11/30/97
The past 4 days I've spent a great deal of time working hard on a demo. I was really surprised just how much stuff I was able to pack into it. I decided to record some small samples of music and play them back as digital audio for the demo. This increased the file size by about half, but it really adds to the demo. Perhaps later I will make a non music version available or something... but as for right now I'm wore out. Go download the demo then go post your opinions to the mailing list.
A good crowd of DALnet regulars are working on an RPG. I don't really know that much about it, but they have a web site online. Check out Rennasoft. I donno if they know that I linked to them so feel free to e-mail them and tell them who linked to them.
And now for big big news! Fantasy Origin is now located at (http://www.fantasyorigin.org/) Vito has obtained a domain name for the site. Among other things, the site promises weekly updates!
Well, now I guess I should answer the backlog of mail I have gathered up over the past week... then I can use whats left of my Sunday afternoon to cram for exams on monday..
11/22/97
As I make this update, I feel very bad. I've had headaches all day and my stomache is tore up.. I guess I'm a bit sick.
Anyway, this week's image is of the newest tile set. I'm not sure if I'm satisfied with the look of this set enough to keep it or if I will start over. If I keep it, I think it will require some work. Basically, the way I structured my maps will not allow me to design a map that can be linked to another map in two places. Therefore, you can't enter a cave from the overworld, walk through the cave and pop up on other part of the overworld. You can, however, enter one map from the overworld, enter a cave from that map, then pop up else where one overworld from the cave. Thats where this small tile set comes into play, its the entrance to a cave. Funny thing is, I needed a tile set like this for an important part of the plot! Things just kinda worked out like that. After I completed this tile set and was building maps with it.. I started to wonder if Square didn't have simular designs in Final Fantasy being that they often had maps that showed nothing more than the entrace to a cave or what not...
Anyway, work on TLOT this week was very minimal. Just some artwork. Animals are damn hard to draw. So far I still haven't been able to produce a decent looking animal.... I digress... anyway (I like that word), this week was very slow. I've been piled up with school work. I've got a time off comming up around Thanksgiving that should help out a lot.. (next thurs and fri).. Maybe, just maybe.... I'll compile a demo next weekend..
More Bob news.. A few months before I submitted Bob to Softdisk electronically, I submitted it to Eidos via snail mail. After not receiving a responce for soooo long, I figured Bob was placed in File 13. Today, much to my surprise, I finally received a letter from Eidos. As most people probably know, Eidos is a pretty high brass company publishing such games as Tomb Raider. Well, as I expected, they weren't interested in publishing Bob. I figured I was getting a typical form letter telling me of my rejections. Much to my surprise, it wasn't... While the letter was very short, it was also somewhat personal. Monica Malone said that "the game is too small in scope for Eidos to take significant interest in at this time," and then she went on to say, "but I wanted to make sure you knew that you're definately on the right track." She said that she sent the game to their Design Director to review and his responce was very positive. She said his note read, "Bob is awesome!"... Perhaps I will take the time to scan my little letter next week and put it online =)
Well, my girlfriend is at the house.. I'm going to go do.. umm.. stuff now... bye
11/16/97
This week's image is of an Inn Keeper... Inn Keepers and Shop Keepers will have the same number of frames as any other type of NPC (12).. But, they will be just standing there all the time. Thus, they will be somewhat animated. Right now, the girl you see in the picture looks around a little bit and reaches down to write in her book every once in a while. Its a simple thing, but it helps to bring the game to life.
If you click on the image, it will bring up another screen shot of the same town. In this image you'll see a well with a bucket.. I figured that the town would need a water source. I'm having trouble filling this town in with stuff. I need some trees, flowers, bushes, walkways and whatever else, but its just not working out very well. On top of that, fleshing out the insides of the houses used up a LOT of tiles. (mostly because of the stair case) There's no telling how this tile set will end up.
Not much coding done this week. I did get some "research" done... I've been playing Phantasy Star 4 and Shining Force 1 & 2. I didn't realize just how important keeping equiped was in Phantasy Star. I like that. In Final Fantasy 3, you can unequip all you party members and still have a fairly strong party. I'm sorry, but a sword does infanitely better damage than a bare fist. More importantly, you aren't very well protected when you are standing there naked.. Anyway, enough ranting... Shining Force is not what I expected. That battles are like none I've ever played. They are very strategic and interesting, but they are so damn time consuming and long! I donno if I will complete any of those games. Shining Force may be too boring and Phantasy Star keeps crashing during certain parts of the game. I'm still looking for Breath of Fire.
Its getting closer to time for finals. School is also right around the corner. Things are going to get very lousy very soon. I'm considering releasing a quick demo with NPCs mainly due to the fact that things are going to be slowing down soon. We'll just have to see, won't we....
One last and final note.. and a good note.. SoftDisk is going to publish Bob! That means that I can no longer sale or give Bob away on my own. Thus, if you are helping to distribute the shareware version, you'll be wasting your time. I will update the Bob page giving instructions for registration through SoftDisk when the time comes..
Umm I love Amanda..
