Also... When opening presents... beware of mimics.
Over the holidays I will be working on finishing and polishing the areas between the intro and the Vampire Castle....
...and also a bunch of bug fixes. The goal is to have a new shiny ROM featuring the first major chunk of the game ready for you on the last day of the year. (Which is also my Birthday)
Above is actual video of us chasing down bugs. XD
From our families to you and yours, Happy Holidays and...
Happy Frostval 8-Bit Undead Slayers!
over 3 years ago
– Sat, Dec 19, 2020 at 01:40:54 AM
Happy Frostval 8-Bit Undead Slayers!
Wherever you are, I hope you are warm, safe, and slaying the evil forces of the undead.
It has been 2 weeks since we opened the Backer-Only discord server for testing. Since then we have released.... 50 Testing ROMs!? O_O Each one was a micro-test focusing on a small area, group of monsters, feature, or fight. If you backed this project through BackerKit, check the Discord portion of this post later down the page on how to join us.
Time for your progress update!
Behold the entrance to the Vampire Castle. Home to Safiria, Queen of the Vampires. In our most recent test, we have been focusing on unlocking that gate.
In the screenshot above you see Gravelyn (pronounced Grave-Lynn). She will be your guide through most of the game. When you see her, you always know you are going the right way. (Or possibly the wrong way XD)
She received new art!
Story time!
Previously, I shared the improved the art for Death (The Grim Reaper). Seeing that the monster and the bigger NPC art no longer matched, Clarion (our pixel artist), redrew Death. But then... our main characters no longer matched. F.J. (our map maker and also well known pixel artist) said "hold my moglinberry juice" and re-did Artix & Gravelyn.... without even telling us XD
They look so much better! (Crazy how every pixel matters)
I feel Gravelyn is so much more expressive and lively now. Considering you will be seeing her on screen more than any other character, this really ups the art of the game.
Hard to tell that crazy look in her eyes that she has in his year's Calendar XD
Gravelyn is at the center of all my major 2021 projects. So much that she is the keystone of this year's calendar. It is available at www.HeroMart.com and shipping now.
Talking about physical merch....
We received the 12"x18" Dungeons & DoomKnights posters from the printers. It was drawn by Dioz (same artist who did the calendar) and painted by Dage.They look GREAT! Professionally creased so they will fit perfectly in your package.
Needless to say, I have been stressing over our long past due deadlines and working crazy hours to get the game ship-ready. But after seeing what happened with CyberPunk 2077, I am now more worried about sharing that fate. Thankfully, the testers on our Discord server have been finding hordes of bugs and issues that we have been aggressively fixing.
Join us on the Dungeons & DoomKnights Discord Server
There is a lobby for everyone, and also a VIP Backer-Only testing area
At this time, we would like to invite everyone who is interested in the project to join the Dungeons & DoomKnights Discord server. This server is dedicated just to this game and its development (Not the other Artix Entertainments games, if you would like that, you can find the Artix Discord Server here)
The Dungeons & DoomKnights discord server has a lobby for everyone to hang out and talk. If you are a backer from Kickstarter or BackerKit, send Clarion a message and he will verify you as a backer, awarding you the title of "8-Bit Undead Slayer" which will grant you access to the testing area.
A core group of testers have sort of formed that are extremely good at running through the ROMs (and jumping the walls to sneak around unreleased parts of the game XD). It is pretty casual, very spoiler filled, and generally a good time. If you are interested in this sort of testing you are welcome to join us. If you would like to wait for the full game to be released simply resist the urge of peeking in that room XD
P.S.Cookie Contest! We are running our yearly cookie contest. This one is being judged by the creators of the game, Cookie Clicker. It would be great to see some tasty 8-bit inspired creations.... see the official 2020 Cookie Contest post for details.
Horrifying new 8-Bit Monsters & Discord Testing Server!
over 3 years ago
– Sun, Dec 06, 2020 at 11:14:34 PM
Horrifying New 8-Bit Monsters & Discord Testing Server
Greetings 8-Bit Undead Slayers!
It is a skull crushingly awesome week for Dungeons & DoomKnights. Clarion and I have been on a roll. We have been in crunch mode, up every night working on D&DK till 1 to 4am. We have new monsters, new areas, better music, and we just opened a Discord server that you can join if you are a backer who wants to help test! (The official invitation link will be in the backer-only post which immediately follows this one.) The first tests are going to be some super basic monster tests. Because we added a bunch of new monsters and played musical chairs with all of the monster banks-- need to make sure the basic stuff is still working. Read on....
New Monsters & Monster Art
Shadow Lord (Updated art)
Skull Serpent (New Monster)
Seed Spitter (New Monster)
Undead Archer (New Monster)
Undead Mage (New Monster)
Necromancer (New Art)
Hand (New Is it right... or left? XD)
Spider (New Monster)
Bouncing Skull (New Monster)
Chompers the chompy Skull (New Monster)
Big Bones Collector (New Monster)
"Flame on!" Skull (New Monster)
Frogard (New art!)
