Hello.

I've always dreamt of creating my own JRPG ever since growing up with SNES and playing what some people call "the golden age of RPGs".

I want to create a small proof of concept that can potentially scale up to a full game where I can have fun just creating a battle engine. I'm basically a noob when it comes to Godot with experience in taking the Dodge the Creeps tutorial and creating an extended game from with that character selection (with my friends as sprites, swapping out the creeps for the COVID virus and renaming it to Dodge COVID - for experimentation), so I know a little bit.

I'm looking for a general direction in concept before I start plugging away at my POC and here's what I'm hoping to accomplish:

I'm thinking of having a main scene which will handle the characters traversing towns and dungeons. This scene will handle collisions with 2d art assets, towns, dungeons, NPCs, enemies, etc. From there, I'm thinking about creating a battle scene that will handle all the battles. Ideally, I'd like to have in place battle such as Chrono Trigger or Cosmic Star Heroine. All the coding that could be used in a battle will be in the battle scene and I'm hoping to access all the functionality of this scene from the main scene mentioned above. I supposed I'd have to find a way to pass on data from main to the battle scene (for things like character positioning , movement restrictions during battle and enemies encountered.

Does this sound like a good approach to achieving this or is there another concept that would work better. I wanted to create a battle scene because then I could just reference anywhere. My initial POC, I wanted to create a few rooms (think debug rooms) that the player can traverse between and encounter, battles, treasure and dialogue. If successful, then I can create the game around this "engine".

Any insights, thoughts on how to acheive this or better ideas are most welcome! Thanks!

You could take a look at the demo rpg in the godot asset library, though it is still wip.

I'm also doing a rpg concept, though its progress is slow. What I'm doing is creating parts of jrpg in separated projects. This way, you have, say, a different idea for the combat system, you can still use the overworld project while adding your own battle system.

9 days later

Thanks for this! I've taken some concepts from it and they have helped. I've started the basic steps for my Proof of Concept and so far, so good. Thanks again for this suggestion.

I released a JRPG made in Godot on Steam earlier this year and the way I did it was to have a new scene for each town/route and then one scene where all the battles take place. Then I have a script for the player character and a script for the npc that can be attached in all scenes.

My game transitions to a new scene for battle ala Final Fantasy, but if you want to have a sort of in scene battle system like Chrono Trigger you could retain the same scene but just execute a different script, or change a global variable to change the way that scripts run. I think this would make sense as you're not really changing the scene itself but the way the characters and enemies interact with the scene.

If you have any questions I'll do my best to answer them!

What's the title of your game? I'd be interested in checking it out.

I'm thinking of having the main scene have a bunch of modes. Each mode will be a scene and I'll have them all as children to main.

Essentially, I'd like to build a mini engine so that I can focus more on story writing instead of coding everything. Been trying to design a framework in my head over the last few days.