Another update!

Hey Everyone,

Here is a quick update for what is going on in the world of AC development.

Hamlin added something to AC that is have NEVER had before… sweet music (complete with cross fading).

Javier got a ton of toolset work done.  The toolset now writes out maps and props.  The cool thing is that the maps now just write out the tiles that they USE and we only load THOSE tiles.  In the future we are going to improve it further:

• Optimize it so that when loading a new map, it only unloads the tiles that aren’t needed on the new map.
• We gotta a couple of bugs to fix, like the ability to erase walls by painting EMPTY_TILE types and the ability to paint roofs

I helped a bit with the game engine side of this too.  In the toolset, Javier also added the ability to procedurally set the draw depth on props when they are written out.  I added this to the game engine in the form of a draw depth override that all physicals now how.

Adam continues to churn away on doors, and they are now able to render in to the game world.  He is currently working on allowing door states to adjust pathfinding.

Erik is back from vacation and has time to help on the project too, hooray!

Several various and sundry bugs got fixed as well this weekend.

In addition, I finally got around to adding word and line wrapping to our GUI_Text element, take a look!

Obviously this all programmer art that we have borrowed from other games.  We are currently reviewing several candidates for art positions.

Stay tuned for more updates!

Another update! This time I am posting screenshots.

Hey Everyone,

Here are some more screenshots, including a couple from combat.  Keep in mind NONE of this is original art – it is either programmer art by me (yuck) or it is art I have downloaded for temporary use.  We are actually in the process of trying to hire an artist for the game!

Hope everyone is doing well!

Thanks!

AC on the iPhone

Happy New Year!

Welcome to 2011.

I apologize to everyone for being gone for so long.  I know in the past we disappeared and you were probably thinking that we disappeared again.  Well, yeah we did but we had a good reason.

Mike no longer works for Xfire and his new job is taking up almost all of his time.  I don’t think he will be available in the near future to help on Aldon’s Crossing.

Adam and myself were both crunching on Fallout New Vegas and we are currently crunching on Dungeon Siege III.  On a side note my girlfriend’s father has cancer and we have been doing a lot of traveling on the weekends to visit him.

To make it short, there has been precious little free time for me, Mike, or Adam.

Adam is working on a font solution, but I don’t know when he expects to be done with it.

I am still working on combat and I hope to have something to show you guys soon.

That’s about it, sometimes life just happens and you have to do the best you can.  I look forward to 2011 and posting more updates here about the continued development of Aldon’s Crossing.

Pop-up!

So a couple of new things as we continue to move forward bit by bit.

Now when you click on the player (with the mouse on the PC version) you will get a pop-up context menu with actions you can perform on the controlled player character.  Right now those are limited to Stats and Inventory:

There were some other various and sundry fixes I put in today too.  Things like making sure the player is properly bound and drawn when near map edges and things like that.

I hope to continue with the progress!

Bit by bit (har har, programming pun!)

Adam is on a much needed vacation after all the hard work he did on Fallout New Vegas.  Mike is busy learning his new job.

So I continue to try and keep momentum going on Aldon’s Crossing.  Tonight I got animated water in and working.  Currently it just rotates through bitmaps that are identical except for the number I painted on them to represent their frame.  In the original Aldon’s Crossing we could only support 3 frames.  Now devices are so powerful with so much memory we could support as many frames as our artist wanted to draw.

Anyway, here are some screenshots because everyone likes pictures, even pictures with “programmer art”:

[Show as slideshow]

The next stage I am going to work on is getting the pop-up GUI working.  For example if you click on an actor it pops up a GUI with all the viable actions on it.  If you click on your own player, his GUI pops up with the options for things like stats, inventory, etc.

Thanks to everyone for being patient with how slow this development is going.  I recognize a lot of familiar names from the comments and as cheezy as it sounds, I’ve missed you guys.

Quick Update!

I just wanted to reassure everyone that we are still here. Things are crazy busy for me, Adam, and Mike.

Adam and I work at Obsidian Entertainment where we were both working hard, Adam on Fallout: New Vegas and myself on Dungeon Siege III. Mike was also in the middle of changing jobs… so yeah, things were VERY hectic and no one had any free time at all!

I still managed to make some progress on combat and some other systems, and Mike is about halfway done with the actor system. Adam continues to make good progress on the rendering and pathfinding upgrades.

I will post some more very soon!

Spawners!

Mike got creature spawners in and working!  Check it out:

Click the image to see the bigger version.  Those little orc peons are spawned and are hunting the player.

So progress continues at a pretty good pace.  We gotta get actors going next.

We are also still working on our new art design and hopefully will have something to show in the next few weeks.

Props!

So Mike got props loading and saving in the toolset.  Then he finished my work on the game engine and got them loading in game!  Hooray!

Now in between those two props next to my character is a teleport prop which Mike also got working!

Adam fixed and issue with the resource system that was causing images to not unload correctly which is very awesome!

Once again, please forgive the very temporary art that I am grabbing from whatever sprite database I can find.  It is all very temporary until my artist friend finishes working on the art design.  We have lunches where we talk and plan the new art look for Aldon’s Crossing and I think once we get it going it will really impress.

Next up on our plates is to get the Actors back in and loading!

World and Map loading now working!

Mike has started working on updating the old toolset for Aldon’s Crossing and now we have the world and map loading once again!

Also, Adam and I decided to raise the base screen resolution to 1280×720.  Obviously we can scale down or up from here to match the machine and OS we are releasing on.  I have some new screenshots but a word of warning, all I did was take our art from Aldon’s Crossing Gold that we never released and stretched it.  The artwork will look a little fuzzy for now and we might even completely change the art style altogether once our artist comes on board.

Some other changes, we have decided to continue with our more traditional character creation process where the player can choose race and class.  The journeyman concept from the original Aldon’s Crossing has been cut though, players will now begin with a class.

Let’s see…oh, Adam also got pixel based movement working.  If you remember the original game had tile based movement.  This will also allow us to have creatures and props that aren’t “tile-sized” and can be of various sizes.

The new combat prototype continues – I actually made a board game to test concepts and combat ideas we have.  Our number one goal is accessibility.  That doesn’t mean easy or simple, rather more like a card or board game with simple concepts but deep tactics.

More to come later!