Ogre Battle Army Tool

Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen is one of my all-time favorite games. I’ve been a fan of the story-telling genres of video games ever since I first discovered them but Ogre Battle and its sequels have always had special appeal. The really killer element, I think, is the character building aspects expanded to not just a small cast, like most RPGs, but to an entire army.

When I first played Ogre Battle I had never seen anything quite like the army and unit editing screens and it was one of the things that hooked me on the game. But, compared to later Ogre Battles (and Final Fantasy Tactics) it’s somewhat lacking. For this reason I’ve always wanted to create an alternative editor that incorporated added functionality and quality-of-life improvements that surpasses even those subsequent titles.

I envisioned something with a fancy graphical interface and that was probably browser-based to make it widely accessible. Beyond a mere unit editor, it would make it possible to level characters up or down, just edit their statistics directly, or even generate them from scratch following the game’s rules. Import, export, and transfer functions would make individual characters portable and some kind of analytics suite might rate them against the best-case growth curves.

My latest project is the Ogre Battle Army Tool and it opens the door to all of this but falls short of my grandest visions. It’s a Windows app that can export and import all the characters and units using a CSV file that works with any spreadsheet application. It’s not an editor by itself but since all the army data can now move in and out of an easy-to-edit format it makes all the fancy manipulations I envisioned possible, albeit performed manually. I, for one, work with data in spreadsheets regularly and find that managing my troops in rows and columns is quite natural.

The tool and its C# source code are now available for download on GitHub. I make it available hoping my fellow Ogre Battle fans will find it useful. If it generates enough interest I might expand it further to include some more of those neat features like character generation. Importing and exporting the item inventory isn’t out of the question either. Maybe someday I’ll still build that cool editor but, don’t hold your breath.