I really like this ! I've always been a fan of cold winter settings in games and your screenshots capture the feeling perfectly. Also great job on the editor, it looks really impressive. I seem to end up making editors as a special built-in mode in the games I make, although it can be as nuch as a curse and a blessing doing it that way.
Apart from Allegro and C++, have you used any other libraries of toolkits for editor?
Thanks! Basically, no, I was crazy enough to make my own toolkit, based on my own window and event system. So, just my engine (which wraps Allegro functions) and a bunch of code that adds functionality and appearance to controls and windows. Using the toolkit is simple enough (a lot of coding though), and it does the job. It supports a simple tabbing system, so everything accessible by mouse is also accessible by keyboard (the lack of this is one of the things that annoyed me in my previous attempts at creating a GUI toolkit (yes, I've done it before
)). It does have its flaws though. Basically it's a dumbed down version of the standard Windows interface.
C and Allegro? And not Allegro 5?! I think I'm gonna cry tears of joy.
Very admirable you're doing pretty much everything from scratch. Any idea for music? Keep up the work.
I am not a big fan of Allegro 5 either.
Music-wise, I am in contact with a composer who has volunteered to compose a few tracks for the game. Hopefully it will turn out nicely. For now, I'm using tracks from
nosoapradio which offers game tracks for free. Some of them are quite good.
From the above, I think the red character would look the best. I have a feeling that the others would blend into the surroundings a bit too much.
I agree, I will most likely go with the red one.
So, what's new?The editor is nearly finished. I basically have everything done except the episode packer (which will basically take a bunch of level files and pack them into a single episode file) and unpacker (which will do the reverse), and there are some minor bugs involving undo routines and a few other things.
A recent screenie from the editor showcasing the crammed preferences dialog:
Game-wise, I have *a lot* of things to accomplish. Currently, the game concept is as follows:
- The game is heavy on the story, but all the player can do is read it (no "real" interaction with the story).
- The main game episode will consist of 25 levels in 5 different worlds (5 levels each), I plan for level difficulty to increase somewhat dramatically.
- You will be able to save at any point in the game (no checkpoints or anything like that).
- Enemies have health, but do not die. Instead, when their health drops to 0, they get stunned for a certain amount of time, then their health restores to its original value (kind of like in Commander Keen). So - nothing ever really dies (except the player, that is).
- Beside enemies, the player has to deal with traps that can be anything from spikes to poison arrows, falling blocks and magical turrets.
- Player has lives which he can collect during gameplay, but he has no health - everything kills him the moment it touches him. The rationale is that I want the game to be hard-core heavy using simple game rules, and, I want to portray the main character as weak - he is a novice sorcerer after all.
- There are only two spells the player can use - the "main spell" and the "advanced spell", which will be obtained upon finding the mystical stone about half-way in through the game. The main benefits of the advanced spell are damage and speed (and perhaps something on top of that). Spells will burn the player's mana, which he or she will in turn have to recharge to use the spell again.
- There will also be a number of pickable things in the game, such as score items, extra lives, mana and powerups (ones I have in mind are invisibility and damage multipliers).
I've also been putting a lot of time into optimizing the engine. The engine wraps essential Allegro functions and adds a ton of functionality on top. The game scene is a part of the engine, so the engine is very game-specific. It uses a metadata system which I devised in order to keep the description of the game apart from the engine and the app using it. It basically translates objects from descriptions into actual engine objects, so I am free to put any number of different object types into the engine and create many meta objects that will correspond to a certain type. For example, I can create a "walking monster" type of object, then I can base a number of different monster types on that type. The editor and game scene correspond to the object automatically. This will hopefully save me a lot of time when I get down to game object and monster design.
Here is a mockup I posted a few weeks ago in the Screenshot Saturday thread:
This is the game font I've been working on, it needs some improvements to increase readability:
Here is a (very quick) line-art mockup of what will maybe become the title screen once it is properly detailed:
Anyway, hopefully I will be able to release a tech demo soon.
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