W. O. L., working title

COMPETITION ISN'T OVER

I got out of making video games altogether and mostly did some comics and such things. BUT a friend of mine is running a pretty neat game company and I have a pretty neat game idea, so I need to build a quick and dirty prototype to test out game logic and build up some sense of how the game will feel. WHAT BETTER TECHNOLOGY THAN VERGE?

As you can see I'm using old Chocolate Sauce assets and code like crazy. What does it mean that these people are rainbow colored? I have to remain more secret about this one, but will post screen shots here and stuff.

Let's Cut Our Losses

Sometime after the last post here my computer stopped booting forever, taking with it (1) my entire novel and (2) all of Chocolate Sauce RPG. After three months or so plus numerous attempts to get the data off of the hard drive and onto a bunch of temporary computers, I got together the money for data retrieval. The answer: if I pay $3,000 and have the hard drive shipped upstate to a clean room, there's a chance of recovering maybe 30% of the data in a raw format, meaning no directory structure, no file names, no file types. Basically fuck that.

Since that time I've managed to go through an additional temporary computer (still works, the screen just doesn't work.) I've reconstructed the novel, but there doesn't seem to be any point in working on a project like Chocolate Sauce when I can't afford a computer that doesn't completely bite and that will fail in a matter of months. I did have two backups: one on a USB drive that is now lost, and one on the Fiction Circus web server which is missing the last month or so of work I did on the game, mostly on graphics, maps, and fine-tuning battle/enemy spawn code. Basically a massively incomplete mess.

It's the latter that I'm releasing for the public curiosity as of this post, here.

Be advised:

• The battle system doesn't work at all. It looks like the only reason for this is that the enemy art directory is missing, so I guess if you edit enemies.dat (which contains the names of the image files for the enemies) you could try it out. Just change the lines that start with @ to any .pcx image file, ideally one around 40x40 px, and put that image file into a subdirectory of /gfx called /enemies.
  
• None of the title screen options other than "New Game" and "Debug Game" work.
  
• There's a major gameplay bug on choosing New Game: the controls won't be hooked up correctly after the opening scenes are over and the game gives you control. To see the menus/to use the map spells, go talk to the shopkeeper one house to the left of your starting location: once the shop script runs the controls get hooked up normally.
  
• You can play through the game up to the point where Illcup gives you your first assignment. After that you'll almost certainly end up getting into fights in the desert and the game will crash. If you want to see the rest of the story for this installment, cruise through the text_data folder; text_church.dat and text_cutscenes.dat have I think all of the story text and dialogue in the game.
  
• The map tiles aren't entirely finished for most maps and look terrible. The sprites aren't finished, most glaringly on Cass.
  
• The music files are copyright Long Dao; do not use them without asking him. If the enemy graphics are somewhere in this zip file at all, they're copyright Xerxes Verdammt and shouldn't be used without asking her. (Some of them are just ripped temporary Dragon Quest art.) I don't mind if you use my images or code.
  

I don't know when I'm going to work on this project again--it's a hugely ambitious thing, something I was obsessed with working on for a few months, and I'm not sure when I'll be similarly obsessed again. I'd like to put at least a temporary cap on it while I worry about money, writing, and my other projects. Losing my novel and a lot of work on Chocolate Sauce was horrible, but given the choice to work on restoring one or the other, I worked on the novel, and that probably has to count for something.

Goodness Gracious

So again we're experiencing major computer problems which gives the game a frame rate of something like 2 fps. This is obviously bullshit, but until I can get a new computer or somehow fix this one, I can't really do the stuff that's remaining on Chocolate Sauce for the first release. I have some new enemy art to load in, and that's about it.

One thing that has been done or is about to be done: I was talking with Paul about wanting to write a cutscene parser for VERGE as part of the work on Demon Lord Adventure III, which I could then use for all future cutscenes on Chocolate Sauce since writing cutscenes is horrible. He came up with an idea for a better "wait for entity" function that's pixel-perfect rather than relying on the entity movecode strings, which cause problems when you do a lot of things where entities stagger backward one step, etc. I've been writing cutscenes just by choosing an arbitrary number of ticks to pause the engine for entities to move and then trial-and-erroring that number, which is senselessly tedious. A parser is the ultimate goal, but implementing it would be crazy since it involves some kind of metacode. I'll figure it out.

That's mostly it--I've been busy with other stuff lately, mostly a new internship and the revival of my webcomic, The Man Who Hates Fun. I have so little stuff left to do on Chocolate Sauce Part I that it's stupid I haven't yet done it--until I can somehow get a computer setup that lets me check things at a reasonable frame rate, though, there's not really a point. That's not a good excuse but it remains an excuse.

Art I can do at least. I'll try to at least make the maps look cooler/finished by next week.

Junction City

Another bad week, though not as bad as last week, and at least one critical milestone reached: the story sequence right in the middle of the game is coded, which means the game's now playable from start to finish.



