Free/Libre Action Roleplaying Engine
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Time for a brain dump. Get ready for some rambling!
Dig through the archives and you’ll see we had grand plans for this stage in the project. A year and a half ago we thought we’d be releasing Flare-Game around now. But here we are, facing the last few Beta Engine releases and no final game yet.
So what happened between now and then?
That early estimate wasn’t crazy. On July 7th, 2011 I released Flare v0.14. It contained the Title screen, Load Game screen, New Game screens. It wrapped up the core Flare game into a tidy package that felt close to feature-complete. Many things were hardcoded, there were no mods or translation support, but it was on its way to becoming a game.
It was that mystical “First 90%” turning point for the project. I figured we’d be freezing features shortly after (around Q4 2011) and churning out art to whip out a very simple game (Q4 2012). A year to make a short game (5 hours content) didn’t seem crazy when we already had about 2 hours of game.
All that juicy engine stuff — modding, configuration, etc — could come later when we made game #2. So I estimated we’d soon be shifting towards making game art and wrapping up a very simple Flare 1.
Around that time several great programmers joined the volunteer effort to help Flare (and kept joining through 2012). Meanwhile I’m still the primary volunteer artist, and art isn’t easy for me (I’m a coder by trade).
When you have a team of 3-4 eager coders but only half an artist, what do you do? Keep coding of course. v0.15 was all about Translations and Modding support. Not strictly necessary if the goal is to just make one game, but good for the future of the engine. Actually the mods and translation stuff had turned out awesome; if you’ve ever tinkered with the files you see what potential the engine has. Just take a look at Polymorphable to see how far the engine can go.
Here’s not-really-a-secret: I like writing low level game code. I get genuine pleasure from writing map display code or collision functions. Starting Games is damn near a lifelong hobby of mine. Usually it’s not with the intention of actually making a game. Writing little game loops is a simple way of clearing my head. Tiny tech demos are perhaps the most fun part of “game dev” for programmers.
I still constantly create tiny game-like experiments. I can point to several I’ve done during Flare’s development. Here’s a Vertical Shooter experiment (playing with movement inertia, bullets, and star fields). Here’s a Karma Slot Machine because I wanted to learn HTML5/canvas/js and I’ve always wondered how to match internal randomness to the reel displays. And here’s an Office Chair that you can pilot with arrowkeys for no good reason.
This is the stuff that’s fun to me. Some of you like playing games, I like writing game-like code. It’s a very happy side effect that Flare is shaping up to be a full game. It gives me good justification for spending all this time on engine tinkering. So when the focus of the Flare project shifted from “make a game now” to “make the engine flex and grow” I wasn’t sad.
I actually have completely Finished and “released” two games before. Both were when I was a teenager and had those magical summers with no school and no work. I uploaded them to local BBSes and shared them with friends, but each one was maybe played by a dozen people total. They were primitive but full games. The first was called “Knight’s Quest” (very original); it had a simplified first-person “Eye of the Beholder” style display and turn-based combat. The second game “Hack” (also super original) was an overhead game with playstyle kinda like Gauntlet. Both were written in QBasic around 1996-97. Both are lost to time, I think.
Then college. And working life. Throughout that time I made dozens of tiny demos or experiments but never full games. If my goal was “make games!” I’d be horribly disappointed in myself. But that wasn’t my goal for years. I’m warming up to the fact that Flare will allow me to possibly actually make games.
So why now? What’s the motivation to take Flare all the way to releasing a real game? Damn if I know right now. Let me ponder and get back to that.
Can’t stop the engine momentum now. I’ll be scope-checking it soon, but I think it’s under control. A lot of Beta cleanup has made its way into Alpha work, but that’s okay — it’s all safely happened in parallel to other engine work. When we finally get to Engine Beta we’ll have a specific set of core tasks: input file validation, error/warning message standardization, any remaining config file standardization, and documentation. We’ll probably be declaring Engine Beta very early in 2013.
I’ve been working on more art. For the rest of 2012 I’ll continue to enrich the current art assets. Around the time we reach Engine Beta the core art assets for Flare should be near ready. I’ve said such things before and been off target, so take it with a grain of salt.
Getting a new artist on board could help. It’s hard to find a volunteer that can match Flare’s middling quality. Most artists can’t afford to work for free, and I completely respect that. Maybe with more donations we could commission some pieces to help the game move forward. Until then there’s just me doing most of the models and tiles. Here’s a short list of what I want to get done to finish up the “fantasycore” set of art.
That’s a good chunk of art, but not insurmountable. I can handle most of it. What I can’t do well is the painterly equipment icons (see the current style done by Blarumyrran, similar to the Wesnoth icons). I’ll have a learning curve with new power art (how to make better fire? How to make good “swooshes”?) but I can probably pull it off.
