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!

Comments working now?

I think so…

Ch-ch-ch-changes! (Updated!)

So I wanted to write a post about some changes that we are making to the design of the game.  First of all, none of these are written in stone but they are seriously being considered.

The first change we are thinking of is simplifying the character creation process.  Instead of picking race, class, gender, and then spending your attribute points you instead pick one of the following:

• Dwarven Warrior
• Human Mage
• Human Priest
• Elven Rogue

You can then still pick gender.

EDIT: after talking it over with Adam we have decided to still allow the player to pick his race and class.  Each race and class will have something unique to it for combat – details of which aren’t ready to be discussed.  Races will be Human, Elf, and Dwarf.  Classes will be Fighter, Priest, Rogue, and Mage.

Your stats will be determined by your starting class and as you level up your primary stats will increase.  The other way you increase you stats is through the equipment you find and use.

The next big change is to combat.  In the original AC, combat was ‘real-time’ but you just clicked on your enemy and the AI would fight for you.  You could use items and special abilities that were on your hot bar, but that was pretty much it.  Well, in an attempt to make combat more tactical and more accessible, we are going to turn base combat – but with a twist.  We aren’t quite yet ready to talk about the twist yet.

If you have thoughts or questions about the change to classes and races, please leave a comment below!

We’re still here!

We have not stopped working on AC!  I can see how some of you might think that since I am the worst blogger in the world and never post my updates, but we are.

Adam has been working on pathfinding and movement still, as well as working on combat.

I continue to work on cleaning up old code and getting the new GUI in.  The game still has just programmer art and what ever sprites I can find on the internet to suit our purpose for testing.

Not that things haven’t been busy.  As some of you may or may not know, Adam and I work for Obsidian Entertainment.  We were very recently working really hard as we prepared for E3, which is the Electronic Entertainment Expo held here in Los Angeles every year.  So while we are still working on the game almost every day, we could definitely be doing more.

Mike has also been super busy so he hasn’t had a chance to do as much as he would like, but once things settle down for him he will start contributing too.

For those of you who follow us, feel free to ask some questions about what we are doing and I will do my best to answer.

Tomorrow I will post some more about the new design of Aldon’s Crossing and what we hope to achieve.

Happy 4th of July!

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!