For everyone's information, I am officially joining in the festive competition.

I'm taking this very seriously, so heads up to the rest of you contenders.

Expect no mercy >:(






And Merry Christmas! :D

She was once a beautiful girl and fiancée of the noble knight, Kasaan Parath. Now, Kasaan will do anything he can to bring back the woman he loved so much from the tragic accident that took her life 10 years ago.

The Fate of Ellicia.


If you haven't heard of it, or just didn't guess, this means that I am resuming progress on my isometric project, which has all engines up and running. If things go as planned, this September, we should see a LOT more work done on this as well. Wish me luck, hopefully I can find a few helping hands with this, as it's an overwhelmingly large amount of work for a single person to complete such an adventure on his own.

In other news, I'll be buying a PSP soon here. The release of the FF Tactics remake along with Crisis Core coming out finally prompted me to decide so. There are other games I'd wanted to try out, but now I figure there's enough of a list to just go find a used one of the darned things and just land myself one.

Sorry for such a lame, short blog. More iso-news coming very soon, I promise.

ChevyRay

I'm back!


ISOMETRIC ROLE-PLAYING

Battle System
After slaving away for countless hours at piles of scripts, resources, variables, and statements, I have pulled together one heck of a wicked battle system. Of course, the only working option available at this point is Attack, but more will come, and quickly! The system is pretty basic. Party members and enemies all have a speed attribute, which decides the turn order. When it is a players turn, you can assign them one of six actions: Attack, Magic, Item, Defend, Wait, or Flee. Attacking is free, and you can only attack back-row enemies if they do not have an enemy in the row ahead of them. Upon attacking, your character's weapon will flash, and if the button is pressed just at that time, a Power Hit is performed. Power hits involve a little extra animation, some flying stars, and (of course) deal extra damage to your opponent. You will also be able to do a Timed Guard when enemies are attacking, reducing the damage you take.

Initiate Battle!
Battles don't just start in this, I really wanted to take a pro-approach to this. Actually, thanks to GM6's deactivation functions, the battles take place completely in the room in which they were initiated. When you DO get into battle, the room shrinks and spins away, while the battle room bounces into view and the players and enemies appear. It's pretty cool, even as far as commercial RPGs go, in my opinion.

Enemy Spriting
I went mad with the pixels, and I mean mad. I pixeled all the bosses in the game, which at this point I will tell you is more than 10. To complement that, and make it SOME sort of a role-playing game, I decided to also pixel a load of monsters to encounter; I stopped at 18 because I realized that I was asleep.

Anyhow, here's a couple examples of what you'll encounter.


And a couple more tidbits of stuff I've completed, as well as hints as to what you can expect from this game...



Getting closer to that demo at an exponential rate, keep in touch.

Okay, more good news, how about that?

First off: I beat Legend of Zelda: The Twilight Princess! I cruised over to a friend's today just so he could help me conquer the final two dungeons and bosses, and t'was a splendid night. Sure, maybe a lot of you have beaten it... but it means a LOT when I beat a game. Games can rarely hold my attention for an hour, if I'm not making them. The last game I beat was Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, and before that Cave Story. All those games captured my heart in some way or another, so that's why I stuck through to the end. To end that, I can truly say that I don't want to see another Zelda game for at least another 4 years. The dumb sword and the whole princess deal, no matter how much you twist it, just gets tiresome after awhile. I was thinking that we could have LOZ: High School. Evil Ganondorf, age 18 (a senior bully) smashed the Triforce into a zillion pieces all over, and you have to get the Master Broom to sweep all 500 of them up. You could climb the jungle gym, go on the roof, and even brave the janitor's closet. It'd be hit, I'm sure of it.

My girlfriend just got back from a Jazz tour she just finished, and she bought me a gift. She gave me a book of selected poems by John Donne. Either she's finally accepted that I'm a real geek, or she's trying to drop by a subtle hint. Just kidding, it just turns out that Donne is my favorite poet of all time, and she decided to pick it up when she saw it in Chapters. He has some real wicked verses, and the manner in which he can communicate such obscene and/or paradoxical ideas is really cool. That's all I'll say about that though, because you guys all just wanna see the interesting stuff, right?


