Introducing: The Heroes!

Small post again, as I'm knee deep in working on three games currently as well as a veritable mountain school work.

Production on my final project for Game Design Theory and Culture is officially underway, and full production will probably begin sometime next week after our next to last project is turned in. As I previously stated, this game will be a top-down RPG as a tribute to my favorite game series: Final Fantasy. That said, I'm starting to discover a few problems with working solely with the Gamemaker GUI especially in relation to an RPG and I've already had to jury rig a few things to get them to work and I'm barely even 1% of the way through development. Oh how I wish I was allowed to use RPGMaker or even scripts!

Back on topic, last time I showed you a few sprites for some enemies that will make an appearance in the game. This time, I present to you: The Heroes!

Zane is the main character of this RPG. Orphaned at a young age as all good JRPG characters were, Zane was raised by the military as a child soldier. The game starts off with his first real assignment. Unfortunately, you won't see the repercussions of said assignment because this RPG is due in a playable form by the end of December, so you will have to be left in an eternal cliffhanger!

Esuna is another Orphan and probably the only friend Zane has. (Oh! Tragic Past AND Friendless! The JRPG soup thickens!) Esuna is even younger than Zane and decides to tag along to help him in his quest because Orphans and Street Rats really have nothing better to do. My only question is, who let this little girl go on such a dangerous mission!? Esuna is a bit eccentric and peppy, showing off her glowing personality in her obscure and frankly weird sense of fashion. (HINT: It's the "prettiest" amalgamation of rags she could find.)

Mathieu is the third in our traditional party of four, and he is a young Ranger of Kent. Kent usually chooses a dark, Hunter green to represent itself, and so Mathieu wears an outfit sporting his nation's colors. It also doubles as camouflage! While older than Zane, Mathieu still isn't quite an adult meaning that the next character has to be our token older dude!

Meet Master Park. Aside from just stepping out of the 80's, Master Park is a Major in Kent's military meaning he's also known as Major Master Park. Notice the Hunter green ensemble. Unfortunately for Master Park, tragic things happen to him throughout the course of the story. Luckily for him, he gets off lucky as the game will end long before any "unfortunate" circumstances were to befall him. Good for you Master Park! So why isn't Zane wearing green armor if he's also a part of Kent's military? Well, for one, green plate armor is hard to come by and two, ::REDACTED FOR SPOILERS::.

So there's your motley band of heroes for the RPG I'm making. Next month I'll be posting up my final project for better or for worse for all of you to play around in. Until next time!

Something Different

I know I promised an update earlier this month and apologies on the delay, but I have literally been buried under the weight of homework. I forgot just how much work you get in school, and now that I'm actually doing my homework, I see for the first time how insane it is. In any case, that's not the reason I am posting today...

Starting Monday, I'll begin production on my final project for Game Design and Theory, a full game created in Game Maker. Now, admittedly, I have never touched Game Maker. When I decided I wanted to dive in and learn programming in order to make games, I did give Game Maker some thought, but eventually decided against it because I wanted to learn the intricacies of making games from scratch and just what goes into it. After spending two classes with a tutorial that could have been condensed to a single class, I still find the "coding" part a little awkward, but I'm looking forward to using this for rapid game development.

After some thought, (admittedly, not much) I settled on making the type of game I've been wanting to make for a long time now - a top down, 2D RPG. I figured if I'm going to spend two months working on a project, it might as well be something I haven't done before to teach me something new. I'll be developing this game as a homage to Final Fantasy, and so while there may be some similarities, the end experience will be entirely unique. Luckily, I do have a few pictures of enemies that will make an appearance in the game to show you today:

This is your basic, level 1 Goblin. A staple of traditional 2D RPGs. What hero doesn't want to just run into hundreds of these pathetic creatures and kill them for equally pathetic experience points and gold?

And this would be the level 2 Goblin! While, yes, I will have some palette swaps, I am also attempting to make each sprite a little unique in it's own way. Not much more to say about these minions of evil.

Finally, we have the first boss, and major antagonist of my little RPG, Garrick, the Traitor. Story details will be revealed later, but the events surrounding this villain will reverberate throughout the entire story should I decide to expand upon it.

And that's all I have for now. I'll be going to Philly this weekend for mega-nerdom in the form of the Philadelphia Magic Grand Prix. Of course, I will provide updates on this and my other projects as more is available. Enjoy, and talk to you all again soon!

Work, work, work!

