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!

Big Update!

Well it has been a while since I have posted but I have been working like crazy and a lot of progress has been made!

First of all Adam and I changed the entire game system from being frame based to being time based.  Then Adam began to change everything over from a Tile Location based system to a Pixel Location based system.

Next we went and got player directional movement in and Creatures also animate smoothly in the world.  In other words, the character actually faces and walks in the direction you want him to go in.

To speed development I am temporarily using some Warcraft 2 assets I downloaded.  Here are some examples of directional sprite maps I am using:

After that, Adam and I got the camera viewport to smoothly scroll around the world, just like it did in the old game.

Now it was time to hook up some of our older systems and see if they were still going to work.

Props, what we call the various and sundry items that exist in the world but don’t have an AI driving them, like beds, flags, and chests, went back in with no problems at all.

I was pleasantly surprised that creatures also went in with very little effort.  Soon  I got Enemies actively searching for and chasing after the Player.

It’s hard to take screen shots of this as it is happening, but here are a few that might better illustrate what is happening:

As the game starts, the Player is the blue warrior in the upper left hand corner of the screen.  The skeleton is an Enemy with a search range of 3 tiles.  You will also notice that there are some temporary Props in the game to test pathfinding and animating props.  That machine should look familiar to fans of the original game.

As the player starts to get closer, the skeleton ‘sees’ the player and chases him.

(I wasn’t quick enough to get a screen shot of the skeleton actually reaching the player.)

Once the Enemy reaches the player, Combat begins.

Now combat in the new Aldon’s Crossing will be completely redesigned.  For now, I just have a little animation play and then bring up the new combat screen:

Which admittedly, doesn’t look like much right now.  Pressing the Cancel button will cause the Player to just win the combat.

After the player wins, the Combat Screen closes and we see the skeleton die.  He actually animates and falls apart, then his bones hang around for a bit before finally fading away:

That’s a screen grab of the skeleton falling apart.

In the future I might experiment with actually recording these because they look a LOT better in motion.

A couple of other things to notice is that the world now fills up the whole screen and we can draw GUI elements right on top of it and move them around.

Also on the tech development, Adam got sound effects and sound management into the engine.  I can’t really take a screen grab of a sound playing, but here is a shot of the Debug Screen with the new Play Sound button:

Oh yeah, there is also a temporary Goblin art asset I found on the web that I am using to test the new combat states for the new Combat System in addition to a new visual effect sprite.

So things are going pretty darn smooth.  It is a piece of cake to add new creatures, items, and objects to the game.  The only hard part is creating art assets since neither Mike, Adam, or myself is an artist.  True, I did all the art on the original Aldon’s Crossing, but we want to deliver a much more fulfilling visual experience this time around.  For now these temporary art assets we are using allow us to continue with the development of the game.

Next I will begin to focus almost exclusively on the new combat system and all the supporting systems it will need.

First Screenshot

I promised an update with a screen shot and here it is:

What you can’t tell in this screen shot is that the background image scrolls horizontally across the screen while the foreground (the woman and the buttons) and the woman and buttons remain stationary.  It creates a neat parallax effect.

Now I’m not an artist, and this is obviously what they call programmer art.  When we get further along we are going to get professional art of course, I did this just to prove I could do it with the new GUI elements I created.

Pressing the Debug button will take you to a temporary Debug screen where an animated Samus Aran will run across the screen:

The animated Samus Aran was to test our new Sprite class and the various new animation states that will be in the game.

If you hit the New Game button the game world will load as will a default player.  At that point the game does clock and run and can do many of the things that Aldon’s Crossing originally did, but it doesn’t render yet.  I hope to have that rendering in a day or two.

So once again, programmer art – don’t worry.  We will have professional art at a later time!

We have a GUI!

So when we originally wrote Aldon’s Crossing we simply used the palmOS GUI elements.  Sure, we made a few custom GUI elements, but we largely stuck with the palmOS elements.

Now that we are focusing on re-making Aldon’s Crossing we needed to completely remake the GUI so as to sever any hard connection with a specific OS.

We have GUI_Object which is an abstract class and is the basis for all GUI elements.

GUI_Container inherits from GUI_Object and is used to contain other GUI objects in local space so that they can be moved around a window.  It has a GrowArray of Children that it maintains.

GUI_Image inherits from GUI_Object and is capable of rendering 2D images.

GUI_Text inherits from GUI_Object and is capable of rendering text.

GUI_Button is our workhorse, it inherits from GUI_Container and has GUI_Images for the button states and a GUI_Text for the button text.

All of this combined with our XPWindow Class (Cross-platform Window class) and we now have functioning GUI in Aldon’s Crossing once again!

Mike continues working modifying the old palmOS database reader we have into something cross-platform and he is making great progress on it.  Hopefully he will have the new database stuff wrapped up in a few days and we will be able to load the old database records up!

Adam is working on the specifics of cross-platform rendering (using openGL) and many other issues that will make Aldon’s Crossing better.  Adam has been a real boon since he can identify many areas where we can be more efficient and improve the game across the board.

I would post some screenshots… but really, is it worth seeing my horrible programmer art at this point?  Maybe i will if someone requests to see them.

UPDATE: Actually I think I *will* start taking screenshots, for posterity.  I think it would be cool to graphically record the history of Aldon’s Crossing 2.0.

Progress Update!

So I know it’s been awhile since I posted an update, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been working!

So we don’t have any screenshots yet or anything but here is what has been going on:

Mike has been working on the game loop and getting the original system clocking and updating.

I have been working on updating our data system and how data is handled.  I have now started on re-writing to GUI so it is not Palm specific and will be cross-platform.

Joining our team is Adam, a friend of mine from work.  Adam has been doing several things from updating our project and fixing some minor issues we had with our source control to taking a look at replacing our graphics renderer with something cross-platform.

We are also looking at streamlining some of our game features and replacing combat with a new system that I will post details about later.

Things are definitely picking up speed!

Posting from my laptop!

Well, hit a bit of unfortunate luck here today.

I was working on AC (as I call Aldon’s Crossing) and getting back into the swing of things when my desktop, where I host my source control and code, locked up.

After kuch fiddling and experimenting I was able to determine that my hard drive controller (pretty sure here) is failing.  What happens is that when I turn on the machine it hangs there for several minutes at the screen right before it tries to enumerate the hard drive devices.

Sometimes it will start up, but then the D: drive is not visible.  If I do some fiddling in the BIOS setup I can see that the D: drive is actually fine and will boot no problem.

Anyway, sort of unfortunate, but I will get past this.

I hope everyone else is doing well!

Update!

So I suffered a bit of a setback this year.  I won’t bore you guys with the details, but I am trying to get things back on track!  I hope to  have some information to share soon!

T minus ZERO!

All the build errors and link errors are now fixed.  Aldon’s Crossing once again compiles – and now it can do it on multiple platforms if we so choose.

The game itself is still not working like it used to of course, we still have to convert the data and fix the tools – but this is a huge step.

-ADavis

T minus 831

whew!  I really should have done this porting business a lot smarter.  Anyway, down to 831 build errors.