ISOMETRIC PLATFORMING

Hookshot Across Gaps
I'd implemented jumping, and as you progress you can get higher jumping ability... but it just didn't make me feel inside the environment, as pixely as it is. Thus, I implemented something I've liked ever since Lufia and A Link to the Past; the hookshot. As you can see from that shot up there, it can shoot across (5 grid panels to be exact) a gap and latch on to a ringed post. At this point, the chain pulls the guy to where it latched, and once you arrive, it lets go. I love the possibilities this opens up for me. Of course hookshots have been accomplished before... but tell me an isometric game that had a hookshot before, huh? I could be the very first, which is a neat feeling; also, upon receiving this baby, a player will have to look over what they've passed, because the hookshot can also latch to trees, poles, and other 'latchable' objects; on top of that, they'll also have to navigate themselves to a level equal to the object they want to hookshot to, exploiting their isometric platforming ability even more.

Rocky Tiles
Also in the shot above, you'll notice some new terrain... yup! It took awhile to nap the shape and dips to the outer walls, allowing it to drop down to allow the player practical vision when he is near the bottom-right most parts of the room. They walls kinda come to an abrupt stop when they open up for the door, but I'll soon add a drop-down so they meet the ground, because I think it looks like crap too.

And that's not all!


GUI Display & Inventory
This took long, but it worked out nice. First off, you'll notice a few gaps in it. The gap at the bottom-left is for the name and description of the selected item. I haven't added that yet, so that's why it looks so strange. This whole thing works nice. First off, the treasure and equipment just display what items you've found and how much money you've picked up. The inventory on the left shows you what you have in your item bag, which can house 9 items. When you click an item, if it is a consumable item, you will get to choose which character to use it on, or to discard it (a trash can appears at the top-left when doing this). Just to make life a little easier for some, I also made it so that when you select to use a healing item, the character-curser will automatically start on the character with the lowest HP (same for MP with magic items). Obviously, 9 items doesn't seem like much... but it is at first, and when it becomes too few as you progress through the game, I'm sure something will pop up... Anyhow, unlike most of my GUI displays this one isn't quite as animated. The only thing that really animates (other than the blur-in of the whole thing when opened) is the items. When you select them, they 'bounce' back and forth, it's kinda neat.

Monsters and Bosses
No, if you were going to ask, I don't sleep very much. Yes, I've ALSO pixelled all the boss fights in the game, which at this point is at least 12! It took awhile, but it sure is cool to see them all finished. So you can expect lots of boss-ness, which (if you know me well) I LOVE to see in games. I've only done 1 enemy so far, but there'll be more (not a MYRIAD, but more) to come. Until then, time to work on the next toooooool.


I'll close with a bit of altered Donne...

Dull sublunary gamers' love
  (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
  Those things which elemented it.



Bai-bai everyone,
ChevyRay

No blog in awhile, time for an update I imagine; I'll start with the good news.

I got the awaited call from the University of Victoria, and I was accepted into first year Computer Sciences in the Faculty of Engineering. I am excited, and I love learnin'.

In the electronic world, I've been working hard just playing around with some engines and pixels. Lately, fooling around with some isometric sprites, I realized that isometric games are scarce in the GM Communities, and not only that, but rarely include platforming aspects such as jumping, gravity, and whatnot. Now I like isometric games a lot, and especially the platforming ones... examples?

Super Mario RPG (duh) for the SNES, one of the greatest games of all time, featured wonderful graphics, but limited isometric platforming mechanics. Fortunately, it had a great battle system to back that up.
Screenshots at MobyGames

Landstalker for the Sega Genesis was a game I stumbled upon and fell in love with a long time ago, back in the days when I loved to play Sonic 2, Shining Force 1/2, and Shadowrun on the ol' Genesis. Landstalker's graphics were a bit odd, but the storyline was much deeper than Zelda III (Landstalker's counterpart for Genesis' rival at the time, SNES) and the puzzles relied more on logic or platforming rather than tools.
Screenshots at MobyGames

Anyways, I've been piling up isometric scripts for over a year now, and will continue to do so in no order and whenever I want. Every time I jump back into isometric programming, I discover something new and add it to my collection. In a year or so, maybe I will use it all to compile a beautiful isometric extension, engine, and/or tutorial. I may even start up a community if I really get into it. With that lah-tee-dah over with, I'll share some info at what I've worked out so far...