Sorry for the delay in posting up an update. I had a wonderful vacation this past week and found myself stranded 75 miles from home when my car broke down. Everything's been taken care of and I'm currently in the process of catching up with all the school work I missed.

Speaking of which, I should reiterate that progress on future releases is going to hit a brick wall. The work load with this semester of college is even heavier than I had originally anticipated, doubly so now that I'm rushing to catch up on all the work I missed. The good news being of course that I'm expanding my horizons and learning a new language in addition to getting formal education on another. This semester I'll be learning the nuances of both Flash and Java. I've already made games in Flash before, but Java excites me as it's a very popular language.

In addition to the above, I may have found just the guy to do sound for my game projects. Nothing's final yet, but when I find time to go into full production again, you can expect me to introduce you to him and belt out 8-Bit Dimension.

The number of downloads for Mana Clash have exceeded my expectations, and I hope those of you who have downloaded it enjoyed the game. One day I would love to find time to fix it up a little and add a few more features, but my focus at the moment is moving forward with new games. As always, I am always open to your feedback and take it into consideration with each release.

I wish I had more news for you, but with the school cram, sadly I haven't had time to make any progress worth noting! However, I will at least post up a screenshot of the pre-alpha build as it stands right now.

I'll catch up with all of you again next month unless I can find some time to belt out some code and get this game just a little closer to completion. Until then, take care of yourselves and enjoy what ever game currently occupies your platform of choice!

Progress Report

Greetings everyone!

I hope you enjoyed the teaser to 8-Bit Dimension I posted up earlier this month. I've been hard at work getting the game primed and ready so all of you can download the early builds and take the game for a spin. Admittedly, I haven't been able to put as much work into the project as I had originally intended. Summer is winding down and I've been trying to spend as much time hanging out with friends and going places as I can before I get sucked back into the grind that is school.

Despite this, I have managed to sneak in some time to work on my current project, and I am happy to tell all of you that as of today, it is in a playable form. Unfortunately, I won't be releasing Alpha 1 just yet. I'm not satisfied with the game-play and want to tweak it a little bit before releasing it as well as add in a few more features to give the game some substance. In addition, classes start next week, and then I am going on vacation the following weekend, so my development time is going to take a severe hit in the coming months while I focus on my school work. I will continue to post updates on on the progress of the game as well as other little tid bits periodically, starting with when I get back from vacation in early September. Look for it!

While I won't be giving you a playable version of the game today, what I can do is tell you what you can expect with 8-Bit Dimension.

8-Bit Dimension is going to be a block breaking pong type game, much in the same vein as Breakout and Arkanoid. You'll have your standard fare of block puzzles, power ups, and enemies, but in a twisted 8-bit realm of forgotten icons trapped in a glitch. Your mission is simple: To traverse the game by destroying the blocky monoliths of games that lost themselves in this dimension until you find what's causing the disturbance and neutralize it.

Also, I'd like to take the time to say that the release schedule will be a little bit different this time around from Mana Clash. There will still be two Alphas, followed by two Betas, and then a release, but the releases will be a bit more staggered. The main reasoning behind this is rather than implementing a few ideas, then releasing the build for critique, I decided that I want the different versions to feel much different. This is also partly why I want to wait on releasing the initial Alpha, as I want the release schedule to smoothly transition into launch while encompassing a greater number of mile stones for each version.

That's all for today, but rest assured I will return with more news, and the latest version soon! Until then, enjoy what ever games you are currently occupied with!

8-Bit Dimension

1983 was a bad year to start a Video Game Company, just ask Gencom.

In 1983, a group of college students decided that they were going to get in on the video game madness sweeping the nation and formed their own company, Gencom. The plan was simple: Release a Breakout clone for the Vectrex. Fate, however, had a different plan. With the video game crash of 1983 and the Vectrex pulled off the market mere months later, Gencom found itself treading water in an unstable industry.

After a year of uncertainty with mounting debts, Gencom was prepared to shutter it's doors when news of the Nintendo Entertainment System reached the collective. Borrowing money from their parents, friends, and any one else who would invest in their dream they pushed to stay afloat and survive until they could launch a game on this new platform. By the end of the year Gencom had come mere inches from their goal before a lack of outside investor support sealed the deal.

