Chaos Rematch - WIP thread

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erico

At first I didn´t even noticed.
Later, when I noticed, I ended up liking it´s non-human-anatomic design, somehow it reminded me of those plastic skeletons that glowed on the dark when I was a kid.

The new one looks great, if I look at it with "reality" eyes, still, the older has a charm for me exactly for being the way it is, and first you spot the non-standard bones, it keeps attracting me to it.

At the end I guess artists have the freedom to portrait stuff whatever way they see fit. There are a lot of non-correct anatomy on characters on the many games/art style around and sometimes it is exactly this take makes it so appealing.

I understand Ian´s point as in my head, it is harder to see a human skeletons in games not have at least most correct bones related to reality. Maybe it is just my 8-bit mind and too much ghost and goblins + golden axe. I do agree with Ian though that the last one looks better, but I also like the other too for the reason I just said.

Nobble #4 and the scary tree are the greatest for me, immediate attention catch.

I see the sprites have a thick black outline. It sure brings a tatoo feel to it to me :good:
Do you have mock of the sprites over background? I would love to see that!

Keep it up people! :) 

Ian Price

I also work in nursing, so bones and anatomy are part and parcel of my job. I can accept fantasy figures without problem (in fact, if the skeleton had had four arms or horns or a long neck or anything else it would have been fine). But it was too humanoid and I've seen too many Ray Harryhausen films to ignore it ;)



:)
I came. I saw. I played.

erico

Sooo great to see a picture of THE MASTER!

Wampus

So that was the guy behind the Clash of the Titans animation, eh? I still remember some scenes from that very clearly. The skeletons, for example. I knew the old skeleton anim for Chaos Remake was odd somehow. Strange that I didn't realise why.  ::)

Our house got struck by lightning and we had no internet for a while. Else I would have posted another screenshot. You can't see it in a static screen but all these creatures are animated: -




  • Mipmapping now working on creatures, objects, tiles and fonts. Everything is scaling well, or, well enough that I will accept.
  • Basic game font now displaying in four colours. Very simple font but readable in even very low resolutions like 320x240.
  • Fire, gooey blob now finished. Several more objects for the alpha need to be done and then the custom tileset will be created.
  • Fog of war, field of vision and line of sight all ready to use. Working well with gradated levels of light and is very fast to calculate. A big improvement on my previous only partially successful attempt at such things.
  • Packet preparation as part of Multiplayer is partially implemented.

Another update next week. Hopefully won't be struck by lightning for a while now.  ;/

erico

It is said these things don´t hit same place twice :P (although I know of few cases it did).
Pic looks great, they look all nice on the playfield!
Bring more!

r0ber7

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8d7OBluielc

Thor has now blessed your game.

(Good to see first in-game screenshot).

Ian Price

I came. I saw. I played.

Wampus

No :( and I'm too busy to do much more with it now until next month, which is National Game Development Month. Starting hopefully around the 28th of May through to the end of June I'm going to have a crazy dev marathon. Everything I can lock down that doesn't need doing I will lock down so I can focus as much as I can on getting Chaos completed. I'm also going to get out an update every day to my dev blog during that time, even if its just a report of why nothing much was done that day.

What I can report is that the old wizard design has been ditched. Even for the alpha version the wizards looked too out of place in comparison with others sprites. Now the wizards and their clothing/accessories are all hand drawn. I'm also testing the rudimentary stages of the single player enemy AI. I'm using a threat vs reward matrix for the map in combination with A* pathfinding. There is a problem with getting stuck around bottlenecks like doors but I've read of a solution that will probably result in overall better AI. Basically, if a creature can't find its way forward because another friendly creature is in the way then it can do several things. Firstly it will go to the back of the turn queue and try again later. This way the creature in the way will have had a chance to move on. If there is still no way forward then the creature can wait once more, if creatures that still need to move is high, or an alternative route / course of action is chosen based on a priority system.

Wampus

Ok, just got a message that Julian Gollop, the creator of the original Chaos, has started work on a Chaos remake of his own. Read about it here.

He says it will take a year or so to be ready. So, I'd better get my little tribute game finished before then or it will be eclipsed for sure.  :doubt:

Chaos Rematch is now a pretty damn high priority.