ISOMETRIC PLATFORMING

Movement and Depth.
Obviously the first thing I set out to do. This was easy, of course, but necessary.

Height and Position
I set about creating platforms with different heights, next. This is also not new, or difficult at all. But there is one issue I noticed, when doing this, that really annoyed me.

This little area, you'll see that there are 3 platforms. But here's the question: is the topmost platform adjacent to the leftmost one? The answer, no.

If I rotate it to get this image, you'll see that the topmost platform (now at the bottom) was actually a lower platform at a higher position, and not adjacent to the other two. Now, if you're playing an isometric platform game and you come across a piece of land that looks like that first image above, there's no way of telling whether you can walk from the leftmost platform to the topmost one; to get rid of this problem, I used a method that I learned from playing Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, to avoid the same thing...

Since this only happens on the top left and right sides of these platforms, the trick is to have an outline drawn around it when there is nothing of the same or greater height attached to it. I used a white line to indicate the change, though it looks ugly... but anyhow, notice that there is no top-left line on the bottom platform, and that is because it is attached to the leftmost one, and to let you know they are connected, there is no outline drawn. The result will have continuous lines drawn on edges that fall off, and separate them from the ones they are distant from.

I've noticed that pixel artists tend to hate outlines, but I think they are necessary sometimes. It's not so bad, either; take a look at this image, a bunch of platforms of different heights, and without the outlining. Now, compare it to the next...

That's not so bad, is it? It helps establish depth and positioning of the platforms, and hardly kills the pixel work. Also, if you don't like black outlines, you could simply use darker colors of the respective platform... like for example, if I used dark-green on these ones, it wouldn't even look like an outline, but it'd still help establish depth and position.

Anyhow, that's it for that. Sometimes you want lines drawn on the sides of the platforms as well, which only helps achieve what I just have.

Gravity and Jumping
Now, if I wanted to have an isometric platform engine, I think that being able to actually ascend and descend the raised platforms would be a BIG bonus -- so I did that too. This was also pretty easy. First off, every object has a z position and a [h]eight value. The z position is the height at which they are sitting, and their height is how far up they extend from their z position. For example, if the character is standing on a 8-pixel-high block, his z value is 8. And since the character is 20 (or so) pixels tall, his height is 20. Thus, the top of the character is 28 pixels off the ground level, where z = 0. For jumping, I simply created a gravity system that functioned with z, so I had the following varables:

z_speed --> The speed at which your height is increasing. - means you are ascending, and + means you are descending.
z_grav_acc --> The acceleration of the gravity. Equivalent to gravity in GML for vspeed.
z_grav_max --> The max speed at which the gravity can accelerate to; aka: the greatest value z_speed can reach.
z_below --> IMPORTANT. This is the dynamic value that records the height of the platforms below you. As your z increases by z_speed, the furthest down it can fall is to
z_below. So if a 16-pixel-tall platform is below you when you jump, z_below=16, and when z>=16, the gravity will stop and you will land on that platform, setting z to 16. Also, because the character can walk in pixels, and not snap to the grid, there are often several levels of ground below him. In this case, z_below is set to the value of the tallest platform that is not higher than the character's own z value.
z_jump --> Your jumping speed. When the jump button is pressed, z_speed is set to z_jump.

With these, and the fact that platforms are only solid if your z is lower than theirs (except for the floating ones) you can jump up, land on platforms, and also walk around in all 4 directions. Also, because z_below only registers platforms whose z lies below the character's, if there is a floating platform in your position and its z is higher than the character's, he will still be able to jump while below it. Either way, with all these functioning, it was easy to do the following...

Floating Platforms that Move and your character can ride.
Platforms that Ascend and Descend and your character can stand on to go gain or lose height.
Movable Platforms that your character can push around and use as a step-up (the metal box in the engine screenshot above)

And pretty much anything else that side-view platforming games can offer, except just with a new perspective and 3d level design! I thought it was pretty cool; now you can see why I look forward to compiling a full-out engine to support this baby, which will at the LEAST support all of these features. Don't expect it for awhile, though. There is reason to doubt that I have discovered the best means of accomplishing all this, and until I've optimized the engines to the best of my ability, there will be nothing for anybody to see. :)

Have a gooooood day, evening, and night y'all.

PS: Oh, and there is no Bad News, by the way. ;D I'll end it on that note.