Friday, September 23, 2011

HA! Rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated!

First and foremost, to the few people who still follow this page - the project is NOT dead, but is continued at a comatose pace due to my kid being almost 3 and requiring all the attention in the world that I can spare outside of working full-time, having a 4-hour (2-hr one way) daily commute, and also doing a bunch of on-the-side freelancing.
Also, this "little" slump in development has originally resulted from a fairly sizable misstep in the coding process. As I have previously written here - I was working on a custom world editor for the game. A flexible little thing that could be activated on the fly and could move objects, edit the tileset, and add all sorts of cool flags and functionality to the rooms. The sub-project started beautifully - the tile-editing engine, the old-format level importer, and partially the object editor all worked well enough, but when it came time to implement it into the game - all sorts of horrible ripple effects started happening. You see - the room transition in LOI is a delicate affair, as it is executed without any reliance on triggers or teleports, with room simply being switched from underneath Iya as she continues the same action she was doing all along. Slide out of one room, and you will come out sliding in the next room. Jump-kick while the rooms are transitioning - and the move will carry over at the exactly the same frame it left off. Needless to say this process is fairly timing-sensitive. Unfortunately - the new level loader refused to play nice with this system. Not only was the pause between room-loads too excessive, but it threw off the timing of the character and a bunch of other internal processes. I struggled with this purely code issue for about a month, but decided to abandon the new level editor altogether, as for it to work a large chunk of the game would have to be rewritten: (
Oh - and for those expecting to see some new art, here are some random things:


<<---WIP modular enemy - not a boss, regular enemy ala Castlevania's Golem and Knight-things.

Alright - I hope the coming of autumn spurs my creativity once more, and I will finally get to a place where I can show the game off to you as at least a demo: )

Cheers guys, and thank you for continuing to care. I will NOT abandon this thing, I promise!
Andrew.

14 comments:

  1. So are any of the games you made available on the Internet?

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  2. @Thomas Keene - Yeah, aside from all the commercial stuff I worked on, there is a couple of crappy little things I have released independently here and there. Only one of them can be called a complete game, while other "demos" may no longer be hosted anywhere.
    The one game I'm pretty sure is still available is this: http://sandbox.yoyogames.com/games/4-maziac
    There is also a crappy little demo of this: http://sandbox.yoyogames.com/games/18174-dead-mans-gold
    The demos for Un-Invader and Inhabitants are not available for download at the moment, due to their hosts being long dead. Maybe I should upload them to YoYo at some point.

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  3. Is there any way we can help you with this project?

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  4. I'd forgotten I subscribed to this. I don't even remember what you were doing.

    ...then I see your art and realise that's probably why. If any game you produce looks even a quarter as good as that, it'd be beautiful indeed.

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  5. HI!!
    Wow... the art style of your game is wonderful
    It's good to to hear that the project is still LIVE!!
    Thank you very much for the news,
    and good luck with the project!

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  6. oh, the effort has paid off T^T
    i checked this thing every day i can!
    just the idea and fluidity of the characters makes me willing to wait for it :D
    not only that but i feel like the game will be one of the best side scrolling action games out there! i think it will be better than any castlevania game to date when this becomes finished. :)

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  7. Hi there,

    I just happened to see your work on PixelJoint, and I have to say I am really amazed by what you are able to do.
    I have a question though: what game creation engine / programming language do you use for creating this game?

    Thanks much for the answer,
    Pampa

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  8. Have you ever considered starting a Kickstarter project to get the funding you would need to cover the costs of working fulltime in this game?

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  9. Hey there,

    My name is Will Alexander and I work as a composer and sound designer with ImaginAudio in Paris, France. I came across your name on Relite, had a look at your artwork and I love the design. I really dig the whole retro feel with the more modern background images (the one on this post is stunning btw). I'd love to get involved with this or any future project you have going. If you're interested, please check us out at www(dot)imaginaudio(dot)com and don't hesitate to get in touch with any questions or comments.

    All the best,

    Will Alexander @ ImaginAudio

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  10. Looks great. Glad to hear you haven't abandoned it yet because it looks really cool. Have fun with the kid :)

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  11. Any updates? Please, please, keep up the work!

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  12. Hope you can still find time for the dev on this as it continues to look fly... the newest anims particularly :)

    Odd that switching screens would be such a problem on any kind of modern computer, though - is it all game-maker inefficiencies again? Would it be possible to, say, pre-load them? As you would only need to buffer a max of 4 additional screens at once (and in fact if it can be chunked over the spare time in 4-5 frames, you only need to have the adjoining screen for whichever segment of the screen Iya is in loaded in before she hits the change-point). Then do a page flip and sprite position reset. After all if it can be done in a VBlank on much, much lesser systems (single-digit mhz, 1mb or less RAM, often very limited display hardware...), why not here?

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  13. I am so super excited this game got fully funded! I was worried man! I shared the project and the successful update on my website! =)

    http://gameversevault.com/legend-of-iya-kickstarter/

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