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.