My Adventure Game Engine - Making Way For Adventure Engine 2

[bartbes]

I found 4, man was I wrong earlier..

[Virox]

I found 4, man was I wrong earlier..

You're right I didn't see the one next to the guard :p

[Jasoco]

I'm trying to go with an EarthBound style feel.



I did some tweaking and think I have a more streamlined method.



Also, you'll note I went back to hearts because I can't decide what kind of health system to use. HP like in RPG's or hearts like in Zelda. Though I want it to be my own method. I just like how those hearts look. But will probably go with a bar-based HP and Experience system. Maybe. Depends on what game I come up with.

[kikito]

If I remember correctly, A Link to the Past used hearts for health, and a green bar for mana.

(...searches on the internetz...)

Yup, it did. Green mana bar is on the left, hearts on the right.

zelda_1.jpg (94.2 KiB) Viewed 2564 times

EDIT - By the way: I like the new trees.

[Jasoco]

If you look closely, you'll notice I used the same colors for the grass and trees that LTTP uses. I found they had the most plesant hue of all the games out there. Simple graphics and nice colors in the trees.

I use hearts now, but remember I had a rolling health bar before. I can probably still implement it. Rolling health as you will recall was like in Earthbound when you get hit, you don't actually die until the HP rolls all the way to 0. You can have 100HP and get hit for 101HP but as long as the HP counter is rolling, you won't die. It's my favorite HP system ever implemented in a game, and I wanted to offer something like it.

I will put a second demo up soon. Maybe tomorrow. Or this weekend. Or maybe 10/10/10 just for fun.

Well, I won't promise anything. I want to do some tweaking before I reveal it to you guys again. But it'll be soon. Sooner than later.

Edit: Now includes music framework for music on maps. Currently using LTTP music for placeholders and proof of concept. Only problem is the music will make the file too big to upload here.

[kikito]

Only problem is the music will make the file too big to upload here.

Mmm doesn't LÖVE support MIDI files? They are incredibly small
sample from mididatabase, ~50KB

If that sounds too cheesy for you, I believe the XM format is also supported (sorry, could not find samples for this one - but it is also small)

[Robin]

The reason why MIDI is so small, is that it is left to your devices to make the music, which IIRC usually means inferior quality.

[Jasoco]

After adding the music and sound effects, my game engine feels so much more official. I love it.

But I really need to port to 0.6.0 because 0.5.0's lack of being able to stop certain sounds instead of all of them at once is constricting and means I can't have background noises that stop when changing maps while the map music continues.

MIDI's don't sound as nice as MP3/OGG/MOD/Etc. And they sound different on every platform. I remember playing DOOM in DOS and it sounded awesome. But when the Windows version came out, and I tried the Mac version, which used each OS' respective video/audio codecs (QuickTime for Mac OS, WMP for Windows) it sounded different and horrible. Because each MIDI interpreter has instruments in their system that sound different for some reason.

I prefer recorded sound. Hell, I'd prefer an NES or SNES style sound chip over MIDI. The SNES could do some cool stuff with its sound processor. (The N64 had terrible sound sometimes. Remember how every Nintendo licensed game used the same MIDI instruments? Mario 64, StarFox 64, Ocarina of time, all had that same sound. And it bugged me.) End rant about MIDI and its space-saving suckiness.

[kikito]

I've playing monkey island 2 lately, and enjoyed its midi sounds quite a lot. But I understand your concerns.

Hope to see another demo of your engine soon, good luck with the 0.6 adaptation!

[Jasoco]

Bump time!

The past couple weeks have been going smoothly for this engine. I have it 90% ported to 0.6.1. Have added a few features. Fixed some bugs. And tweaked some graphics.

My latest cool thing is my new menu...


Some of you may have seen a video of the menu system with the zoomy-rotatey-fadey effect. Well, I have just now implemented particles into my menu. See the colored circles? Originally it was gonna be fire, but I decided to make it match the color of the selected item. Right now it changes the particle color the second I change the menu selection, but I plan on making it change the source color while keeping the already old color still going. I assume that would require three particle systems with them being switched between or something. I dunno, I'll figure it out. I might put up a video of it in action sometime soon. Not sure. Just working as much I can on it.

I will probably make big use of particles in the final product if only for show. I mean they can look pretty damn cool. Is there a way to change the color of the particle system but let the already alive particles keep their current color, just make new particles take on the new color while old ones remain as they were?

I also changed it to a single save slot mode. Originally it had three slots, and it might get them back, or I might add the ability to have as many as you want, but for now I like this simple method. When you save your game it just saves right there. When you load up you can either start a new game or continue your saved one. If you save your new game it will replace the saved game. Not sure how it will be in the end. Might go back to a 2 or 3 slot system.

Music and sound effects are also in place.

When I have it 100% converted to 0.6.1, I will probably upload a new (audio-less) demo. Unfortunately that depends on if the current build of Löve I am using (Which is newer than the release 0.6.1) is available to everyone since it uses the "nearest" constant for doubling up images via setFilter() as opposed to numbers like 0.6.1 uses. But we'll burn that bridge when we come to it.