By "coded" I mean "mostly coded": I still have the stupid habit of putting characters into traps without figuring out how they'll escape, so the end of this scene is, um, a little bit weak. I also need to throw in/steal some little visual effects like a "quake" function and a "trail bloody footsteps as you stagger to your death" function (or something reasonably similar.) And by "playable" I meant "not actually playable", since there's a critical bug if you don't have Cass with you in the final sequences and I haven't yet thrown in the code to have Cass join up with you after you leave town--which means that you can get to the game's ending and then you can't actually see it. Rad!

Still: it's some kind of tangibly right-direction step. I don't know what it is lately--once I stop worrying about money this is going to go faster. When will I stop worrying about money? Will I ever?

Oh also: a new battle theme is in the game, courtesy of Long! I kind of need to get used to it like I'm used to vangelis.mod as battle music, but the new battle music is (1) better and (2) not stolen from probably multiple sources.

I was having dinner with my writer friend Billy on Wednesday and he asked about this game, surprisingly, since I think the last time I talked to him about it was back in July or something. I said that I was still working on it, and that coding story sequences was like writing novels, except instead of just writing what the characters do, you have to construct robots of the characters and program them to function in simple ways, and then assemble the film stock of them functioning in simple ways yourself. I said you can work for hours to create a one minute scene which you will then watch over and over again forever with joy and love that no one else in the world will share. Lord love video games

Lame / Move On Reader

I don't have anything this week. I plead three-day houseguests and the need to entertain them, two days of illness following the departure of three-day houseguests, and the rest of the time spent going to job interviews and not getting jobs (plus the freelance jobs I still have going on, plus trying to quit smoking out of economic necessity in the last few days.) Despite all of that I could have worked on the game for a fucking hour--an hour!--, but I didn't, which is lame and horrible. But sometimes it goes like that.

Here's a comic page at least:



Sorry, gang--I'll try to make another post in a couple of days with something, at least. The next two items on the agenda are (still) to fix the save/load system and to finish up all of the story sequences. It's such a small amount of work to finish this up and move on to the polishing stage that it's silly not to have done anything this week.

To everyone who is working on/has worked on Demon Lord Adventure III art: you are radical, even radical to the max. You beat this old sinner at his own terrible game.

If I only had a lever, enough money to buy food, a few more hours and a place to stand

Posting this early because I started to fall asleep while coding/testing, jesus. If I can stay up until 8:30 I can get back on a normal schedule. I can get all the stuff done I n eed to get done and I can have a good life one day.

Here's what's done: all text is written and in-game, except for ten lines RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE SCRIPT (they sort of go around a puzzle sequence and I haven't figured out the puzzle yet because I'm stupid) and except for the final scene, which I'm saving. It's okay; it needs another draft or so. Right now the textbox count is something like 490, according to the logs, which is pretty okay I think.

I did some more frames on Cass--he's almost done except for the back side which for some reason is really hard on him (it's the weird scarf/surplice thing he wears.) I did a sprite for Illcup and the Sheriff as well since I was tired of using generics for them. You can see here if you squint:





The sheriff one in particular needs work because I tried to make his face all lean and scary and Texan and he just looks like a weird dwarf or a child or something. I wanted him to look kind of weak around the shoulders, weaselly, horrible, and he just looks like an eight-year-old. Jesus. At least the pixel cowboy hat came out pretty rockin'. I can't even draw those things freehand

What else? Some fence tiles to get rid of the horrible placeholders:



And the save/load system. Jesus. I can save and load one game with no problem and no obvious data loss. I'm falling asleep trying to get the actual UI set up--I wanted to wait to post this until it was all done so I'd have rad screen shots and stuff. Instead I have this:



It doesn't do anything and it doesn't even display right. Whatever. Whatever!

Whatever is no way to finish a game. This is so stupid; I should be further along with this by now. I wanted to have all of the cut scenes blocked out, only waiting for special frames to be made to finish them off. I did manage to smooth out some rough jumps in the early ones but this is the next Big Looming Thing.

One day I'll know where the money's coming from and I'll have enough to like--go out to eat sometimes, like in the old days. Until then we're stuck with ourselves

(Oh: and Syn is angel. For Demon Lord Adventure II, go to here. If you're on the forums which I have to assume everyone here is because who else is gonna read this crap, you know that sprites are being made for the inevitable 3. I want to start diving into the battle system but patience, patience makes the plot grow golder--not until this Chapter I (of six! Christ--they'll get easier at least once all of this system/engine stuff is over) is done, or at least thick in testing.

