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update - 9 more maps complete and ready to be thrown into the game. The only reason this took so long was the brick texture I decided last minute to put into the floor. That was definitely an exercise in patience.

Torwa - The City of Darkness

Here's a look at the lines before coloring



and a shot of the coloring finished. It's meant to be a drab, rundown town thats falling apart


I don't have many maps to go for the first episode areas to be complete - maybe 5 or 6 left and then i can get started on the combat engine and animation.

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long time since last update but I've locked myself away to make some progress on this game.

What's Now
- Kali9 0.5.a released (I skipped 0.4a due to the leap of progress I made)
- the site has been updated and redesigned http://www.kali9.com
- I made a short trailer and posted on youtube

if youtube hasn't processed it you still might be able to view it from my site
- Music has been added to the game. My brother is now the musician for this project. (The soundtrack is about 50% complete)

What's Next
-I'm going to start working on 0.6.a which will feature the first implementation of the battle engine. I'm giving myself a deadline of Early October to complete this step. This is my main focus for the next release.
-I have a voice actor for Reilynn whom I will hold of on announcing for now anyway I'll need to start recording her voice. I finished a voice script a few months ago.
-My collision is still spotty so if I'm lucky I'll have a fix for it in the 0.6.a release.
-This project is very close to entering beta I'm speculating but I have a feeling that .0.8 will start beta.

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some quick fan art - first drawing of the year, colors could be better - I'm still getting used to flash cs5's color picker

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*UPDATE*
09/02/02

I've been recovering for the last week from foot surgery (almost healed) so I've only been doing minor changes to Kali9. I'll start the major stuff when I'm fully healed (over the weekend)

- Added some code so that the NPCs turn to face you when you speak to them.
- Added details to the Mountain Area
- I made an indie db page http://www.indiedb.com/games/kali9

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*UPDATE*
Version 0.6.a released and playable on http://www.kali9.com

this version adds a basic combat engine to the game. The enemies won't move or attack because I haven't fleshed out the ai yet. You can smack the monsters around all you want and claim victory.

Here's the latest Report from kali9.com

Fixes
- Various minor game tweaks

Additions & Changes
- Changed the main game theme music to a song called "Light Blue".
- Added battle music, the song is called "Photokinesis".
- Added more details to some map.
- Created sprites for a few of Reilynn's battle animations.
- Created sprites for monster - "Green Gelat" battle animations.
- Added battle engine with support for: attacking enemies, damage calculation, defeating enemies, moving, victory and calculating spoils.
- Added the animation for Reilynn's first attack "Vertical Slash" under her status/techniques.
- I've locked out the saving and continuing. That feature was only for testing in the previous version. I'll bring it back in a future version.

Still Working On
- Adding more details to the maps.
- Tweaking battle engine
- Problems with getting stuck in objects.
- I'm still working on the world map display system. I need some more time to get this working.
- I had to lock out the inventory keyboard controls. I found a bug that slows the game down to a crawl while using them. Once I figure out the problem I'll bring them back.
- An algorithm that will "Guide" the player around borders and hopefully make areas easier to move around.
- some of the map tranfers may put players in borders which may make it difficult to move. I am aware of this and working on it.


What's Next
Along with a growing list of other things I have to fix & tweak the main focus of the next version update (0.7.a) will be a cut scene engine that will drive the storyline of the game. I'll probably have to work on the animation of a few npcs so I'll give myself until mid December to make this happen. However since this update was so taxing on my sanity to add, I will probably take the next week off to get rid of some stress.

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So why rebuild?

Back when I released the 0.6.0 demo 2.5 years ago ActionScript 2 was on it's way out. Until that point I was using AS2 to create the game and wanted to release on mobile platforms as well. The only way to do that was by using AIR which AS2 does not work for. I would have to use AS3. At that point I had two options either continue to work on the game using an obsolete version of a scripting language or to rebuild the game in AS3. I chose option 2 however my knowledge of AS3 is not that great and I'm not a great programmer to begin with so I shelved Kali 9 and taught myself AS3 by making smaller mobile games (SYNC, Rubedo, COINS! /plug) until I felt confident enough to rebuild it.