Death (New art!)
Zombie (Updated art & animation)
Lich (New Casting art frame)
Old vs New skeleton
We added and improved a bunch of the game's monsters. The new skeletons are sooooo much better than our previous ones! We did more than that...
Crunching Monsters into Memory Banks
The NES has a super tiny about of memory for Graphics. At least, compared to today's video game systems. That image above is our total space for monsters at a single time. In this "Undead Pack" you can see the skeleton, undead knight, necromancer, flaming skull, and some fireballs and giant skulls. Of course, this image was blown up. Here is the actual size...
I honestly find squeezing the monsters into these sheets to be really fun. But it is very challenging determining which monsters will be grouped together. The Necromancer and Skeleton need to be on the same sheet, because the Necromancer summons skeletons. Now their death crawl out of the ground looks more intentional.
There are two types of skeletons. The ones that crawl up out of the ground, and the sort that just sorta lurch around. It also makes sense to pair them with the Undead Knight. An Undead Knight mini-boss and a few minion skeletons makes a lot of sense. However, it is not possible to have the monsters from this sheet on the screen at the same time as something located on another sheet... for example: the undead archer, chicken cow, dragon, or lich.
With the "still relatively new" alt-banks feature, we now have roughly twice the amount of space for monster graphics. So Clarion remade death to occupy the same huge dimensions as the Lich.
"If only we could exclusively create the dark parts of death with Dead Pixels"
Rebuilding the Graphics banks (We need to test this!)
I do not want to get too technical here, but over the past two week, I organized, optimized, and re-built all of the graphic sheets. (Sheets, tilesets, texture atlases... whatever you prefer to call them.) Which means, I had to rebuild all of the animations too. Which was a great opportunity to free up some animation space (we were pretty much out) by removing animations that were either too big or less important than an entire other monster. The end result is really good. But oh boy do we need to test it.
We need to test every monster... every direction... every attack. Think I will make a bunch of mini-ROMs with one monster each for our 1st test. Because I broke all of the current monster groups, I will need to re-add them back to all of the maps. That is probably a good thing too. With the new monsters, some might naturally fit better.
MUSIC
The music sounds sooooo much better! Jongaar spent 13-ish hours re-mastering the chip tunes for Dungeons & DoomKnights (The actual game music, not the heavy metal remixes). Then we spent more time together figuring out how to squeeze one extra song onto the bank. What we know now, versus what we knew at the beginning of this project is like night and day. He has a little clean up left on two songs, then we are going to be doing a final lock down on our music and SoundFX.
What is the new song? We have officially added the song "ChronoKnight" to Dungeons and DoomKnights! Since we already did a heavy metal remix for it, it will go nicely with your rewards. It is almost my favorite boss fight music... ever.... O_O EVER!
Remember how I said we ran out of space in our code bank?
Dale Coop freed us up ~3K of code space!!! The morning after I made the last post, I woke up to a freshly posted patch file from Dale Coop. I thought we were tapped on bank switching, but he did some clever magic freeing us up plenty of space for more scope creep.... <_< Do not worry, we will just use this for essential monster stuff and emergencies. It is time to finish this project.
"Or so you think..."
More Features/Improvements
Shadow Vision now only affects the underworld (because certain areas in the overworld were turning dark when you did not have the skill XD)
The mysterious skull floating on the title screen has been exorcised!
The shoot at player script now uses proper direction (before those Undead Archers were shooting arrows in silly directions.)
The player will always face right when entering a cutscene. (before, it was possible to make your character face the wrong direction.)
Axe no longer teleports to random places when you die.
Corrupted Tile after beating a boss monster has been fixed (Bank Switching error)
Modified collision so the player will not get stuck if they move down onto a screen that has exactly the player's height worth of space.
Fixed my mislabeled AI code which was causing monsters to do completely wrong things O_O
Fixed the connection between the intro and Greenguard forest... the dialog now only plays once, and allows you to freely go back and forth between the dungeon and the forest.
And, of course... Dale Coop freed up ~3K of code bank space!
"This is why we do not let Artix use the clack board any more..."
Other notable news
Today is Clarion's birthday! (Happy birthday)
The Ultimately Gilby and his wife just discovered they are now expecting Player 3! (Congrats guys)
Jongaar and I recorded some video at the lab on Thursday... we got a super unusual request from TheNew8Bit Heroes. When we find out what it is used for... I will link you!
Immediately after this one, there will be a backer-only message with an invite to our testing server. The goal of this server is to test small blocks of the game, one piece at a time and work out the bugs. Step #1 will be verifying backers, which we will have to do manually. Thank you in advance for your patience. Clarion offered to handle this responsibility, so you can message him when you join the server.
Your Invitation to the Dungeons & DoomKnights Discrod Server (For game tests)
over 3 years ago
– Sun, Dec 06, 2020 at 10:16:29 PM
This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.
Darkness and Doom
over 3 years ago
– Fri, Nov 20, 2020 at 05:05:42 PM
DARKNESS & DOOM
Greetings 8-Bit Undead Slayers,
The past few weeks of Dungeons & DoomKnights development can be summed up by two words... "MORE SKULLS!"
