Town almost complete

Of the two total rooms and four screens of the Town I have completed one room and three screens. I have to draw the inside of your house, which shouldn't take too long, then the town will be complete (without any story events added in yet just the landscape) Also the game will hopefully be able to run in both 4:3 and 16:9 ratios. Right now it is in 4:3, but I checked out the 16:9 and it looks good so hopefully everything will work out when it comes to device capabilities. All I have to do with that is make sure it looks good in a room that is smaller that the 16:9 size and then not worry about it until way down the road. The town should be done by the end of the week, and sometime mid this week I'll start working on the enemies for the forest.

A curse upon you!

     I added cursed items into the game. These items are super powerful, but are to be used at a price. In the beginning of the game you will be warned to not use cursed items, marked by a different color background in the selection menu (hasn't been added yet.) Using cursed items will increase how badly you are cursed. What penalties you will face for being cursed (other than not being able to see the good ending and fight the real final boss) are yet to be determined. Whenever you hit an enemy with a cursed sword, you get more and more cursed. And if you get hit by an enemy when wearing cursed defensive gear you get cursed depending on how much cursed gear you have on. I plan to use some sort of item that can be crafted to get rid of how badly you are cursed so even if you use cursed items you can still finish the game completely, but the items will probably be hard to find.
     I also added in use items into the game, which can be used once and add either health, focus, or have some sort of special status effect for a certain time (status effects haven't been tested yet.) I'm pretty ahead of schedule and will be starting on the forest very soon.

One thing led to another...

I started working early today hoping to quickly knock some things off the new todo list. Two easy things were on the top of the list, make you have a limited supply of breath underwater and allow the bubble armor to make you float under water. I finished the first task quickly, you now lose one fifth of your max health per ever two seconds or so after being underwater for about five seconds, which will probably change when I get further into the game. Then I had to do the bubble armor thing. However there was no bubble armor in the game yet so I was ready to add a new object into the game, which was going to be easy with my new system. However something was wrong and it wouldn't appear in the menu. So I fixed that, then for some reason the entire jacket menu disappeared and I had to find out why that happened. And hour of troubleshooting later, I found out the problem. Then I could finally add about five short lines of code to add the new feature. Now everything should be perfect with adding new things into the game and I got two things off my todo list.Even though it took about two hours to do something that was only should have taken five minutes, I hope it will all work out in the end.

More making stuff easier for me to add items in the future

That's what I did so far today. I made it so enemies drop items which can be common (1/20 Kills will drop an item), rare (1/50 Kills will drop an item) or Super rare ( 1/100 kills will drop an item). And I also implemented money into the game and gave items a value for when they are to be sold or bought. However there is no way to get money currently. I also create a todo list for the game, which can be viewed at:

http://www.toodledo.com/views/public.php?id=td4cf0019720155

This will make it much easier for me to find out what I should work on next, since this morning I was wondering what I should do next. Now I have about 80 things that I have to do, but many of them won't get done for a while.

Started out trying to work on the pause screen...

... ended up making new items easier to add into the game. Before today if I wanted to add a new item I had to hard code it into the global variables, player sprite, and pause screen. Now all I have to do, after an hour or so of coding, if edit the global variables code. Hopefully that I spent doing that will take off days of work in the end.

Working on the Pause Screen Again

I'm working on the game again. Black Ops lasted shorted than I expected. I am trying to make the pause screen easier to add things to, but that might not be working. I implemented the background scaling and it didn't look right so I am leaving it out for now. When I fix the size of the pause screen to match the new resolution I will post pics.

First Screen Shot

I got home early today and was eager to start putting images into the game. I contemplated just putting the background (which I drew last night) in on paint and making a fake screen shot. But I didn't. I programmed the background into the game so it draws like everything else. It took longer then I thought it would, but I haven't done any programming since September or so, so had to get the hang of it. The next thing I am going to do is make the far background scale so it looks like it moves off in the distance. Without further ado here is the image you've all been waiting for:

The HUD doesn't have much detail yet which I will add eventually, along with the pause screen which needs to be re-sized. I also need to make a tile-set because it will take a lot less time than what I did yesterday (above) which took about two hours. Okay, an hour and a half. But a tile-set would cut the time down so much, especially when the rooms get bigger and more intricate.