My Tools

Flash Professional CS6: For creating art and laying out the levels, Scripting is done with AS3. *Note* I would never recommend creating a game like this in Flash unless your fully prepared to think outside the box.... Far outside.
Swift 3D: For creating/animating 3D objects that can be exported back into Flash.
My decade old Wacom Graphire: For any lines that I can't get from my trackball.
Pencil & Paper: for sketching ideas and animation.

Rebuild Process

All the coding had to be rewritten from the ground up and it was a double edge sword because some things were easier to recreate in AS3 while other things were more difficult. I do remember that the most persistent problem I had while working in AS2 was that the main character would easily get stuck and clip through walls. When It came time to code movement into the AS3 version this was not a problem as once I finished and tested it there was no clipping whatsoever.

Graphically I salvaged maybe 80% of my assets. It's been a long time though so I made corrections and recreated what I felt I needed to.

Take the following three development screenshots into consideration







The first one is from 0.6.0 nothing much to say there. The second one is from an the unreleased (unseen) 0.7.0. I thought I had the brilliant idea to texturize the floors to fix perspective issues. On hindsight I probably made everything look worse and ended up bloating the project file size. The third screen shot is from 0.8.0 and shows what I'm working on now. I've went back to the non-textured floors but painted in some details. I'm overall happier with how things look now. I also recreated the trees and the bushes to make them look more detailed.

Getting things to look right while maintaing the illusion of correct perspective in a 2D game has always been a struggle for me in this project. I hope I'm taking steps in the right direction.

Got any Gameplay?

I suspect things will get very gif heavy in the future but for now check this mildly shaky cam video taken of the game running on an iPad retina mini.

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GIF!


Basically shows what I've been working on last week or so.

- Finished layout of first area.
- Linked areas together.
- Tweaked wall/barrier detection code.
- The main thing I wanted to get working was walking around objects, as you can see in the second map we got that working. There may still be tweaks necessary but for now - yay working!

Heres what's next on my agenda

- add more details to first town (maybe animals and stuff - that would be cool)
- tighten up what i have so far (no sense in going forward if what I have now isn't clean)
- start to add in inter-actable objects (like signs and npcs and stuff)
- implement mobile controls (for ipad version)

Aaaaannnd  Random musings

- I'm not that happy with the walking down animation I'll have to do something with it in the future - but for now I'll leave it as placeholder. (go easy on me the sprites are almost 3 years old)
- While working on the code for going around objects I came across this weird bug that caused duplication issues. It really had me stumped for a couple of hours. In the end I didn't fix the problem but I figured out a work-around and I'm really hoping it doesn't come back to haunt me later. Just thought I should have that noted.

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Here is a short video demonstration of the basic implementation of touch controls for the mobile version.



I'm still trying to iron-out problems with z-ordering when the player walks "behind" certain objects. What I originally thought was a glitch with flash may actually be it's behavior. I need to figure out a more efficient way of detecting and removing duplicates when they are initially created. I see no sense in moving forward until this issue is resolved.

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So in direct opposition of my own advice I moved forward anyway without really solving my previous problem. In my defense I was only doing restoration work.

First some screens (these were taken from a development environment)








 
I've been redesigning the bamboo forest area which is the first area where the player is likely to encounter enemies. It's not really a dungeon, it's more like a hostile over-world area. I've shown 4 maps above, the full area consists of around 15 maps so it's quite large. I'm providing dev screen shots since not everything is coded yet (Bounds, transfers, etc.) As you can see from the screenshots above, it's a very detailed area and very time consuming to work with. I still have more details to add which is why my updates have been scarce.

Once I finish programming the bamboo forest area into the game I'll have to revisit that z ordering problem and try to fix it once and for all. Then I'll begin working on NPCs and the battle engine. I probably won't do another video until I fix that z-ordering issue.