NEVER... do this...
about 6 years ago
– Thu, Jan 16, 2020 at 12:09:26 AM
Just in case you, or any of our other friends here needed to hear it...
Never Give Up!
Do not give up on the big things. Especially do not give up on the little things. Sometimes, we just gotta dig deep and give it that little extra push.
Your friend,
Artix
P.S. This was an incredibly short update post :D Normally I send lots of screenshots.... ones that do not contain any spoilers. Which has been hard, because the best screenshots are always the ones from those "awesome moments" during game play. Instead I post things like prototype caves...
... which, I am excited to share because while Clarion using does our pixel art, I actually drew the stalactites and stalagmites! They connect and you can walk behind them sometimes. It looks really cool. Also drew the new door and pillars. Oh, and we finally decided on a final "save game" object...
...which is the book in this pic. Loosely modeled after the Book of Lore, which was modeled after the Evil Dead / Army of Darkness's Necronomicon-- I stuck a 'lil skull on the cover. When you play, you should pretend it talks to you. At least, that is what I see it doing in my head.
Thanks to Dale Coop, we are now able to do cool things like this water effect. What is really happening, is one of the 4 background pallets is being continually rotated.
I <3 this effect so much.
We are going to use it a bunch. Also, if you have an eagle eye for pixel art, do not worry. I already fixed the water tile.
Glisel: Artix, are you adding more "naturally forming" cave pillars?
Artix: 8-Bit retro game nature is a mysterious and beautiful thing.
Glisel: ...
Artix: They are just Stalagmites that rolled a 20 on charisma.
Glisel: .............................
Last time we talked, I was nose-deep in the intro's boss fight. We uh, immediately ran into some horrific problems. First....
We filled up the bank that stores our animations.... O_O. *gulps*. "That's bad, M'kay?"
While I share this story, I will distract you with a piece of Pumpkin pie my beloved waifu made for me to fuel NES development.
It is gluten free.
So, previously I ran out of room for monsters. We only have room for 64 monsters and 16 player "thingies". Flexing my inner-hacker, I started packing multiple monsters together into one.... giving us the ability to have MORE than 64 monsters. Not realizing that the 64 limit was put in place because it is not realistic to fit more than that in there animation-wise! LOL.
Also... we have a lot of "HUGE" monsters.
Well, huge from a 1985 video game console's perspective.
So, the good news... is that game is since I cannot just sit there adding new things every night, I will actually have to finish the game now XD
But it does mean there are going to be a lot of things orphaned onto the "cutting room floor". Thankfully we can use those for the CHAOS ROM.
Whatever it takes to make room for... THIS BAD GUY!
Clarion made A LOT of frames of animation for Sepulchure. Unfortunately, we will not be able to use all of them.
You can create 8-Bit NES art in any graphics program. Photoshop, Asesprite, Pixel, MS Paint...
This is the actual sprite sheet for the DoomKnight.
I always assumed we would spent more time in these posts talking about the process of making and squeezing these things into the NES.
But why is it RED, GREEN, and BLUE only?
Those colors work like paint masks in the NESMaker Tool. I have some strategies that I came up with for doing this that I would LOVE to share with you in a future post.
But really want to talk to you about the actual Monster and BOSS Fights!
Because creating this fight, I had hit a serious problem.
If you played our previous Dungeons & DoomKnights tests, there was a sorta common strategy... which was, dodge a bunch, run in and hit the Boss, then run away.
That was because we had to. But not any more!
Have you ever seen 6502 Assembly Language code before? (I know some of you have... and you guys, no making fun! I know I am just a hedge mage at this :)
O_O
So, this change (along with a few really huge fixes by Dale Coop to the engine) allows you to hit a monster for a certain amount of time.
In short... you can now hit a monster 3 or 4 times before they go invulnerable and run away.
Talking about beating up monsters. We needed a clear way for players to know if something would open up if you killed all of the monsters in the room. Dungeons & DoomKnights is mostly about exploring, gaining powers, and using them to unlocking even more areas and powers.
So we added those little blocks with skulls on it. If you see those blocks... then you will know that killing all of the monsters in the room will cause it to open.
We tried a lot of things... mostly trying to think of something more immersive. We needed something that was clear to see no matter if you were on a chaos map, an ice castle, a slime cave, or a magical forest.
We also added a ton of new features & fixes....
- JUMP animation! (You no longer look like one of the zombies with rigor mortis when you jump... it is very Belmont-esque)
- Your weapon can now be "de-activated" by NPCs
- Multiple hits added to monsters
- Offloaded a little bit of code space... (every line counts!)
- Levers can now turn on and off things
Here you can see my brave little play testers hard at work. Except....
THEY BROKE THE GAME!
I mean broke it bad. I had my editor up and... somehow they switched to the editor and hit some random keys. I do not even know HOW they broke the game as bad as they did. Took me an hour to find these "extra four zeroes" in one of the screen files:
/facepalm
When you talk about game development troubles... 3 year old hackers is not one of the things you normally think of XD
All fixed now.
Thank you
Hope you enjoyed this post. Actually, if you are one of the few who made it to here... you deserve some sort of special title :D
If there is anything I have learned from video games, when you are encountering new and increasingly tough challenges, you are DEFINITELY going the right way!
