12/28/97I had a reminder of why I wanted to write an RPG this weekend. I finally got my hands on a copy of Final Fantasy 2. I played some with my girlfriend and a lot by myself. Even though I've played through it many times in the past, I still absolutely love the game. Seeing the lunar subterrain got me excited. Needless to say, this cut deeply into TLOT development time. I'm renting it right now but I am desperately trying to get them to sale it to me. It has no instructions and the 4th save spot doesn't seem to work very well as it went -empty- on me (low battery?), but I must have this game.
The holidays also cut into TLOT time. I got very little done this week. I worked with some of the battle graphics this weekend and converted them into a format that I can manipulate. Thats just about all I've gotten done. I haven't even been able to reply to any e-mail. It was all I could do to get this update done.
I've been very un-inspired this week. I've actually kinda been severely depressed and I'm not sure why. Its suppose to be a happy time with the holidays and all but I've been really down. I'm not sure whats going on. Its funny, but this time last year I stopped my weekly updates for a month because I felt much the same way.
The image this week was done by Brian Crews a long time ago. I was trying to get a better title screen and he took a shot at it. This is what he sent me. I browsed through the images on my web site and realized that I'd never shown it to anyone. If you click on this image you'll see a mock up of a battle scene that I've been playing with. I'm trying to see how well the battle scenes will turn out with the new larger screen area. The forest background was sent to me by an artist who was interested in working on TLOT with me, but caught me when I really didn't know what I needed. He's working on Telen now. I really like the look of the hand drawn battle background. In fact, now that Tom Hall has commented on how good the rendered backgrounds look, I think I want to dump them and go with all hand drawn. (figure that one out for yourself)
Anyway, I've got lots to do tonight so I'm going to go act like I'm getting it done until its so late I have to go to bed.
12/21/97Well... oops... Last night I didn't make any progress forward, it was actually a big step back.. but it might have been worth it. Lately I've been discussing and thinking about making my view screen larger. Last week I did a mock up to see what it would look like. I wasn't impressed or eager to do it but then I thought I'd make a few more mock ups and see how I felt. Then I realized that making mock ups was a lot of work so I figured, "what the hell" and I went ahead and coded it in. In a moment of inspiration I came up with a method of doing it that doesn't use any more memory than the previous way I did it. The finish result looks extremely simple, but beleive me, it was a lot of work.
I call this a step back because it means I've got more work to go through before I reach a finished product. The larger scrolling window still needs some more coding and will require more code all the way through the production. I hope its worth it. I've actually gotten advice to leave the window as it was. But do I listen?????
Once I had it coded in I started walking around my world. All my test maps were designed around a smaller window so I found many glitches, but just adding one tile around the view window opened the world up a lot. The only thing I'm worried about is a performance hit on slower machines. Now that the view window is 220 pixels wide, the buffer is 260... I used to use a byte (0 to 255) in some of the subroutines and now I have to use an integer.. and the subroutines are now called much more often. Luckily I was able to use bit shifts in the tile blitting routines as apposed to multiplication. 260 is 256+4 wich works out nicely. Anyway, I will have to put the new stuff into some beta testing here pretty soon. I will likely have an option to turn the large screen on and off thus slower machines can turn it back to a smaller window. The only problem when you add an option like that you slow the entire program down because you have one more boolen evaluation to deal with in every screen draw.. but gosh, one more if-then probably won't hurt to much *gulp*.. (sarcasm)
Another major concern is the battle screen. I previously had a 180 pixel width to deal with. I also had 3 chracters. So, I decided that each character should be 60 pixels wide. Now I've got an extra 40 pixels. Not only the width, but the whole screen is bigger. I've got more space than I wanted. Not a problem I could just redesign everything a bit more spaciously. But, there were other things I really wanted to do that required the smaller window. I may have the border return for the battle scenes. I'm worried that this will look funny and I'm not sure how I'm going to work it out.
Anyway, I did a few other things this week. I added a new edge to the water-grass tiles on the overworld map. There's a slight cliff or ledge. Also, the water kinda moves a bit around the edge of those tiles. It looks a bit better than it used to. The water still doesn't scroll or move, but the new tiles kinda take your eyes away from that a little bit.
I also added some various levels to the grasslands. This will not be used in a map as you see in this screenshot. They will be used for large open grasslands to break up the monotiny. The cool thing about these hills is the fact that the character is actually moved up on the screen when he's standing on top of a hill. I'm still not sure if I like this whole hill thing, but I think I can make it work. I've gotten some feedback that my hills make my mountains look kinda funny... I like my mountains! But its not the first comment I've gotten about them. Chances are, they won't change.. but if they do, you know why.