Oh, but our story doesn't end here. In fact, it is just beginning! You see, by October Gencom had completed their game and sought money only for marketing and distribution. Investors still wary of the video game industry weren't willing to risk their money on another failed venture. Ironically, the NES went on to become one of the most popular gaming consoles of all time and nearly single-handedly revived the entire industry. After selling all of their assets to repay some of the debt, all that remained of Gencom was a single prototype cartridge for their game "Brick Busters." A prototype recently rediscovered and sold on ebay to a video game archivist, left rest in the halls of brothers it never had.

Brick Busters had a secret. A terrible, dark secret. For shortly after Brick Busters was admitted into the archive, the games around it slowly stopped working. After twenty-five years of bitter jealousy and hatred something in Brick Busters had been locked in stasis, never to face the thrill of battling a human opponent. Trapping portions of the other games within it's own, it seeks to destroy the very industry that had condemned the game so many years ago.

This is where you come in! We're developing a program to allow you passage into this realm, and we need you to free the other video games from this disturbance before it's too late! Are you ready to travel into the 8-Bit Dimension?

Mana Clash Release!

The download for Mana Clash can be found here.

This is it! My first public release of a game I programmed from scratch! At this point in time I feel that Mana Clash is complete. There were a few other features I wanted to add, but they were all auxiliary and unnecessary. If there is demand for me to revisit this game and add some more features, I may. But for now I'm going to move onto working on my next game full force. (After a brief celebratory respite that is.)

Now, that being said, I tested this game very thoroughly for as many bugs as I could find and fixed them. I played through the final build four times from start to finish after trying to break areas of weak coding, and I had no issues in my play-throughs. Of course, that doesn't mean that there aren't some obscure bugs lurking somewhere in the program. If you find any, let me know! I probably won't fix any non-essential bugs right away, but they will be top priority if I release another version in the future.

So, what's different with release from Beta? I essentially "turned on" the game.

- Added additional fixes for controller support. I am 99% certain that I nailed any loose ends that could cause the program to crash.
- Fixed a few bugs which could glitch the game making progression impossible under certain, rare situations.
- Added level progression up to level 20. If you beat level 20, you will be given the option to re-play level 20 as many times as you like. Sad to say, there is no ending, so if you are that awesome at the game go ahead and see how many times you can beat round 20 before you lose.
- Modified the initial placement of blocks slightly. Now you should have no more than 2 of the same type of block next to each other.

In the future I will be giving Mana Clash it's own dedicated page linked from this blog, and I will need to look into a different online storage provider that can host Mana Clash beyond the 30 day limit that Rapid Share has. Suggestions would be very much appreciated!

I hope you enjoy the game I made! It was certainly a learning experience programming my first game from scratch. My next game is going to be another take on an arcade classic. I wish I could tell you more, but it's only in it's early stages, and I'm still in the process of looking for someone to do sound for it. Rest assured, however, that I will post news as soon as it's available here on the blog. Until next time, enjoy, and feel free to tell me what you think!

Mana Clash Beta 2

The download for the new version can be found here.

Yes, I have been very busy working on finishing the game this week. This is it, Beta 2! This is the final release before the full version. After all the work I put into this game over the past week, I'm going to take a short break before I get down to business and blitz through what's left to complete the game. You can expect the full release 2 weeks from now at the latest, though schedule permitting and no problems withstanding, it might be available within a week's time.

Now, as this is the Beta v2 I would appreciate any and all feedback as I work to complete the game. I will be submitting this to pygame.org to feature and allow others to download and the last thing I want to happen is discover some game breaking bug after it's submitted. Of particular interest is a bug regarding controllers that my friend Neil pointed out to me after Beta 1 release. I put a work around in Beta 2 for those that do not have controllers, but I cannot duplicate the error on my machine, so I have no way of knowing if it is fixed for this release or not.

The Changelog this time around is rather small, but here it is:

- Fixed a bug that could cause the game to crash if the first mana pair in a game was rotated at specific intervals during gameplay.
- Tweaked Controller settings to allow the game to run if the user does not have a controller plugged into their PC. (I hope. I need more feedback on this!)
- Added basic game information that shows the level, speed, and number of blocks remaining.
- Added animated sprites to represent the different elements outside the game board.

There's still a lot that needs to be done in order to complete this game. At this point I'm not sure what I will keep and what I will cut to get a workable game done and out of the way. Most of my decisions in this regard are going to be made on the fly as I work on finishing the game. If there is a feature you really want to see, let me know! Otherwise, as I said in my last post, even post-release I may work on the game here and there to include some of the features I wanted in my original draft. Until next time, enjoy!