I forgot what I was talking about. I just needed to write down all these thoughts so they’d stop banging around my head.
Oh yeah, timeline estimates vs. where we are now. We’re having fun now! And staying incredibly busy. Instead of having a primitive game by now, we have a nice engine. And we’ll have a nicer game for it. As long as we’re making some progress and not drifting from our original goals (end up with a nice engine; make some games along the way) I think we’re in good shape.
With multiple equipment slots implemented it’s hard not to make new armor styles. I added two essentials: full set for Mage and Chain
Each of these, just like the old armors, are now broken into slots: head, chest, hands, legs, feet. Mixing and matching is satisfying; I tried to make the general styles compatible so that any equipment combination looks interesting.
It now takes me about 8 hours to create a new set of armor, start to finish for two genders. That’s in this very low fi style where textures aren’t really needed and the rig is already fully animated.
[–Update–]
HadiDev on Reddit asked about how I create the sprite layers and handle z-order. I posted a brief overview of my workflow. One day I’ll have a tutorial on how to make new armor for Flare. I’m still figuring out the process myself!
Here’s a screenshot of the new Inventory screen. (compare to the old layout)
I separated the old armors into these individual slots. Here’s a mockup of the female character equipping slot pieces individually:
Several cumulative code changes are going to allow us to add new equipment slots to Flare.
The current visible equipment slots:
The new visible slots will be:
Also we can add a few non-visible slots where items can be equipped but they aren’t displayed on the hero sprite. Probably we’ll do:
Maybe we’ll do more, but that brings us to an even 10 slots.
If you upgraded to v0.17 from v0.16 and had trouble continuing your save games, this minor release should help.
If you installed v0.17 completely new, you can probably skip this update.
After you update, you may have to enable the alpha_demo mod. I’ve done this by default in the new Windows build. To do this, go to Configuration, Mods tab, and enable “alpha_demo”.
If you’ve been building previous versions of Flare for some platform or operating system:
You can create your entire package from the flare-game github repo. The flare-engine repo is mainly for people who want to fork and build a completely new game.
We’re working on an update that will fix the issues with using old save games and settings in the new version.
If you want to play now, here are two things to try:
If these steps don’t work for you, there may be something else we need to patch! Please email me your save game and I’ll use it as a test case. clintbellanger at Google’s popular email service.
Flare is charging through the remaining Alpha engine work, taking us to this latest and greatest v0.17 release.
Huge thanks to the core programming crew for v0.17 – Igor Paliychuk, Justin Jacobs, Stefan Beller. These guys are all the momentum behind the project right now.
Thanks to Thane Brimhall and Matt Krohn, who have helped Flare’s engine tremendously with their total-conversion Polymorphable which was made for the Liberated Pixel Cup
Special thanks to all the bugfixers, bugfinders, translators, and players for making this possible.
Like where Flare is going? Help us create Flare or donate to commission more open art!
Lately we’ve been overhauling the classic Dungeon Tileset (which I started making 3 years ago!). I think the difference shows. Here’s a v0.15 screenshot vs. a v0.17 screenshot of the same location.
Thanks to some solid help (from feillyne and protektor), Flare is now available through Desura! (Release announcement) If you’re just discovering Flare through Desura, welcome!
I started F.L.A.R.E (Free/Libre Action Roleplaying Engine) 3 years ago to create a great Action RPG engine that’s completely open source. I’ve long been a fan of games like Diablo and wondered why there wasn’t a free game like that with a great modding community around it. I’m a software developer by trade and I had just learned enough 3D art to get myself in trouble, so I started on this ridiculous quest to make a completely free action RPG.
Instead of trying to make an engine that does it all, I decided early on to just try making games. If I reused as much code as possible for each game I’d end up with a highly moddable engine that does one thing well: Action RPGs. But I set some limits early on so that I could actually manage to finish anything: no multiplayer, no realtime 3D. So far that decision has paid off — three years in and the engine is very close to feature-complete Beta.
Along the way I had a team of amazing volunteers and freelance artist join the team. It’s no longer a solo effort by far; this crew has helped push Flare well beyond what it would be at this stage. The engine has been translated into over a dozen languages. It’s been ported to many operating systems and even some handheld devices. It’s already got a total-conversion game called Polymorphable.
We’re still in Alpha and it shows. But we have a ton of momentum. Flare v0.17 is scheduled to come out this Friday. The engine will be very close to Beta at the end of 2012. During 2013 we’ll move beyond the current alpha tech demo and create a great classic-style RPG. And we have great plans for the future of Flare.
And you can help. If you like Action RPGs, free/libre software, or Creative Commons art, we’d love to have your support. Use this form to contact me directly.
Most of all, thanks for playing. It means a lot.
Clint Bellanger
Flare lead developer and technical artist