I also sat down to create a whole new menu panel yesterday. I worked on it for a loooong time and came up with lots of different stuff. But for some reason it all sucked.. The best one ended up being the old panel with a demonic face on it. Its the same face found on the title screen. I also made the brown color a little richer and a bit more contasting than it was previously. This isn't the major change I wanted for the menu panel, but atleast its a little bit better.
You may have also noticed the little white dots to the right of the characters.. Umm.. ignore them.. They were sheep. I tried drawing animals about a month ago and never came up with anything I liked.. they just sorta worked their way into this screen shot.. You know how sheep are, they just keep popping up in strange places. Warcraft 2.. Hexen 2...
There's some more screenshots to see if you click on this week's shot. Just some samples of the larger scrolling window. Everyone needs to post their opinions of the larger scrolling window to the mailing list.
Ever notice how many RPG projects there are out there on the web that seem to just die? Well, one is back.. and its one of my favorites. Tsugumo has gone back to actively developing The Game. Also, Fantasy Origin has been updated. If you have old outdated links to FO, please update them. The new url is [http://www.fantasyorigin.org/].
Speaking of new URLs. My account will be moving to a new server in the future. My URL has always been [http://www.nortexinfo.net/Zaskoda/Talibah], but often times the nortexinfo.net translates to host.ld.centuryinter.net. When I move to the new server, host.ld.centuryinter.net will NO LONGER WORK. I'm sure I'll loose some hits when this happens but thats the nature of the web.
Speaking of hits, has anyone ever payed close attention to my hit counter on the main page? The damn thing actually goes backwards sometimes! Whats up with that?
And everyone MUST (you have NO choice in this) go to Aphrodite's page and enter the midi contest.
Well, this is the end of a rather lengthy weekly update. I'm off to catch up with my usual backlog of e-mail then I guess I'll go wrap some more Christmas presents. BTW-This friday Amanda and I will hit 2 years. Happy Holidys to everyone!
12/14/97Well, I've redrawn the tree tiles.. I've also added code that does that fairly common but neat trick of making the character appear to be submerged in the trees. Now that I've redone the trees on the overworld I might redo a few other tiles as well. I hate doing this because it isn't really moving me closer to a finished game. It is, however, making the finished game a better product.
There has been a lot of discussion about increasing the scrolling area. Well, if I increase the scrolling area as much as I can, I will have to keep a 20x20 border around the entire screen. Thus, I don't gain any height over the current viewing area. I played Age of Empires a lot this weekend and I hated the wide screen.. you could see a lot further left and right than you could up and down. I don't want to make that same mistake. Sooo, I'm considering another trick that will simply remove the border around the view screen on the left. Click on this week's screenshot to see a mock up of what it may look like.
I've also updated the screenshots on the web site. I thought I'd try to make it a bit more current. If I decide on the larger scrolling screen, then I'll have to redo all the screenshots again. =(
I had a rather nice surprise the other day. I visted the Identity Software Creations web site and found a progress report page. Much to my surprise, they are still moving along well on their game. So many people start projects like this and don't finish, its nice to see another team that appears to still be making some ground. You might take the time to send them some e-mail and let them know that people are interested.
I had a lot of other things I really wanted to mention, but I can't think of them off the top of my head. It was just a bunch of boring rants anyway... have fun with the new screenshots!
12/08/97Ok.. I got up this morning at 7:10am. I left the house to go to school at 7:45am. I took a 30 minute break at school to eat. The rest of the time I was in various labs trying to get all my final projects completed. Then I came home. It was 8:45pm when I got home. I am very tired.. and my brain is pretty much dead. I still have hours of homework to do tonight thats due first thing in the morning. What fun! So don't hound me about being late on my update.. *grumble*
The screen shot this week shows off some elevations.. sort of. Its the first ones I've done that look even remotely useable. My maps look so darn flat, I've been trying to get some demention to them. Its a lot harder than it you would think.
I mentioned something on the mailing list about the first characters I drew for TLOT. I thought I'd show some of them off. If you click on this week's image you can see another image of some of my first characters standing in the village town. (fake screen shot) The very first character I drew was a big blue guy. Then a big red guy. Then I tried a few more things. Then I tried a smaller big headed character like the ones found in most console RPGs. I did some other stuff too.. Here's some images of some of the sprites I've done but will probably never use:
I blew those knights up 2x so you could see them. I may still use the Knights in the game after I tinker with them a bit. Maybe they'll be gaurds in Uther's kingdom or something. Anyway, there they are.
I can't take anymore. I've got to get some digital logic done and then I've got to go to bed. Sorry for the short and late update.
Woah.. almost forgot. I've got 2 links for everyone. First, Joyous Rebel 2 I have a funny feeling the counter may not be entirely accurate. Anyway, you can D/L JR 1 from their web site. Also, check out Identity Software Creations. Their game seems to be moving with 4 alpha releases available on the web site and a beta demo due out fairly soon.
