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[Inanimate]

I imagined this in cel-shading and such, like a painting, and with SotC style exploring.

[DamienDe]

I don´t want to get your hopes to high. I am just one progamer with no art background and even if I try my best (and I am commited to finished the game into something playable), it just can not be as cool or good looking as a Ghibli movie.
But that said, I will do everthing I can to make it look good and "stylish".

Regarding the engine...it is my own crappy "engine" if you want to call it that. It is written in c++ using SDL for input, sound etc. and OpenGL for rendering.

But oh my god...it is so hot right now here, I hope I can do anything at all for the game today. Next thing will be deciding, how high the whale is floating, so it is threatening enough fo the people on him, but low enough, so I won´t run into problems rendering the ground level. As I just won´t have enough polygons to do a landscape you can see for miles with no end.

[increpare]

Hah neat: another whale noise buddy - best of luck, man : )

[Inanimate]

Oh, not saying you have to conform. This actually already looks fantastic; just saying what I imagined it as.

[DamienDe]

Hi people,

just a little update from the game. I am not particular happy with the title, for one thing ... does it mean "noises which are dying" like a noise which fades out or does it mean "noises of the dying", like someone is in a death struggle, who is giving his last breath.

Work, family and heat are taking their toll, but I managed to start drawing sprites.

This could be the hero character, it is just a start, but I really want to have an old warrior, who does not want to, but has to fight one last time (against the whale).

If I succeed with making this game, the charactes maybe has to fight again, as I am thinking about integrating the happenings of the game into a larger narrative and connect it to two other projects I am working on from time to time.

[DamienDe]

I wanted to give a status update. Sorry no pictures today as I am still working on engine code which is not really visible stuff.
The game now has a primitive blue gradient sky sphere and three moons, which are visible from a certain camera angle. On the groundlevel there is a heightmap, which is generated by perlin noise, but I still have some speed issues there and I have to write a shader to texture that thing.
I hope I can put everything together this week and maybe I will produce a small walk around demo on a floating island (to simulate the floating whale), so I can prove I did anything at all.
Oh, and I was pixeling the family of the hero, as he is quite old and was always on a quest, he does not have a wife, but is living in the house of his daughter and grandchildren. The husband of the daughter went to defend his country in a war, which may happen in another game in this world.   

[Melly]

That's a pretty nice character you got there. Personally I enjoy the non-filtered texture look, but I'm like that.

[DamienDe]

Yeah, I know what you mean. I like the pixelated look too, but I think it is not the right choice for this project. I don´t really want to put the pixeled characters in there, but I can´t help it, the time is just to short to model anything decent in 3d.

And I have been a bit lazy the last days, the heat is back and the PC I wanted to work on the game (a quiet one, because fan noises etc. piss me off quite a bit) died on me. But fear not, the game progresses. Right now I am looking for free textures, which I can use for the moment. I want to use my own stuff in the end, but if the time runs out I do not want to step into legal problems, because of the textures.

But I am kinda embarassed, that I don´t have anything to show for the last days. Hope the people reading this, do not feel cheated. I am still working on this !!!

[DamienDe]

Showing life signs...
I am still not ready to show anything, but I started working again on the game, after I stopped for some days to complete my new PC, which is for all purposes besides gaming. It is almost completely silent, which makes it much easier to concentrate on the programming, so hopefully development speeds up now.

Right now I am looking into rendering grass on the ground, because everything looks still a bit barren. I am about halfway through with designing the locations, but the hard part will be building them inside the game. For textures, I don´t think I will be able to have a significant amount of time left, to draw them myself, so I will use stock textures.

Storywise the game is changing a little bit, as the whale won´t be a sentient creature, but more something like a pyramid. So it will harbor something inside of it, which maybe is better not seen again.

[DamienDe]

Hi people,

I did not make enough progress, considering the time which is left. I still hope I can give you something to play, but there are so many loose ends everywhere.
But to show at least something, I captured a video and upped it to youtube. It does not really show anything besides moving the camera through some test geometry and watching the hero "Reynold" walking around.

