AIT2 preview available

Hi Guys,

Last weekend a preview version of AIT2 were released on Arok 15 party. You can find it here:

Adventures In Time 2 Preview on Plus4World

The preview contains one map specially designed for the preview. You won't find it in final product. The preview does not show all the features it could, I spared them for later time :)

Have fun playing it!

Bye,
KiCHY

Armadas of Bad Guys

Hi Followers,

In last weeks I made refinements on level1, implemented more types of bad guys so from now they can spread over the whole level 1 map :) They also hurt you if they touch you. On the other side you have 4 hitpoints before you lose a spare life! Naturally, you can refill your HP with potions you find on your way.
Csabo composes the music. We have plans of a never seen (heard) music player feature on the Plus/4 Scene :)
This means a releasing of the preview version soon with an unseen map designed for the preview. I have to implement some missing pieces of software until the preview:

• Animate the water
• Code the pickup event of potions (maximize HP)
• A proper "player dies" animation instead of simply jumping back to last checkpoint.
• Insert the music
• Anything I forgot now...

The snail, the bird and the potion

We are Batmen!

Minor milestones

Hi,

Finally I made some minor milestones in AIT2 development :)
- Spektro designed the very first level of AIT2. Thanks for it!
- Some minor tileset changes, dropped a few ideas and replaced to new ones which fit better in graphics style.
- The first enemies appeared! Still no collision test.
- Picking up coins now earn score.
- The water/lava/spikes finally kills the player.
- Checkpoint system. Instead of the method of original AIT where you respawn in last safe room/location before you died, now you respawn at last checkpoint Perhaps some rooms earlier. This method will irritate some people I know but it gives another strategic factor into level design.
- The negotiation with the music composer is in progress :)

A coin protected by snail

A bird flies over some new graphic elements

Map designers wanted

Hi my dears,

Made some progress in the last weeks:
- some new sprites,
- new minor background elements,
- asked some background animations from Chronos (Wake up, N... err Chronos!) (Remember, that guy who helps in graphics)

The most important thing in this blog entry is that I'm after some talented people who could support me with some maps for levels... (even on scanned hand drawn paper if you wish).

Respond here with your comment or at Plus/4 World Forum. I'll give you more details about requirements, specifications, etc. later.

A caped ghost

Unnamed robot

Bird

See ya next time!

Screenshot Galore

Hi,

I made several screenshots which you can reuse anywhere you want (at least some credits please).

Screens from a medieval world:

Use the crates, Luke!

Turrets and cannonballs

Greenhouse

Spikes everywhere

More spikes

Screens from a natural scenery:

A flower...

...with a butterfly

The first coin

Use the jumpers in the cave to get out

Look for secret places even in the air

Nice stripes, eh?

Treasure awaits in "deep" of the cave

Hi!

Here's another proof that I worked on AIT2 in last 4 months (in silence). I made various "engines" for different tasks: one of these is the Objects (or Actors, nevermind) engine which handles all kind of objects in a room: the switch, the pushable crates, and from now: turrets and bullets!

The turrets are - in fact - invisible objects which only spawn bullets in given position and direction. Those visible turrets built in the wall (lower video) are simple graphic elements of background.

Each turret has various properties in room definition: speed, shooting pattern (explain soon), shooting direction and bullet type.

Each shooting pattern is a byte (8 bits we know) and the turret rotates this pattern byte bitwise by a determined speed. 1 bit means "shoot" and 0 bit means "wait" in this pattern. So how it works:

For example, turret speed: 10, shooting pattern: "01100101".
1. The turret waits 10 times.
2. The turret checks bit #0, now that's "1". That means "shoot", so the AI of turret spawns a bullet and puts into the object list.
3. Rotate this pattern 1bit to the left, now the pattern is "10110010".
4. The turret waits another 10 times.
5. The turret check bit #0, now it's "0" so the turret does nothing.
6. Go back to step 1.

The bullets are really simple things. After they were created start moving to a given direction (not only left or right but up and down directions are also possible) until they collide with a wall then they disappear (future plans: instead of simple disappearing perhaps some kind of explosion, smoke, etc?)

Two new features

Hi,

I finally finished the implementations of two features: slideable objects and switches (only from ON to OFF direction). I made a short video which show these two features.

I'm still experiencing YouTube video uploading features, this time I learnt putting annotations on video :)

Another video of gameplay

Hi,

I made another video from a different world. Let's go medieval! :) The gameplay currently lacks enemies, swithes + doors, spikes can't hurt you and so on.

This time I tried to improve the video quality.

Early gameplay video

Hi,

In last months I worked on AIT2 on and off. I made a short video of current state. You can watch it here:

I made this level for testing purposes (but its graphics will be used in final version, or else it'd be a waste).
A short feature list you can see in the clip:
- A butterfly for eyecandy (tests sprite-sprite collision, sprite-gamearea collision)
- Two tile types which slide you left/right - like when you stand on a conveyor belt. You can see it on very first room.
- Rotating coins as collectible items - it disappears from game world, won't reappear again when you enter the same room again.
- Hidden passages.
- Jumper platforms which make you jump higher.

Hello Followers,

Another post, another mockup...

This time it is about a Forest/Cave scene, plus a cute statusbar.

Entering the cave

Here comes the statusbar as a separated image.

The statusbar

The first row shows the static elements of the bar. When the player has 0-3 lives it shows little heads. Later when the player gets extra lives it changes to a different display because there are no rooms for 4+ little leads.

Overhauling the Cloud theme

Hi again,

I found some talent somewhere again and I used that to overhaul the cloud theme because I weren't satisfied with the old one.

I tried to play with color scheme as well and made 3 variants of the same scene.

The night in the clouds

It snows!

A terrible weather

The snow and rain will be animated (well, at least, that's the plan).

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...

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.

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:

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.

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")...

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.
  

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.