December 27, 2011

New mockup about space theme

Hi there,

I just drawn a nice mockup about space level of AIT2. There are some guns (+ fire bullet), gravity lift, minor background elements.
Space level


In the festive time I thought about the title screen and I got these ideas so far:
- A nice big bitmap logo on top of screen
- Various textual contents will replace eachother: credits, toplist, etc.
- A "press fire to start" text.
As you see, there will be nothing fancy. Gray background, some texts and a nice logo. That's all.
- I don't upload title screen mockups yet, the logo is still missing...

December 11, 2011

The Time scrambing machine

After several weeks/months I finally back. I had to find motivation, a family loss happened, lots of work, etcetcetc...

I pixeled a nice time scrambling machine, dropped into a scene, put some sprites (from Adventures in Time) into the mockup and here's the result:
The time scrambling machine in action!

This new graphics eats lots of characters from the maximum 256 chars so perhaps I'll need to implement some kind of "banking", and replace some non-used graphics with the machine's tiles on the selected screen.

September 28, 2011

A downloadable test version of graphics/tile editor

Hi There,

The last two weeks were full of work ergo I had a very short free time. At least I could make an initial working version of my graphics editor. It still has no real name. Only the characterset editing is implemented yet.

You can download it, test it, use if seems useful. Positive criticism and tips to make it more usable is more than welcomed :)

It is a windows executable, it needs installed .NET 4.0 runtime
WIP version of graphics editor

September 12, 2011

Tile Editor is on its way

Last week I worked on an editor to draw characters, tiles, sprites. It is wery WIP yet, I can draw characters only, no save/load yet. This current editor is the 3rd revision of my earlier editors. This means I don't need to reinvent the wheels, lots of code can be taken from the older versions.
It will contain 3 tab pages:
  1. Character editor:
    You can edit all the 256 possible characters here. You also can see all the 256 characters in a larger table.
  2. Tile editor:
    You can edit 256 different tiles (from 2x2 to 4x4 sized. For AiT2, I need the 2x2). All tiles are composed from characters which you can edit on the 1st page.
  3. Room editor:
    You can edit rooms built up from tiles. For AiT2 I need 40x22 chars large rooms which are composed from 2x2 chars large tiles. This means a 20x11 tiles large tilemap. The tiles comes from the 2nd page.
Why do I develop a third version? I'm not 100% satisfied with the second version (1st does not exists, it was evolved to 2nd version). It is slow. My aim is to see the result of my editing "online" or "as soon as possible". That means if I slightly modify the character "A" I want to see its modifications not only on the "Character editor" page but on "Tileset Editor" page and in "Room Editor". The second version solved this probleam but redrawing the images on every change of any pixels made the whole thing slow.

Character editor in action

September 05, 2011

Weekend coding

Last weekend I did some coding. I wanted to develop an initial version of avatar control and movement: walking, jumping, falling. And a basic collision detection with the walls.

First I made a prototype in C# using only byte and word types only. When this algorythm functioned well, I converted to assembly code.

Current features of this control system:
- builtin interia system: when player start to walk left, it starts at low speed and gets faster and faster, etc.
- jumping at variable height.

I took a short videoclip about this feature:

September 01, 2011

A small animation

I made a small animation for the spikes in the second map of previous post. It is a very basic animation.
There are two version of spike. The left one is in the shadow and the right one is without any shadows.

These are the animation frames.
The animation in large..
...and in small size.

Maps

Finally I got some free time and achieved to complete a pair of maps. They represents different worlds and they are positioned in the easier part of the whole game.

This very easy level comes from the cloud world:

This one (sky city?) is also very easy but I placed some nasty spikes where you can fall (and die, muhahahah) if careless. I'll put some nice animated propellers around the city which keeps the city in the sky.

August 29, 2011

Decision made

I had a very short free time last week. I started to draw some "experimental" maps with several rooms. During mapping I made a decision:
  • The room graphics will use 3 fixed + 1 variable charcolor.
 More decisions to be made for the future:
  • How many levels should the game contain? 3-4-5 larger maps (each has its own graphics and style/layout) or "many" small levels grouped in "worlds" just like Super Mario, for example.
  • It would be cool to implement some talkative NPCs (or at least signs which can be read)
  • Would be much better if these NPCs could give you small quests ("bring me a drink and I open the door for you")...

August 23, 2011

Video uploading issues

It will be a short post, I just want to share my first experiments with video uploading.

Originally I wanted to post a short video in this post.
First, I made very WIP version of the sprite engine. I wanted to show you it in motion, so I made a video (AVI) of it in YAPE emulator. Blogger has a feature: embed video which is uploaded to YouTube. "Fine, I have google account, I have YouTube account, they are linked, it will be piece of cake." I'm so naive :) Pressing "upload video" button on YouTube bring me a new page: "Create a channel! You can't upload videos if you don't have a channel." Hmm, still ok, let's continue. Next page: enter e-mail, id, all kind of data for a new "some-kind-of-account". WTF? Why do I need to have 3! different accounts for uploading a fukin' video??? No way YouTube, thanx anyway.

So, no video for ya this time...Instead of it you can see a screenshot with 8 pieces of 16x16px sprites, which are move, rotate, overlap text and other sprites. Believe me :)

Update: I could manage to upload my video directly into the blog, skipping YouTube.
The flashing on the border means various techy things about the doublebuffering and how fast (slow) the engine is...
Last week when I decided to start developing AIT2, made some mockups. Currently I'm lacking talent so I used some graphics of an old GameBoy game.

No more words, let the pictures come...

This theme is about a forest. I used green and gray as character color, FYI.

The next is somewhere in the clouds, at late noon :).
This scene really fits for a city in the clouds (now grayscale only).

This scene is a weird one, I'm sure I couldn't find it in the real world...

And another decision I made:
  • The game will use rooms, no scrolling.

August 21, 2011

Looong time passed since my last post...
In the meantime I made lots of mockups and some games as well but I were too lazy to post these here.
I made a game Adventures in Time, a game for the Plussy. You can download it for free or if you wanna own a nice boxed retro game, you can buy it.

AIT was coded to 95% in one single month (december, 2009). Then another 4 months were spent to improve minor things, include musics (both thanks to Luca).

In this week I decided to start developing of Adventures in Time: The Second Scramble (a WIP title yet).

Some specifications decided:
  • The game will lay on disc (AIT: singlefile/tape solution)
  • The game will use character screen (AIT: bitmap graphics)
  • Will use a softsprite engine (AIT: objects are moved by character boundaries)
  • Will use a doublebuffered screen (Cons: game screen will be updated on half speed, 25 frame per second. Pro: I can double the amount of softsprites, which eat lots of CPU time)
  • Multicolor mode
Things I thought but not decided yet:
  • TED music and/or SID music (finally we can buy a SID card again, it is in active production stage)
  • Amount of colors in the levels (use only 4 colors globally or use 3 fixed + 1 changeable color per character...)
End of post, it's getting too long, hehe.