Looks wonderful. I like the paintings!

Long time has handed for the reason that final replace. In these months we improved the event instruments, outlined some pointers for sprites, enemies and maps, then ready two public demos for 3 italian exhibitions. Our group decreased the dimensions from 6 to five members as a result of some inside re-organization too, that helped us to enhance the main target for our objective.

Some tiles was utterly re-designed, some tiles scrapped as a result of some Z-priority issues and we improved the shadow system.

The grass just isn’t a single shade anymore. We are utilizing a mix of 4 tiles for the grass, mixed with another small particulars on a separate layer (like flowers, small rocks, grass borders); a separate processor combines as a lot layers as potential, optimizing reminiscence, loading occasions and map measurement.

Small objects, taller than 16px and shorter than 48px, are positioned as objects and never tiles. This solves the Z-priority downside that I described on earlier web page. Currently the creation technique of an object is lengthy, we want a separate editor to create and place them in lower than one minute.

Animated tiles are a factor, however we’re planning to implement dynamic palette help too. Currently all the sport’s graphics is in 32-bit and we do not need a palette as reference. What we need to do then is to transform all of the graphics in 8-bit and use some old-school strategies like palette shifting, palette mixing and palette altering to realize nice animations with a minimal influence on performances.

We improved object’s shadow too. We are utilizing two shadow sprites, one 16×16 and one 32×32. Based on Z-virtual place, the shadow can have a special measurement and a special opacity. When the sport desires to render the shadow larger than 16×16, it makes use of the 32×32 model. Imagine it as a mipmap system.

An important effort was devoted to optimization: it’s presently potential to render and course of recreation’s logic of greater than 2500 totally different objects (the place every one makes use of the dynamic shadow system that I described beforehand) , operating at [email protected] on an outdated Celeron CPU of 2008. There remains to be some room of improvments on sprite rendering system, as a result of solely few objects are included on batch rendering.

I’ll discuss new maps, gameplay improvments and enemies quickly

Okay, immediately we need to present you our first two enemies:

Barillo

Back on this put up, the Barillo was not even working or have any animation. Currently it’s outfitted with a really fundamental AI: it follows you, assaults after which get again. As easy and weak it may be, it appears enjoyable to take them down when mutiple Bairllo are searching the hero.

Onipolla

This unusual plant with an onion as the top, is attention-grabbing. It was designed to look the identical from any route, that allowed us to create round strikes across the hero. It has two assaults: a fundamental bodily harm from the lash of certainly one of their arms and a particular assault that inflicts poison when the hero is simply too shut.

Video gameplay

We created two movies throughout these 6 months of labor.

This early technical construct suffers from plenty of issues: the surroundings may be very static, the collisions usually are not working, some objects are mis-placed or not possible to make use of as a tileset as I described in this put up. We tried to keep away from some paths too to not present how that construct was damaged haha. Musics and sound results was positioned throughout the video manufacturing and was not performed from the sport.

This new construct got here greater than two months later with big improvments: a brand new tileset is used, a flatter and less complicated map is performed, the Onipolla has a spawn animation and may poison and the sport is 25% quicker. This construct was used as the primary playable demo ever throughout our first exhibition ever.

More or much less. We are doing this as a interest and throughout the free time, however with deadlines and a minimal of high quality content material that everybody ought to respect; that one did virtually nothing however harm and slowdowns in a single yr of “work” .

Today’s replace will probably be devoted to our first boss.

Its title is Sarmanthor and it’s situated within the cave space.
The first concept was that this type of big humanoid bat used its tail to assault and, often, used a single arm to slap the hero. Its physique can be situated on the sting of the display with out shifting. Another concept was that Sarmanthor catches a mining cart to throw it to the hero; on the influence, the mining cart can be destroyed, dropping some HP spheres. The solely means we needed to power the participant to battle it was that the boss battle occurred on a rock bridge, the place a part of it was destroyed by tail’s boss.

But throughout the manufacturing the principle concept modified drastically. We ended up that the boss can twists its tail on the edges of this rock bridge, trapping the hero. Then, the tail squezzes little by little, limiting the battle space whereas Sarmanthor makes use of the palms to hit the participant with punches. We although that the thought would work, then spriting and programming course of began.

We determined to separate the physique from the top so as to have the ability to animate them individually; this gave us extra flexibility throughout programming part, for the reason that animation may be extra realistics with out to sacrifice the A.I.. Since I’m utilizing my engine to programming it and it doesn’t help nestede entities, I ended as much as connect the top to the physique statically coding it.
The programming part concerned 4 days of labor, then we reached an excellent end result.

The boss was created as goal for the demo exhibition that we took the final month. During that day one of many predominant issues was that hitting the tails confirmed dealing harm and it was not clear that it was meant to cease and push away the tails. Infact the gamers tried to kill the boss hitting the tails and never the physique. That day I opened my reliable code editor and decreased the harm to 0, making use of a patch in couple of minutes. After that, the subsequent gamers fought it as we meant to be.

We want to add a long-range assault to Sarmanthor too. It can be an icy cloud or some sort of ice elemental ray that comes from its mouth. I coded it only for testing, however I don’t prefer it; we’ll attempt to change, enhance or take away it in subsequent days.

Obviously, boss battles has their devoted music!

This is all for immediately

(sure, the demise animation is impressed to Final Fantasy VI)

Overall, the progress you make appears unbelievable. The Secret of Mana vibe is unreal.

Thank you a lot :3 . Secret of Mana is certainly one of our favorite video games!

November was intense due the thought to use a pretend 3D system into the sport.

Since maps is a robust level on our recreation, we deliver again our concept so as to add depth to the maps. Currently we’re in a position to swap to totally different layers with the intention to use bridges or underground passages, however we weren’t utterly happy but. The depth system can be a breaking change for good. The concept got here from Alundra, certainly one of our reference factors.

The implementation was not too onerous however an extended course of. The idea is to mark each tile with a depth (a Z axis) worth whereas objects would translate their Y based mostly on Z. If the tile has a larger Z than the item will probably be thought-about as a strong wall, whereas whether it is smaller the item will begin to fall.

This leads me to different main issues: whereas Z place afflicts the Y on graphics drawing, the whole collision detection system ought to be tailored to this new system; a falling animation ought to be applied and we want but to discover a approach to resolve how climbing ought to work. Enemies mustn’t see you based mostly on a Z vary and each strong object ought to have a Z peak to resolve on what Z it ought to be strong. Our recreation would develop into a 3D however with 2D graphics.

Before to leap instantly on a critical implementation, we tried to implement the fundamentals and evaluated the primary end result:

Currently we’re pleased on the way it appears and we most likely resolve to maintain it on last model. It is a crucial step to think about now, since all our future maps ought to be based mostly on this alteration too. After deciding it, we’ll proceed to create a falling animation, repair the odd bugs and enhance physics and collision detection!