I played the opening ten levels of Dragon Warrior to get some idea of how the stat progression works and what makes it work. It's pretty impeccable: the first like six levels of that game are you trying to go from dealing 1-2 damage to enemies to 3-4 damage to enemies. The game "jumps" from Slimes with 3 hp to ghosts with 7 to Magicians with 12 really gracefully, smoothing the HP gap by giving you the HURT spell at the right moment and increasing your range just enough to justify the huge jump up to Skeletons with like--35 hp or whatever, just beyond the Magicians' borders. It's such a tedious game but it's so completely masterful. I messed with the stat growth tables some in response--I'll probably even make them more brutal soon, make it so that you can only raise 3 stats at level one and raise the requirement for all stats. It'll help with this horrible scaling problem desert.map has, where the north end of the map is just another world altogether difficulty-wise compared to the south end of the map. I don't like it but for some reason I have to have five enemies on that map; they spread out; so sue a brother

I'm not making any sense any more. Next week I'll do better.

Better days with a girl like you

This week was kind of a slack week--I spent a lot of it working on other things, some of them for money, and otherwise not being at home hacking away at this stuff. I did get my hour in, though, and crossed off a couple of annoying things-to-do, and fixed some bugs as well. Here's shots:



The final cave is all linked up! You can now walk it from the beginning to the end and back with appropriate warps and all! There's one bug remaining caused by me trying to do Fancy Stuff with one of the warps, but 9 times out of 10 it works okay. This means that we can now walk from the start of the game to the end of the game, always a point I like to be at.

Not that it looks like--pretty or anything. This is my Breath Of Fire moment. You remember those caves in Breath of Fire where you went down three or four identical little "switchback" floors before you got to the actual cave? This is that. I love that--it's so demoralizing



Here's a guy who hangs out in the cave.



Here's another guy who hangs out in the cave. This one is the boss of this chapter. He is fearsome, but you can't fight him yet--I just dumped all of his text into the game.

The other big thing is that the Pray command for Cass works. Let's check out the different responses we can get when we pray to an angry God of Death for assistance!



This is what happens when we pray too often. If you're wearing the L.Pendant, you take damage. If you're not wearing it, the God of Death stops your heart.



If the God of Death likes you a little bit, here's what happens. The text is first-draft and really stupid. I wanted to write "death relaxing his grip!", but thought I wouldn't have enough room. So I figured "death relaxing!" was equally understandable. The final version is going to be like "You think death is happy or something"



I love it when movies say shit like "The perimeter has been compromised"



This is more what you hope will happen.

The actual code for the different prayers was pretty easy to put in, all told--the problem was setting up the whole architecture for whether or not the gods are smiling on you. It seems like it works pretty well, though. I may increase the penalties for using Pray so that it doesn't just become like a magic points system, where after you pray once it doesn't matter how much karma you have stored up: you're back to Square One with your god. That should help to balance out the fact that these attacks are way more powerful/useful than I really want. I want you to have to scrabble in terror every moment of your life in this game until you figure it out.

I also fixed some odd bugs, juggled some equipment stats around, made the DetectorRing accessory do what it's supposed to do, and put in a few extra equipment management functions so eventually I can solve the "equip multiple copies of the same item" problem. It's not a hard problem to solve or anything; I just really do not want to do it yet for some reason. I messed around with the evade/dodge bug I created last time but didn't get anywhere as far as solving it. It's a matter of making the numbers work out right; it's something I'll worry about just before testing pretty much, when I'm constantly changing all of the .dat files like twenty times forever.

The version number is 0.41 now because the battle system, barring warts and enemy commands (and, um, better animations), is done. Enemy commands are going to be irritating, particularly the "drag other enemies into the fight with you" part, but not too irritating I hope. That .1 is there to boost morale around here, since technically I shouldn't push it past 0.4 until the BP manager is completely done--but I've made all the maps and linked 'em up and put lots of story in, so whatever! Almost all of the story text is at least formatted for the textbox parser and all but one scene is in-game--at this point I'm going to have to spend a week or so just fiddling around with entity movement and things like that to finish it off. I don't actually know how much system code I have left to write beyond:

- a Zelda 3 "jump down" function (only used in like four places maybe)
- block pushing (probably can skip this if need be)
- Saving/loading (almost done)
- Make the BP Manager automatically store BP toward certain stats and level those stats up automatically at the end of fights (easy; just haven't done it)
- enemy commands
- map spells usable against random entities
- minigames (the jail game and the horse cave stampede game--I have no idea whether these will be horrible or okay)

And of course there are the known code improvements that need to be made:
- fix the fucking inventory bugs once and for all
- menus are still glitchy and help text doesn't work most of the time
- map spell targeting ring is jittery
- status conditions are still suspicious; lots of testing required
- title screen
- I don't even know; jesus

October: god. Late October. At least I think there are more things on the done list than on the remain-to-be-done list.

All of this sidesteps the fact that I was supposed to be working on graphics this week. I didn't touch a single pixel this week pretty much. Here's what I did instead:



This is from Demon Lord Adventure Tutorial II, which is done--I just can't upload it to verge-rpg.com for some reason, and it's like 200K too large for my terrible free web hosting service. Hopefully it'll be up there soon: in the meantime go play through the first one, if you haven't!