Bivouac - Every Enemy Band Stages Its Own Ground, for GameMaker

Every enemy band stages its own ground. Bivouac reads the band a battle starts with and draws what it holds: the worked earth under the battlers' feet, a shadow that seats each one on it, the camp the band brought and set down, and the tracks it left coming in. Pure GML, no image files.

Most battle screens give a goblin rabble and a demon lord the same nothing to stand on. With Bivouac, a rabble gets trodden earth, crates and a spit over a campfire; a host plants a standard and a war drum; a champion stands on a stone dais. A fire caster scorches the ground, an ice band leaves rime, a dark band blights it. Standing is measured against YOUR bestiary, so rebalancing your game restages it.

my_program = bvc_compose(my_encounter, my_bestiary, { width: 816, height: 624 });  // Create
my_ground  = bvc_bake(my_program);
bvc_ground_draw(my_ground, my_field_x, my_field_y);                                 // Draw, before your battlers

What your players see

• 10 grounds, each its own construction: trodden, hardpan, ashbed, rime, mire, scorch, blight, drift, flagstone and sward, shaped by where the members of the band actually stand.
• 14 marks the band leaves: boot, claw and hoof tracks leading in from the side it came, drag and slither tracks, cart ruts, a blood slick, scorch licks, web strands, frost creep, a spore bloom, bone scatter, gouges and a ward ring.
• 28 pieces of furniture: campfire, cook pot, spit, bedroll, lean-to, stacked arms, shield rest, war drum, standard, palisade, chevaux-de-frise, totem, altar, brazier, carrion post, bone midden, cage, spoil pile, crates, dais, hide dryer, anvil stone, cocoon, fungal cluster, ice cairn, cinder vent, reed bundle and root knot, placed clear of every battler's feet.
• Cast shadows that seat each battler on the ground.

How it decides

• Nature from the shape of each enemy's numbers (raider, warded, quick, adept, great), so a bestiary ten times larger stages identically.
• Standing from the band's experience against your whole bestiary: rabble, band, warband, host or champion.
• Ground from the elements its members strike with, else its nature. Wear from how often the player has fought it.
• The encounter's name and id seed every choice, so the same band always stages the same ground.

Tested

• Igor package build clean on the shipped source.
• 293 in-engine assertions on a real built exe: the composing core checked against the RPG Maker MZ original's (every reading, choice, outline point and furniture seat for seventeen encounters over an eighteen-enemy bestiary), the stencil fill kit against a concave control, and every ground, mark and piece asserted to put ink down.
• 24 more in a blank project that installed the package the way you will and ran the Readme's own code.
• 168 adversarial calls against the documented functions with zero crashes.

Requirements

GameMaker 2024.14 or newer (built and tested against runtime 2024.14.4.268). Pure GML: no extensions, no DLLs, no shaders, no sprites. Import the .yymps, open rm_bvc_demo, press Play: seventeen bands, each on its own ground. For front-view and side-view battle screens; grid tactics are out of scope. Bake once when the battle starts (tens of milliseconds, measured), never every frame. Bivouac makes no sound. The battlers and the dusk backdrop in the store images are stand-ins; your own go there.

One commercial licence, unlimited games, no attribution required. Everything the package draws in your game is yours to ship, including on your store page and in your trailers.

Paid, from the same studio

• Bivouac for RPG Maker MZ ($14.99): the same staged grounds as an MZ plugin.
• Adversary ($14.99): multi-phase bosses that draw their own bodies and their own attack telegraphs, for GameMaker.
• Hearth ($14.99): furnishes an NPC's home from who lives there, for GameMaker.

More GameMaker systems at csaf.itch.io.

AI disclosure: the code and the generated artwork in this package were produced with AI assistance. Every store image was rendered by the product itself. Type: IM Fell DW Pica (SIL OFL 1.1) and Open Sans (Apache 2.0), notices included.