The map

This is the concept map so far. I have the first 30 or so cells in the game (starting at top left). Tonight I'll color up the first room and make it look nice and then post a nice screen shot tomorrow hopefully so you can see what the game looks like. And I will start programming the background scaling or whatever it is called when the background moves at a different rate then the foreground. Also, I fixed (hopefully) the bug where you fall through the ground. And thanks to whoever is viewing my blog.

A Dilemma?

Yesterday I started implementing the level into the game, and I knew something was going wrong right away. My screen resolution for the game was set to 640x480, so each "screen" or block on the map would be that size. But it was much to big for what I had planned. So I experimented with that size and it didn't fit. Everything was to big, so I changed the screen resolution to 480x360 which is a very weird screen size, but fits the game perfectly. Hopefully this doesn't affect (effect?) the game when I decide to port it to the Xbox. I've roughly placed out the collision blocks for the first 14 or so rooms of the game totaling about 30 screens and a weird glitch surfaced. When you fall in some weird way (maybe when you fall in the line between two adjacent blocks if that makes any sense) you go through the ground. That is definitely a game breaking glitch that I need to fix. Oh well. Lets hope for the best.

It is time

Today I am starting implementing the map into the game. I never got to finishing the crawlway but it is about time to actually start working on the actual game again. First I will put the Town and Forest areas into the game, then draw the backgrounds (all hand-drawn not tileset) and post pics of the game after I'm done. No enemies or bosses or items will be put in yet. After I decide how the level design is that I have made I will continue working on the sketches of the level.

A Dude With A Sword

     Ok, I don't actually expect anyone to visit this, but if they do, that's awesome. I'm mainly using it to help me to keep working on a game I started mid summer 2010 but my computer keeps telling me I stared it September 4, 2010. Even though I know for a fact I started it way before that. Oh well. The game started out as a shot puzzle platformer that I was going to finish in under a month. But after I finished the basic engine, I kept wanting to add more and more, until the concept of the game ended up being a full fledged castleroid game, or metroidvania, whatever you want to call it. So now I have a boat load of work a head of me, hundreds of enemies to design, draw, and program. Along with weapons, armor, and more. Oh, and music. I have no idea how I will make all the music.

So what do I have done so far? Here's a list.
Done:
In the basic engine
Moving
Gravity
Ramps (glitchy)
Pause Screen
Inventory
Changing Weapons/Armor
Changing your sprite along with different armor
Moving from room to room
Enemies able to hit and get hit
Damage being shown
Double Jump
Water
Anti Gravity Power Up
Speed Dash

In the concept for the map:
The areas and path which you must go through the game
The powerups you get and where they let you go

In the drawing of the actual map:
Town
Forest
Cave
Entrance
Armory
Waterway
Catacombs

Enemies:
All enemies and bosses up to the point I am in drawing the actual map

/Done

     I still have a boat load to do. About five more areas to draw out, along with the revisited areas for almost every area. I haven't programmed anything else except everything in the basic engine category so I got a while to go. I hope to finish the Crawlway tonight. I hope to get a few more areas done before next Tuesday because after Tuesday nothing is going to get done.
     In case you haven't figured out the game is a 2d side scroller in the form of Metroid or Castlevania. The two series that helped define my childhood. It resembles Castlevania a lot, but I am trying to make them less and less similar. I decided to start making the game while playing Castlevania Harmony of Despair when I realized how (dare I say it) much fun I was having while playing the game and looting the chests. I wanted to make a game in which you loot a lot, but don't get pissed off at the game because you killed Dracula 200 times and he still didn't drop the Valmanway. And I also love leveling up. When designing the game I hope to make leveling up frequent but not too frequent in which leveling doesn't mean anything. When it takes two years to go up one level like in Halo, I feel the game is a lot less fun. The game is being programmed in C# and hopefully when it gets completed will be playable on the XBox indie games. I'm thinking about selling it for 80msp despite the game's hopefully huge size. Mostly because I don't know who wouldn't buy a game with hours upon hours of gameplay for a dollar, I feel more people will play it if it is for a dollar (even if it means I lose money), and I really am not trying to make money; I am trying to release a game for a console, something I always dreamed of doing as a kid.
     After typing this I feel like it has done its job, making me feel psyched for continuing on the project. I really hope that this blog helps me keep on track on making this game and accomplishing my goal. Thank you for your time.