Gamestone: Music and stuff

Well, I added a music and sound system into the engine finally, and it works for the most part. Not sure yet about it's usability on the iPhone (since I'm less familiar with sound stuff), but I would imagine so. Anyway, just thought I'd offer an update on that. I also got a couple other things in there, along with advancing the battle demo. Almost to the point where, after selections are made, that allies can attack enemies and vice versa. Not easy going, but I'm making definite progress.



In other news, I'm starting school again this week... so it's going to be a split between attentions, but I think I'll still have enough time to work on things. Still have 3 more classes and 4 months left and then I'm out and graduated, a second time.

In any case, lots of stress and time crunches and gamestone updates to come :P

Gamestone: RPG goodiness

Hiya there,
I've been doing a lot of work trying to design this rpg engine from the ground up... not just battles, but things that will be used in maps, menus, boot screens, etc, etc. Although this screenshot doesn't show it, I've finally started getting some of the battle data into the battle system:



And don't those guys look happy in the green fields? I'm sure it's just they never got any fresh air or anything that they turned evil :P

Now, that I can read from the data (or am starting to), I hope things will continue to progress smoothly. The toughest thing is I'm trying to design the mechanics of this by memory or rote of playing so many games. There's sooo much to think about, but it's not bad. Just time consuming :) I'm still sticking with an easy phase based approach for battles.

I figure, this is the first full game from start to engine that I'm creating, so simplicity is good. Everything is going to be somewhat basic at the start, and maybe I can tweak things up if I learn more about how it all comes together and have time. Nothing too complicated UI wise, mechanics wise, etc, until I've gotten my feet wet more :P My ultimate RPG goal is something akin to Star Ocean for the SNES (that game rocked!), so maybe in a sequel or future game I can figure that stuff out :)

Alrighty, it's sleep time now...zzz

Gamestone: UI Stuff

Hey,
I'm finally out of classes, and have 2 weeks (well now less..) to put towards the engine, so I hope to get a lot done. Here's the latest demo (and beginning of my battle prototype):



I got a Window class in, that can use textures to decorate the borders and body, as well as some UI classes in (for Icons and Windows, as well as a battle UI). I'm including the NES controller since I want to make sure that I allocate some space for the virtual D-Pad (not to mention making the demo resolution the same as the iphones). Not a permanent thing I want, but for now it'll do for simplicity.

I hope I get over this cold sometime soon, I hate wasting my vacation time... :P

Gamestone: Quickie 2

Hi,
I changed the font system for the better. Now, thanks to FTGL and freetype, we can have stuff like this:



Yes, that's Japanese Chinese (yes, that's what you get for not knowing the difference when copying in asian characters from random sources; But even so, the font in use does have Japanese characters--and Korean, and others--so it's more of the fault of what I typed into the string :P). I have no idea what I wrote, but it's probably something like, "I are l00ser" (but we'll just pass it off on Hidon for now) :P Anyway, now we can use TTFs instead of a proprietary font format. Didn't take that long to get in, plus it helped me fix a few longstanding bugs/annoyances about the coordinate system.

Gamestone: Quickie

Howdy!
I've been doing numerous things lately (also trying to finish up a semester), but here's a screenshot to tide you over from the latest demo.



I got box primitives working again, as well as did some more work on designing the first battle system. And I figured, what the heck, have a little fun :P

Gamestone: Progress report

Hey there folks,
I just submitted the changes to GS that make animation working again. Here's a screenshot:



The current demo moves the "player" sprite around (along with the camera) the "world". It is pretty smooth even with 511 other sprites all animating at the same time. So, now I'm moving onto getting collision working again. I also cleaned up some of the resource management, so that it's easier to know how much memory a game will use and to set what textures/tiles/glyphs/etc go into it (probably could be explained better, but basically you have more direct control over memory management, but it's not complicated as it sounds).

Finally moved

Hi folks,
I was a bit away while I moved into my new place and started transferring things over. Been a busy week, and more hw is on the way.. :P Anyway, just thought I'd give an update.

I finished Secret of Mana, and it was quite a nice experience :) Now, onto getting GS updated again, see ya soon!

Quest: Secret of Mana

Not done yet, but just felt like getting a screeny up here for all to enjoy. I really like the game, it's hard to imagine why I avoided it for a while. Not at all complicated (with dozens of hidden items, one-shots etc), and very enjoyable.



I got myself an Xbox 360 controller and surprisingly it works very nicely for snes games (though I got the gamestop version).

One of the best things you will ever hear

Nuff said :)

Gamestone: Stress test

Hey there again!
Not a large update, but wanted to throw up the latest things for GS. I haven't coded on it much in the last week or so (for previously stated reasons), but I figured it would be good to post up some screens on the last stuff I was doing (aside from porting to different platforms). The new sprite system has a set number of slots that can be defined in, meaning that each platform it's compiled for could have a different sprite limit that fits with how many could be used before slowdown (the same thing is possible with bgs too). Here's 512 sprites:



And, here's 4000 sprites:



There was some slowdown, but it wasn't super slow, so I think some of the optimizations I was doing really paid off! Anyway, I'm going to continue work again officially tonight (after I finish the hw which I've been procrastinating on :P). More updates later this week.