The above screenshot is from the very first town in the next Shining Online demo. Like other Shining Force games, you start alone and have to recruit a team before you can venture into the wide open world.

All of the above is handled by a little bit of lispy-script:

Shining Online uses a custom lisp engine for scripting, and has an entity + component system for managing in-game objects. Entities can be anything from characters walking around to hidden triggers or spawn zones.

So far this setup is working really well. Entities can have scripts attached to them, and it’s possible to add components to entities via script. I’m not 100% happy with how inspecting works; it’s far too complicated for what it is, but it works so I’m trying to leave it alone.

In development

I’m currently working through milestone 3 – items. At this point it’s mostly UI work that is left. It’s not one of my strong points, but it’s slowly getting there. My aim is to have it all complete by the end of the month so that I can start on shops and the priest.

The main screen for managing items looks like this

I’m not totally happy with the tooltip yet, but it’s pretty close to what I’m aiming for. Giving items to other characters works, but the table needs updating with stat changes. Equipping items and armor is getting a slight revamp, but should be working by the time March rolls around.

I’m looking forward to working on something a little more fun.