Hello all you happy people! I hope you’re feeling better than I am. Dust allergies are a bitch, I tell you.

However, I have exciting news. I am switching development on Legends of Faerie from RPGMaker to Unreal Engine 5.

Why, you might ask? The answer is simple: RPGMaker can’t publish games for sale on the Nintendo Switch, and Unreal can. As you know, my goal is to become a Nintendo developer and sell my games. Unreal is the best tool for that, as it is not only easy to learn, but its also free. Completely and utterly free (at least, until you make a million dollars or more which, ha! Not going to happen), whereas with both Unity and GameMaker you need to pay extra (and considerably extra) in order to publish on consoles.

I call bullshit on that, personally. But it’s their company and their resources and they can do whatever they want with it. In the meantime, I’m going to stick with Unreal.

So! A screenshot:

Obviously, these are placeholder graphics, but I thought it would give you a good idea of what I’m trying to do here. This is another reason I like Unreal over RPGMaker: it’s much more flexible. RPGMaker more or less forces you to recreate Dragon Quest 3 unless you’re willing to break the engine. Unreal doesn’t have that problem, because you’re more or less building the game from the ground up.

As you can see, battles in Legends of Faerie are turn based and have four combatants on each side. Well actually, there can be up to eight combatants on each side, divided into two rows. In the back row would be your ranged or just squishy combatants. Casters, archers, those sorts of guys.

In the front row goes your melee combatants. Most of these are tougher than the back row combatants, but some, like the Lumberjack class line, are more glass cannons.

This is also a good time to talk about how classes will work in Legends of Faerie. Classes will work on a Job System. Each of the eight characters in Legends of Faerie will start in an Apprentice Class like Lumberjack or Fencer. When they reach level twenty in that class, they can promote to a Journeyman class. Promoting resets their class level to one, but they gain a huge boost in their stats. Likewise, when they reach level 20 in the Journeyman class, they can promote into a Master class. Again, promoting resets them to level one, but with an even larger boost in stats.

You don’t have to keep your characters in their starting classes, either. Every character can switch into any other class and gain all their proficiencies and stat boosts. However, in order to change into a more advanced class you need to first master the previous class.

That’s it for today. We’ll talk more about classes, how they work, and how they interact with elemental powers and familiars next time. Along with some examples of how battles actually work, hopefully.

See you guys soon!