BTW finished an on-screen keyboard lately. Works on all platforms including desktops. Flips up when needed.


Wampus

Created a particle engine for the game during the weekend. The editor needs some tweaking and I need to get frugal with the number of particles so as not to put too much of a strain on slower devices. Even still, I'm pleased with the results. With practise I'll get artful at creating some real nice effects. Although you really have to see them in action to appreciate them here are some static screenshots I took:-

Wolf receiving protective shield spell



A knight about to be hit with a ball of magic



Vampire engulfed in fire



Phoenix in a cloud of blue haze

Wampus

The particle engine is now nicely optimised and working in my game's debug mode. This is helpful since it means I can edit and save particle effects directly from within the game. Should cut down time needing to move from the editor to the game to see if things look nice. Screenshots of debug mode showing the particle editor screen:-




This weekend I want to add spells and information panels to the in-game GUI. My current idea is that spells can be displayed on the left of the screen, can be scrolled up and down with click & drag and information panels about spells, creatures and other things can pop up on the right. When a creature is selected I want the screen to smoothly auto-center on the creature and pop back again when the info panel is closed. Hmm. Actually maybe that's not such a good idea. Will have to try it and see. Here's my concept so far:-



My whole aim with this thing is to keep the GUI smooth and easy to use on touchscreen devices as well as PCs, make it scale well on almost any resolution from 480x320 to ultra-high and try to insure everything is as intuitive as possible to play with. So many turn-based games have awkward UIs. That is something I'm being careful to avoid. In fact, much of the hard work has gone into that. The mechanics of the gameplay are almost simple compared to what has to be involved in the UI.  :S

I did a performance check last night. Even with excessive particles the game is nicely responsive on my Nook Color. Should work fine on current devices with no problem.

r0ber7

Nice to see the progress you've made so far. Give us a youtube with the particle effects in action if you feel like it. ;)

Wampus

Quote from: r0ber7 on 2012-Nov-08
Nice to see the progress you've made so far. Give us a youtube with the particle effects in action if you feel like it. ;)

I am bound to get around to uploading some vids. Got a lot of stuff to demonstrate. Not just Chaos Rematch. If nothing happens soon then at the beginning of December there is a short 'story so far' video presentation planned. Looking forward to that. It may become a kind of practise run for something later. You see, if the (singleplayer / multiplayer match only) alpha version turns out to play well enough I/we are thinking about going to Kickstarter or Indiegogo for potential funding. We wouldn't need much. Covering the costs of drawing and animating the characters to make use of Spriter is what we are wondering about. It would allow many more gameplay possibilities and visual improvements. Adding many kinds of weapons, armor, power-ups, etc. to smoothly animated and configurable creatures and wizards would be wonderful. In fact, if crowd funding happened the final game might end up more like a Lords of Chaos tribute than a tribute to the original Chaos its intended to be. The possibilities are latent in the code already.

erico

Nice advancements!
vids vids tube tube :whip: :P

Wampus

#44
 :nw: :whip:

Ok, I'll organise something soon. There is still so much to be done before it looks presentable is all. I won't be able to work on the core game mechanics until after Christmas because there is so much to do before then. Check out my projected schedule, which may be optimistic:-

Week 1 - Nov 12 to 17
   Spell & general icon control. Information panel for right side of screen. UI stuff in general.
Week 2 - Nov 19 to 24
   Map editor to handle tiles and objects in debug mode. Line of Sight and Pathfinding code finalized.
Week 3 - Nov 26 to Dec 1
   Multiplayer LAN networking. Handle dropped connections, data loss, etc. Testing for all devices.
Week 4 - Dec 3 to 8
   Wizard and Creature editor. Start to work out combat balance.
Week 5 - Dec 10 to 15
   Combat and spell dynamics. Game starts to be somewhat playable, i.e. controllable.
Week 6 - Dec 17 to 22
   Review progress so far. Fix bugs, quash niggles and tidy up code.

In the new year the big stuff can start to happen; Nice game menus and navigation, computer AI (big deal!), spell powers added one by one, multiplayer working, single player working, etc. That's just for alpha. I'd love to work on a single player campaign mode, if reality allows.