Youtube link:



Maybe I will write something about the battle system next time, if I can wrestle some time from my wife and child away and actually implement the damn thing.

[deathtotheweird]

Shame. It has a very distinct look to it. Reminds me a bit of the SaGa games for the playstation.

[Melly]

I think there's some interesting stuff you could do with that style. Sorry to hear that you may not be finishing it. Maybe with the possible extension you can work us a short demo?

[DamienDe]

Oh my god...an extension would be awesome

The game is picking up steam a little bit right now. I finally got around adding items, which you can pick up and drop somewhere else (a little bit like in Ultima6-8).
The biggest problem for me until now, was loading all the different resources like pictures, sprites, definitions for the stats of items, gui dialogs etc. In the last days I made some good progress in this area and it is much easier getting stuff into the game (maybe someone will even mod the game a bit ... nicer sprites maybe ?). BUT this stuff took way to long ...

Before I go to bed, I will add an inventory screen, to drop the items from the world into. Wish me luck

[DamienDe]

I am getting kinda pissed at coding these days ... had to think for about 8 hours straight at work about a problem (and could not solve it).
When I got home I almost did not want to work on the game, as I found some VERY bad collision bugs, which I could not solve either. But I just took the Bullet collision library and within the hour my collision problems vanished. Well there is some jittering, which I have to get rid of, but else everything works nicely

But there is still not enough content to warrant a demo, I am just crossing my fingers for the extension.

[Melly]

Programming is a matter of immense ammounts of patience.

[DamienDe]

Yeah...patience...I almost did not have any left ... BUUUUUT I finally got my shit together and solved the coding problem at work (and it looks awesome).

Then I came home and in a matter of minutes I could fix the last collision bugs, which were bothering me (and kept me awake until 2.00 in the morning, because Bullet is not as easy to use as I first thought...but great stuff anyway).

Hopefully I can do some more work on the game today, when the kid is in bed. I would love to go into crunch mode for the rest of the competition, but I don´t see it because of the family. God, I love them, but sometimes...

[Melly]

What we need is for someone to invent an atemporal chamber so we can spend 10 hours crunching in it and come out with only a few minutes having passed.

Man that would be havoc on our sleeping schedule if it ever comes to be.

[DamienDe]

Ha...the extension is absolutely great. I am on a two weeks vacation now and the kid is the only distracting factor now (well...there still is Starcraft 2).
I got quite some things done and the engine finally is somewhat complete, but there is still so much assets to be done and I did not yet add the battle system.

The problem here is, that I want the game to be a RPG and I like stats, inventories and I am NOT a fan of realtime battle systems like in Kotor, Mass Effect or Final Fantasy 12 (but at least there you had enough control over the party).
My game will feature only a single character instead of a party so first I thought, I have to do a realtime system, but who am I to tackle something like Diablo 2. But thankfully there are other options like Secret of Mana or Vagrant Story (which have kinda single character Kotor-like systems)... AND Panzer Dragoon RPG, which has a quite cool battle system, because you have to exploit weak enemy spots.

So to make it short, I am trying to do some mix between the Vagrant Story/Panzer Dragoon battle systems. Enemies will be visible on the field and you can attack them or be attacked. The game will not change to a special battle screen (I would have to do extra assets), but will focus on the area, the battle is happening. Then the hero will focus on the enemy and move around him Zelda 64 lock-on style and attack, when some kind of action bar filled up.
So all in all nothing new, maybe even not fun at all, but we have to see...maybe I can´t get that thing to work and you will see "point-click-kill--super-lame-diablo-clone"-system. 

[DamienDe]

Ahhh...screw it, I am doing "only" a Vagrant Story battle system clone (minus the targeting of body parts). Everything else is just to much trouble.

[Melly]

Yeah, it's often a good idea to scale down your ambitions based on how much time you have.