11/8/97
Ok, I've gotten a lot done this week. First of all, I drew some tiles. This screen shots shows an elevated platform. This is where Eznik will be giving a speach near the start of the game. He will be proclaiming that he is the son of the King.. unfortunately and unknowningly, he is wrong.. Shortly after the scene I just described will be a scene involving his death.. BOOM! Uhh.. ok, I'll stop giving away the plot.. but its all in the beginning of the game so it doesn't matter much anyway..
I got a lot of coding done this week. All the sprites are now contained in a single file. I am limited to 256 sprites for the entire game.. but I'm not really worried. So far I've got like 25 or so... I can only have 32 NPCs on a single map. These might sound like bad limits, but if you stop and think about it, 32 people in one town is a lot of people to talk to.. and 256 original sprites are a lot of sprites.
Anyway, I got scared while I was changing the code for the sprites. I spent a solid 20 minutes or more putting in new code involving lots of pointers and such before I could compile and run the code to see if things were going right. I finally got to that point and saved all my work. I ran the program expecting some kind of crash when I entered a map with sprites.. For some crazy reason.. there were no errors. Twenty minutes of coding and not a single mistake! Thats impossible! It can't happen... You are SUPPOSE to have errors to fix.. I'm scared... it just isn't right.
Ack.. I can't remember what all I coded at the beginning of the week.. oh yeah, over on the right side of the screen, I put an image of the character next to his/her name. That looks pretty cool. I also did some other cool stuff.. I keep a copy of TLOT on my hard drive that has sound effects. Basically, at one point I made a copy of all the source code and added the sound libarary and some sound effects. It was all just for fun. Well, today I went in and added the CD Rom music and got out some of my CDs. The machine I'm working on now has a SCSI CD Rom so its pretty fast.. (unlike the other machine I was working on).. It worked pretty damn good. I had to set up Cd Rom Drivers for DOS on this machine because my sound card works like shit under an MS-DOS promt. Anyway, it looks as though my sound engine should be fairly solid.
After going to The Frag and seeing some of the games on the near horizon.. and now that 640x480 has become such a standard in computer gaming... I think I am going to stick with the idea of distributing TLOT for free and then charging for the music CD. I still am not sure what I am going to do.. but I'm starting to lean pretty far this way now.. I guess we'll see what the next few months bring.
11/2/97
Well, I am home from The Frag. Talk about a ton of people. I saw a presentation for SiN as well as a rather cool movie for Daikatana. I think SiN is going to rock... I was really impressed with the work in progress demo they showed us. I could go on for a few hours with what impressed me, but I won't bother.. its just good..
So, how did I do at the tourney? Everything was borken into brackets of 16 players. We played Death32a. The top four in each bracket go on to the one-on-one bouts in DM2, DM4 and DM6. I placed either 5th or 6th, I can't recall for sure. I was 3 frags behind the guy in 4th though. I had 48 frags and 4th place had 51. Infovein had simular luck. During the warm up he held a steady second place by a large margin of frags. Then, in the real match, he started off strong but lost his rythm breifly. He had 42 frags, the guy in 4th place had 44 frags. Lord Chaos ended up in the same bracket as me. He placed just behind me. His frag count was in the high thirties, but I can't recall the exact number. The whole thing was kinda lousy. So damn close, but none of us qualified. Maybe at the next tourney.....
Ok, this week's screen shot is the Rod of Phonovan. I've mentioned this before, but I just wanted to comment on its role in the game. As you can see, the rod has three stones in it. (The red one is kinda hard to see, I'll have to work on that). The rod can only be held by certain people. With combinations of different stones, you get different special abilities. You have to have all three stones in place to make the rod work. Each stone casts it's own ability. For example, one stone might increase the max HP of all the party members by 10%. Another might make each party member gain an HP with each step on the overworld. (until HP=maxHP) The main focus on the game is to first find the rod, and then find the three original stones that were in it. The rod was used to seal a gate to Aphillia's realm. Now, when you reassemble the Rod, Phonovan will appear. Realizing that if the gate is sealed again, it will simply be broken again, Phonovan decides to help you seek out Aphillia and destroy her completely. And that give you a good run down on the importance of the Rod.
There was very little work done on the game this week. A few tiles and tweaks. I did, however, bring a demo of it to The Frag with me. I showed it to Nick Pleis of Cataract Software as well as a couple of other guys who let me borrow their machine with a zip drive. My responces were positive, but showing other people my game in person made me realize just how dated the technology was. Now I'm eager to finish this game up so that I can start a new one that is a bit more up to par.
I downloaded the demo for Island Gates. I must say, it looks very good. The actually technical merrits of the engine are better than TLOT. Full screen scrolling and the ability to walk behind objects look very good. It is in mode 13h (320x200x256) as Talibah is. I really like the graphics, he used a good pallete. When you enter a town, there is a kick ass rotation, scaling and fading effect that looks great.. although it does make entering the towns kinda slow. The characters are cool. They have the big head thing going on like Final Fantasy style RPGs tend to do. Its worth taking a look at.
Well, I feel like I'm hung over. I didn't get a whole lot of sleep this weekend. If anyone is interested, there are live updates and photos of the frag available at avault.com. Anyway, I'm outta here....................
