New Look, New Gameplay, New Everything...

It's been a while. I took a momentary hiatus from working on ADWAS after the huge amount of trouble I was getting with the random map generator frustrated me. There was probably a really easy way to do it that I just didn't see. Anyway none of that matters anymore. During that break I started to transfer one of my old gamemaker files to XNA. I basically finished the engine and realized that I was wasting my time. So I stopped that. (I seem to be returning to my old ways where I start and quit a project :'(. ) Then I decided to take the ADWAS engine, change it to 8 Bit and make the game more Megaman esque, where there are levels and a boss for each level, not an open world. But it would have collectible items from crates, enemies would drop items, there will be special items that change your player's abilities, a shop, two different playable characters (a sword user and a gun user), and more.
So far all of the game's main menus have been completed, for example: you press start to start the game, then choose a save file (up to 3), or start a new game, then you can either deploy to a level, or go to the armory and change your equipment for the level. You can also go to the shop and buy/sell items in the armory. This has all been added to the game excluding a menu for the special items. From there I created what I think will be the first/easiest level of the game, the Junkyard. The level has 4 different unique enemies (specific to the level) and a boss. The level is complete, along will all the programming for all the enemies/boss except that the boss does not explode when it dies which will be the next thing I have to work on. I also added special abilities such as wall jumping, dashing, and rope grabbing (this one is hard to explain), and probably more that I don't remember at the time. So that is what I have done, now this is what I plan to do.
I plan on having either 6 or 8 levels in the game, probably 6. Which would break up into two tiers of 3 levels. The second tier would be locked until you defeat the first tier. Each tier starts with the first two levels locked, and the third level of the tier would be unlocked after defeating the first two levels of the tier. This will still allow you to somewhat choose what order you play the levels (like in megaman) but still have an increase of difficulty and weapon/armor drop power. I don't really remember how this drastic change to the game took place, but it was right after I broke my leg and was playing the final dlc level of Castlevania HD and thinking how much it sucked that that was going to be the final level. Anyway, to end this wall of text here are some pictures of how beautiful the game looks now. Oh, and did I mention it runs in 720p?

This is the beginning of the level, the thing on the left is the first enemy I made in the game, all it does is jump, things to the right of the main character (the guy with a sword) are compressors that squash you and you take damage. You cannot see it in the picture but to the right of the pistons is a treadmill that works just like the treadmills in metalman's stage in megaman 2.

This is a picture of the first boss. Shoots lasers, throws wheels, and smashed you with the smashers. You destroy him by hitting his eyes, then when you smash both of them you break the thing in the middle of his head. I also made an armor that looks like the original ADWAS guy. Also you can pretty much fully customize your character. The parts that you can now change independently are the head, body, legs, and arms, apposed to the original changing of the head, body, and jacket. And to the best of my knowledge everything follows the 8 Bit (Original Nintendo) rules for color somewhat strictly (sometimes I use a one or two too many colors per sprite, but each color is directly from a NES palette.)

RMG Day 4

On day 4 I fixed the overlapping room for every room except the first room. Now when a room overlaps it changes to the room that should be there after the map has been fully created. I think the game is going to end up becoming a dungeon crawler.I'll have to see how it turns out. The first picture is the RMG without any limits, rooms can be placed anywhere connected to another room, creating a very claustrophobic tight map. The second has limits on where the room is created, creating a longer map, but for some reason at the end the rooms destroy themselves. I'll find out what's wrong with that later.

RMG Day 3

A whole lotta glitches, mostly with rooms over lapping over themselves, this will hopefully be ended after the map is fully generated then I will eliminate problems with the map so that the game will be playable. At the rate I'm heading this map generator will be finished in a month or so. Hopefully by the end of February. On day 3, more like week 2, I limited the amount of 3 door passage ways could be created, and tried to stop overlapping, and failed. Here's a picture of a map that came out good.

RMG Day 2

I took about 20 minutes today and decided to add single cells with two doors instead of one, to create different paths and make the game less linear. Something happened that made me super happy. There was no glitches what so ever. Something that never happens. I put the code in, started the game and everything went exactly as I wanted. I still need to limit the amount of different paths that can be made, so the entire game isn't a whole bunch of different paths. Thats all for today, here's a picture of a randomly generated map:

RMG Started

Started the RMG (random map generator) today. I started doing it wrong, and it took a couple hours until I decided to start from scratch again. Getting all of the different tiles that form the map and naming them took the longest though, and some distractions on the way also didn't help. So far there is no limit on how the map can be created, so it just randomly creates single cell rooms that lead to other single cell rooms. Sometimes it stops before the map crosses sections, but sometimes it doesn't and that needs to be fixed. It looks like it is working well so far, here's an example of what I just generated a couple seconds ago using 30 rooms.

A wise man once said...

An idea is like a virus. Resilient… highly contagious. The smallest seed of an idea can grow. It can grow to define, or destroy you.

And that is what is about to happen. I was in class today, and out of nowhere I had an idea. My first instinct was to start making a new game with the idea, but no. I have given up on my foolish ways of giving up. I decided to incorperate my idea with ADWAS, since the game is pratically still just an engine. So what was the idea? Randomly generated world. A randomly generated map allows unlimited replay value since the game is pratically new every time you play it. This will be quite challenging, and I hope I can pull it off. I plan to randomly generate a map/overworld, imagine the map you would see in a metroid game, hallways, vertical columns, open big rooms all making up a larger world. There would be rooms that have to be in the game ex. shops, boss rooms, special item rooms, and I would have to make a tileset for the game: something that I didn't plan on doing but is now a necessity. After generating the large map, the game will generate the individual rooms. Depending on how this ends up working the game will either remain being a castleroid exploration game, or it will become a dungeon crawler type game similar to Castlevania Harmony of Dispair. Hopefully this turns out to define, not destroy this game.

Collision

I haven't been working on the game for the week or so, however in the time that I did put into the game I added the gate that opens after getting a key, and per pixel collision checking. Now the enemies will have much better collision checking and be easier to make.