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[Melly]

Primary:
Ancient lamp found in tomb—when filled and used, its light reveals strange world.

Secondaries:
Demophon shivered when the sun shone upon him. (Lover of darkness = ignorance.)
Monsters born living—burrow underground and multiply, forming race of unsuspected daemons.
Enchanted garden where moon casts shadow of object or ghost invisible to the human eye.
Man followed by invisible thing.


More info when I get the ideas more sorted out. The passage inspired the main game mechanic, though things are still prone to change. Working every free moment I have in this. Kind of coding it from scratch.

May or may not feature a familiar face.

Expect Heart of Darkness style death scenes.

EDIT: For those that are interested, I'm coding this in C++ using the Allegro library. Which is why I've been a while without showing progress or content. Gotta get the basics of the engine working first, but with the extended deadline I'm hopeful to have something playable submitted.

[Melly]

Progress report:

I've been working feverishly on this over the past few days on the little free time I have (sleeping 4 hours a day is fun!). So far still working on the engine for it. Yeah, maybe C++ is a bad choice for making a game quickly, especially if you're still learning it (and is working 8 hours + college ), but this will certainly be done either now or soon after the compo, because I want it to be my way of learning raw game programming.

I was using normal Allegro, but horrible tearing and framerate issues in my crappy machine drove me to try and port it to AllegroGL with OpenLayer. I've been making some progress with it despite OpenLayer's weird quirks. If anyone around here has used it I'd REALLY appreciate help. If all else fails I might still be able to use SDL (though I hear it's a bit complicated to learn at first). At least from what I managed to get done the performance improvement is heavy.

I still need a pixel artist that can animate sprites.

Also, I should get a mockup/teaser painting/whatever this weekend. Maybe. If I'm not coding my ass off.

Also using time at work/college to work on tilesets, though my lack of skill shows (help!).

 

[William Broom]

The ideas you have really seem to fit with a Heart of Darkness style game. I hope this works out!

[mirosurabu]

Hey, hey, hey! Not only you are considering same Lovecraft note as me, but you are borrowing HoD elements and using C++ with Allegro!

Not sure why you have problems with tearing and framerate. I've been using Allegro successfully.

You are doing tile-based engine on your own?

Anyways, I am looking forward to this one.

[Melly]

Thanks for the interest.

Yeah, i was using plain Allegro at first, and it was going well, but in my shitty comp the framerate sucked when I used even slightly big bitmaps and there was a LOT of tearing. I know it's probably my own computer, since other people reported no issues, but I can't work like this.

I might be changing my graphics card VERY soon to a slightly better one, and if that makes the plain Allegro issues I've had stop I'll stick to it (I'll interrupt the port to OL until I get it installed, then I'll decide better).

Another thing that worries me is that I've heard that AllegroGL/OpenLayer doesn't work in Core Duo processors. Wonder if anybody can confirm that. If that's the case it's a huge problem.

I should probably only ask such questions in the Tecnical forums.

The direction this game will take is still prone to change. I haven't actually played HoD myself, but the death scenes you see around are inspiring. And quite creepy for what seems to be a game for kids (rated E for Everyone even, I heard). Like the gargoyle snapping the boy's spine in half. Or that worm that pops up on the cliff. Nowadays stuff like that would get at least a Teen.

[deadeye]

Maybe the rating board just saw the Jar Jar-esque sidekick and said "Oh, it's one of those games, never mind, here's your E."  It did have some sweet death scenes though.  Hell, that game was pretty cool all around.

Anyway, looking forward to seeing your progress