Sure, there are bright and sunny forests... but the game gets dark. Real dark. So dark that the only way to see would be if you had a torch, or a candle, or perhaps a light spell? Unfortunately, those things are nowhere to be found. Instead, you will have to slay a Shadow Creature and steal his eyes... acquiring his shadow vision.
The "shadow vision" skill was supposed to be a trivial task, but.. Hahaha... O_O I will never say any part of this game project is trivial ever again. The skill is now working correctly (most of the time) and feels really good to acquire.
Gravelyn (Pronounced "Grave-Lynn") is the DoomKnight's daughter. She will be an unusual ally through this 8-bit game. Always appearing in the places you need to go... she will help guide you through D&DK.
Gravelyn is also going to be a big part of 2021 for Artix Entertainment. She prominently featured on the upcoming 2121 calendar poster. Earlier this year I wrote a comic book for her story and one of our artists has been illustrating it. (Of course, we have to ship this game before we do our next Kickstarter...)
Her relationship with her father, the DoomKnight Sepulchure (Pronounced "Sepp - Paul - Chur") is the typical. Young girl coming of age, having to deal with her demanding undead DoomKnight dad who wants to take over the world with his legions of the doomed. It was not easy, being raised by the dead within the cold, skull-filled walls of the dragon skeleton fortress. I wonder if she realizes she is different from all of the others there... that, you know, she has a pulse.
You will get to explore her "home sweet home" in 8-Bit....
"More skulls!"
It really does make everything better...
The game looks and feels far more "Dungeons and DoomKnights"-like.
The art just keeps getting better... (mostly thanks to "MORE SKULLS!") I love the way the slime cave came out. It looks even better animated.
Bloopers, Bugs, & Behind the Scenes
The more the content comes together, the more the bugs start crawling out from under their hiding places. Crunch mode game dev time always feels like "One step forward, three steps back."
Take this "super special bug" from last night-- in the dark version of the slime cave....
"It is raining bottles of holy wasabi!"
I broke the Holy Wasabi skill when hijacking functionality from the Heal Spell for the slime spike spawner because I was running low on space... #naturally
Also, last night, after what would be too long of a story to tell here...
The Shadow Creature's projectile attacks suddenly started reflecting back at him after I completed an unrelated quest for no good reason at all! O_O
Worse yet... "HEY! Why are the lights on? The lights are supposed to be off during this fight!" XD
Trouble shooting bugs in 6502 Assembly Language is so tricky. Without the incredible help of Dale Coop we would be doomed. How he figures out what causes these bugs so fast is mind boggling.
Side story: Dale Coop and his amazing 8 year old NES Making son "SJ Games" have been making the news in France. They have interviews and appearances on TV, the newspaper, and their recent interview at Grand Festival gaming. Kudos guys!
If you have not checked out Kubo 3, you can get and play it on Dale's itch.io. https://dale-coop.itch.io/kubo-3-nes-game-by-sj-games . Given how much Dale has helped our game, I will never feel bad promoting all of the cool stuff his son makes for the rest of my life.
Meanwhile... back at Dungeons & DoomKnights...
Last night... I officially maxed out the code bank. O_O
Here is the latest screenshot from Shiru's Space Checker Tool. The green bar with the concerned face is the one you want to look at.
Important note: Running out of code space does not hurt making the game content, it just means we cannot add any new fancy-pants features. (Well, Dale Coop says we might be able to bank switch a few more things.... we are already doing a lot of bank switching.)
Happened while I was adding a universal "spawn slime, spikes, and stuff and drop it on the player while they are fighting monsters" feature. You saw something like this before in the Frost Lich boss test. But this is a universal one that will work across ALL of the different sprite sheets in the game. I hijacked some of the Heal skill to do it (longer story... but I thought it was super clever) and unintentionally removed the code responsible for restarting the game when you died. No problem! But when I added them both back in together.... POOF! O_O Out of space.
It is both good and bad.
I mean.. It pretty much rules out any more "feature creep!" LOL
The next thing you will hear me panic about is running out of room in our animation bank XD
New Necromancer Monster art...
Clarion went a bit overboard when he started drawing those "alternate skins" for monsters. He redid the base art of a bunch of them. I need to finish up my current tasks so I can input and set up all of the monsters.
Battle on!
Thank you for your unbelievable support and patience while I finish building Dungeons & DoomKnights.
I expected us to be neck deep in testing at this point. Everything is taking 10X longer than anticipated. We do need to get the testing started ASAP. The best strategy, and our current plan is to lock off regions of the game and thoroughly test them one at a time.
I would like to release the area that starts at the end of the intro and goes until you unlock town for backer-only testing as soon as all the known bugs are fixed and I finish putting the dialogs in and cleaning up the remaining screens.
Let us set a goal of doing the first test with the next update post in two weeks. That should be enough time to get everything ready including an official Discord server for any backers who wish to participate in the tests to meet at.
