And he's also getting smarter...

Not much progress this week. Just read up on Panda's various capabilities and learned more about animating models. My cohort, Phil, and I went through a long process of trying to get animations and exporting working, and after several hours, we got it.

The one thing I did do is implement mouse picking (click on an object). I spent most of my time this week working on other projects.

Announcing: Project MBC3D

No, I didn't cancel Prince Dallio. This project has been in the conceptual stage for a while now. The difference here is, it's actually a REAL LIFE project with other REAL LIFE team members, not interwebber drones.

Several years ago, Chad Austin (I think) a.k.a. AegisKnight a.k.a aegis a.k.a. The All-Knowing Chad Austin introduced the SausageDance crew to an obscure game called Moonbase Commander. We played it heavily for a while, but it fell out of rotation, maybe due to the pisspoor networking/game customization options.

I took the liberty of passing the game onto my real life friends (you're welcome, Infogrames), and we all loved it as well. The gameplay was refreshingly simple, and you always felt like you let yourself down when an opponent found a chink in your setup and brought your whole base down. We played it heavily for a while, but it fell out of rotation, once again.

Fast forward to March 2009. After getting out of the hospital and feeling much better (another story entirely), I had the game-making itch something fierce. I tossed the idea out, almost sarcastically, that we should remake Moonbase Commander, but this time it would be in 3D. Then a pause. Then I realized that was a great idea.

The idea evolved a bit, and we decided not to remake the game inch-for-inch, as we wanted to maintain some kind of artistic integrity and make our own game. However, for the base engine, we aim to copy the mechanics of MBC fairly closely, and branch off from there.

I found Panda3D, a 3D engine using Python, and I decided I'd use it for the project, as I'm the head programmer. After tinkering around, I managed to generate some terrain and put objects on it. Here are some screenshots of my tinkering:

Design

Overview

The evil wizard Moldeus is threatening the Kingdom of Tyrax once again. Prince Dallio has set out to do battle with him, but he is quite weak and stands no chance. His retainer Sedgwick has taken care of the Prince his whole life, and has done everything for him, and as a result the Prince has grown up naive and unable to provide for himself. Sedgwick offers his services to the Prince to guide him on his journey, but the Prince declines; a true hero must go it alone and face death to truly serve the Kingdom.

...So take control of Sedgwick and manipulate the events in the Prince's journey without his knowledge to increase his odds of defeating Moldeus.

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View

A quite simple 2d puzzle game style view, where everything is just plastered onto the screen (or just think every NES game that takes place on a map). There will be a window on the side that lists events currently happening, a window on the bottom detailing Sedgwick's stats and Dallio's entourage stats (more abbreviated), and a window close to Sedgwick's stats showing his current inventory. Pressing some??? button will zoom the main view out to show the whole world map.

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Map: Exploration

The game takes place on the continent of Tyrax and a small archipelago next to it housing Moldeus' Keep. It is roughly divided into ??? X areas, each ending with a thematic boss and granting entry to a wider area. Exploration is mostly linear, but ??? it might allow branching at one point, just for fun.

The Prince and his entourage will plod slowly along the main road until they hit a dead end or an obstacle that you've placed for them, at which point they'll try to find a way around or send out a messenger to summon workers from the kingdom to come and clear the obstacle (can't have the Prince and his entourage doing the dirty work, can we?)

??? In each area you might find watchtowers that you can climb to reveal the current screen or the current area.

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Map: Interaction

The following are ideas for interactable objects/obstructions:

Automatic:
- The horses will get tired and need to drink from a nearby stream.

Obstruct the prince:
- Chop down a tree, it falls into the road. The King then sends back a messenger to bring workers.
- Cut down a rope bridge.
- Place a detour sign on a circular road.
- The entourage stops at a bar for a while.

Train the prince:
- Enemies: lure them out onto the main path to force the prince to fight them.
- Shop: steal or buy the items you don't want the prince to have. In this way you can force him to use the equipment you think he should.

Train yourself:
- Perform various odd tasks for NPCs to gain useful items or money or something.

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Resources: Music

All music should have a generic high fantasy orchestral sound to it. Lo-fi, MODs or MP3s, nothing needs to be longer than about a minute but it should loop seamlessly.

- Easy Battle Theme - victorious sounding, fantasy fanfares
- Hard Battle Theme - exciting, dangerous, maybe you'll lose
- Boss Battle Theme - dark, foreboding, orchestral

- Grassland Theme
- Snowy Theme
- Jungle Theme
- Desert Theme
- Dark/Badland Theme

- Prince's Fanfare, Long (5 sec) - trumpets, royal, etc
- Prince's Fanfare, Short (2 sec) - smaller version of above
- Sedgwick's Fanfare (2 sec) - comical, sparse, instruments of the peasantry

New/Quick Project: Temporary name "Prince Dallio"

The evil wizard Moldeus is threatening the Kingdom of Tyrax once again. Prince Dallio has set out to do battle with him, but he is quite weak and stands no chance. His retainer Sedgwick has taken care of the Prince his whole life, and has done everything for him, and as a result the Prince has grown up naive and unable to provide for himself. Sedgwick offers his services to the Prince to guide him on his journey, but the Prince declines; a true hero must go it alone and face death to truly serve the Kingdom.

...So take control of Sedgwick and manipulate the events in the Prince's journey without his knowledge to increase his odds of defeating Moldeus.

I know what you're saying: so when's the next project idea gonna come? Well, shut up. That's when.

This is a quicker project and isn't some pipedream game like my tactics nonsense in its various incarnations. I don't anticipate working on this for more than a month.

Get hit by a sword twice.

I announce my return to Gruedorf.

I have retooled my tactics game ideas a bit, and now I am making an RPG with no numerical statistics.

More details to come.

Back again, bitches! ...on a different project!

I just won't stop pretending to come back from the dead. Blogs are cool like that.

Let's face it -- my old idea was too big, TOO EXCITING for the world to handle. So, I'm going to be working on giving old ika games a facelift to better improve ika's standing in the world. I'm starting with Fukyuuten, since it's probably the closest thing to a finished, well-rounded game that ika has.

More info soon.

Less-than-triumphant return.

Insiders will know that I stopped failing about a week ago, but there hasn't been enough to show until now. I started back (mostly) from scratch a week ago, using ika. All that pyogre stuff is long gone... FOR NOW.

I started by making my own entity system because I wanted to tie it in more closely with the characters, and ika's doesn't give me enough control over the actual sprite drawing. The sprites are completely overhead at least for the time being, so I simply rotate their sprite to face whatever direction they're facing. That way, you only have to draw one direction for a particular frame. Also, the sprite is color coded and I color-replace when the character is made because I'm so lazy that all my characters and enemies will be color-swaps.

So far, you can walk around, the camera follows (it's zoomed in), your party follows and they face you, and I've got some rudimentary party formation stuff going (but it'll require a more robust pathfinding thingy than I've got, so it doesn't work very well right now). Here's a screenshot:

It won't win any awards for graphics, but I'm fine with that. It's a triumph for me because usually I'm too picky about having good art to get anything done. Getting over that is the first big step to global domination. I still won't rip anything, though; I'd sooner make a scribble. It's the principle of the thing.

(Not shown: the ability to rescale the screen to the chosen user resolution. I store an internal game resolution and made a little system for scaling it and centering it if the user resolution is not 4:3. Thus, I'm running ika at 1680x1050 on my widescreen, and instead of stretching everything, it centers everything at 4:3.)

I don't know if I'll update next week since I'm currently battling tonsilitis (or possibly strep throat) and general ickyness. But I'll try. Now that I've got some Obamamentum momentum, I might be able to keep it up.