A Castlevania/Metroid type game

[illspirit]

Well, I kinda suck at coding, but the basic concept is starting to come together here. Eventually it will be a Castlevania/Metroid flavored adventure game with several levels, but right now it's just one map (or two if you count the interior) with a few zombies. There's also still lots of code recycled from Tree World and the Top View RPG test game, but most of that will be replaced as I go.

That said, it controls like sort of like Tree World, only WASD moves and enters doors, control attacks, E is the action button, and space jumps. Escape opens the inventory/save/exit menu a la RPG, but for some reason, the weapon equipping option broke yesterday. There's only one weapon so far, so that's not too bad.

The player sprites are really heavy too (4.5MB for the character, 3 for the sword), but they'll be compressed later once the animations are final. Plus it probably makes for a good stress test. :p

Anyhow, two screenshots are attached to the post, and if you can download the zip here (http://media.gtanet.com/illspirit/files/unnamed_novashell_game.zip). I'm making/running this in Windows, if that makes any difference.

[Seth]

Awesome work, really coming together!

[sphair]

Looks awesome - really nice graphics! Have not had a chance to download yet, as I am on vacation.

[mikael]

Great level, I really like the platform layout for the castle and the graphics look very good.
About the equip error. Changing g_activePlayerItem to g_activePlayerItem.item on line 89 in item_menu.lua seems to have gotten rid of the equip error atleast for me. Not sure if it's the right way to do it though, I only took a quick look.

[Uhfgood]

well looks like someone will have the first completed game out (not counting Seth's as he's the developer).

Was hoping it would be me, but i'm a bit lazy.

[illspirit]

Thanks for the kind words, I'm glad everyone likes it so far. :)

Mikael, that would seem to be the right way to fix it. Not sure how it happened, but I must have doubleclick/copy/pasted the string sans the .item bit while testing it with a forced item name. Thanks for figuring that out!

Uhfgood, don't worry, you still have a good chance of completing your game before me. I'm lazy too, and have probably have my sights set far too high for one person.

[Uhfgood]

Uhfgood, don't worry, you still have a good chance of completing your game before me. I'm lazy too, and have probably have my sights set far too high for one person.

Don't let anyone tell you that. Just keep working at it until it's done. You can't reach the moon unless you shoot for the stars ;-)

In any case, I don't have any test levels working. I have my character moving around and jumping, and then I have another character I've sketched a 4-frame animation for, that I've yet to put in. Also as all my characters are hand animated they take time. In fact they take time even to make temporary or placeholder animations. You at least have a working map, mine can scarcely be called a map :-)

But since you only have one map, we could find a way to make this into a friendly challenge :-) Truth be told, I need something to push me to continue. Not that I'm going to quit, but I need something to push me to work a bit harder than normal.

Any ideas? (from you or anyone else who has read your thread).

[illspirit]

I don't need anyone to tell me that, I know from experience. :p Worst case scenario was a new level for GTA2. Ended up taking like two years, less than half the original cars were replaced, and there were only like a dozen missions.

As for the speed of my progress here, half my assets so far were made some time ago for GTA San Andreas. The player char was never used, so I thought she deserved her own game. Now that it's time to make new stuff though, things will slow down here. Aside from some technical tweaks, the only thing I've really gotten done since the last upload is a new bat enemy.

http://media.gtanet.com/illspirit/randompics/flying-bat.png

No idea what to say for motivation. I have a hard enough time motivating myself. :(

[Uhfgood]

really I was thinking more in the form of a wager, but not money as I have none to-speak-of... but something friendly.

[sphair]

Keeping up motivation for projects, especially when you are doing it alone is very very hard in the long run (that is, after the initial 2 weeks in the beginning of a project :)

I am all for some friendly "competition" to kick ourselves to do something. It is always motivating seeing other people show progress. Maybe we should create a Novashell Project Team (better name needed), where the point is to show eachother something new every 2 or 4 weeks or some other time schedule. Could be a new level, a new character, a new script or whatever. Small or big, anything goes :)

Dunno, open for suggestions!

[Uhfgood]

Might not be a bad idea at that.

[illspirit]

Got the bat in game and flying around (though for some reason, the gravity override goes berserk after you pause it..), made a flaming sword, and started working on proper backdrops. Can't tell from the screenshot, but the zombies now climb out of the ground when they spawn.

Hopefully I'll have a new, near-complete first level to upload in a couple of days.

[Seth]

for some reason, the gravity override goes berserk after you pause it..

This will be definitely be fixed in the next build... :o

[Marcus]

Very nice! You got to tell me what program you use for creating those cool graphics! :)

[illspirit]

The gravity thing will be fixed? As in, like, it wasn't something I messed up on? That's good news! :D

Marcus, most of it is modeled and rendered in 3ds Max, and the texture work and post-production-ish stuff is going on in Gimp.

Anyhow, there hasn't really been any progress over the last few days as I've been sidetracked with a web design, and am stuck figuring out how to cover a seam in my parallax layers.

[Cobra]

Awesome work, very impressive. I really look forward to seeing more.

[Checho]

Impressive work!... keep it going! i hope to see more updates, good luck ;)

[illspirit]

I haven't had much time to work on anything recently. The first level is mostly done (save for some details and alternate exits), and the library level is starting to shape up. I was hoping to have a second boss before uploading a new test version, but it doesn't look like that will happen any time soon. :(

But here's the current version if anyone wants to check it out.

unnamed-game-sept20.zip (http://media.gtanet.com/illspirit/files/unnamed-game-sept20.zip) (7.03MB)

[Marcus]

It looks awesome!! :D

[Checho]

Nice game... very complete n_n i hope to see more! :D

[vincejebsen]

Basic stuffs are really quite straightforward but I had the same kind of difficulty with coding. Hope you can help me out.