of actions of various types (walk to location, speak to, destroy actor, basically all actions required by the game) and served as our scripting system for game content.
The animation editors allowed our team to define how actors should behave when executing attacks in the side-on view, allowing spline-based movement as well as spawning particle effects and addition sprites required for each attack.
Collectively these editors empowered the team to build the game for the project, the tools exported XML files which could be interpreted by our custom game engine and ultimately provided the gameplay to players.
