DarkFalzX dev journal

HA! Rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated!

2011-09-23T05:57:00.000-07:00

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.

It's been a while!

2011-02-14T17:38:00.001-08:00

If in your most cynical hour you thought that LOI project has come to a standstill, you weren't far from the truth. It has been a tough few month trying to make headway in development, and to be honest I have been in a bit of despair about it. Most of my problems at this point stem from the inexcusable awfulness that is GameMaker's built in level editor, which I have bitched about on many previous occasions. Therefore, I have ended up building my own level editor, but with such a large tool having to be written from scratch I have encountered many issues. It works now, but still has many problems and lacks many of the features the final editor has to have. Several times during its development I almost quit, but every time I opened the default editor my resolve has returned. Hopefully once I iron out a couple more kinks in my program and start cranking out rooms things will get back on track.

Happy upcoming New Year, Comrades!

2010-12-30T11:30:00.001-08:00

Dear reader,
This holyday season I was able to do fuck-all related to the Legend of Iya project. However - I did get hooked on a game that has become a digital equivalent of crack to me - Minecraft! I must soon shake this addiction, as I get nothing done because of it.
Oh - and I also did this:(the skin file can be downloaded here)

Minor update.

2010-11-05T10:13:00.000-07:00

Since this Game Maker version of Legend of Iya was initially conceived as nothing more but a guideline to since discontinued DS version, its fundamental code basis was never particularly thought out. As a result, the features kept being added to an engine that had some serious flaws at its core. This week I finally went into the game's dark smelly basement to fix several annoying, and to be honest - noobish bugs that have been plaguing the game all along. Most of the fixes centered around the controls, which on certain machines (such as, once again - my netbook) had severe issues with key polling. Other fixed issues dealt with some basic animation handling and collision. Even though I'm pretty happy with the improvements, I'm sure this isn't the last time I have to screw around with LOI's shaky foundation.
Other progress:
* Added tile tint control to the background scrollers - now I can add even more color variation to the areas with the same tileset... I am physically restraining myself from adding some sort of a weather/day-night system to the game now.
* Finally added functional game saving and loading. Still need to make the feature more robust, but the basic file handling is there. At the moment the game saves its data in plain text with a file footprint of only 3k.
* Designed another enemy. Must animate him still.
* Close to be done with the second boss fight. Needs more animations and visual effects. Also - cleaner scripting.
* Worked more on the start area screen (which is a giant pixel painting)
* Started several new Iya animations - such as one for climbing onto knee-high steps, and one for hopping over small obstacles. The animation for looking up had to be temporarily disabled, as it messed up some of the attacks.
* Did more room texturing.
* Started another set-piece room near the beginning of the game.
...Gahh - too many holes to plug for one person: )

Defeated the Lag Monster!

2010-09-30T19:02:00.000-07:00

Not much in terms of asset updates, however, over the last two days I have solved a large-ish issue with the game. You see - Game Maker is a slow, high-level script. Its math computations are laggy, and its asset management is rather inefficient. But hey! I'm not really complaining there. My biggest issue with it, however, its abysmal handling of tiles. Not only that the built-in tile editor is completely worthless, and doesn't allow to utilize even a fraction of GM's own tile manipulation abilities, but the output algorithm is incredibly inefficient. It appears it blits every tile in the room on each redraw - with larger tiles most people use - it's not really a problem, but since I had to use DS-compatible tilesets of 8x8 elements the game ran like crap on lower-end computers.
From the day I got my netbook I've been frustrated with the game's awful performance on it. Even on "high power" mode the game ran at barely 20 fps. I tried to solve the problem several times before, but could never pinpoint the fps sink, always suspecting my own code as the culprit. A couple days ago I have finally discovered the tile issue, and have quickly devised a solution.
A short script was added to the hud object. At the start of each room a global surface is created, views are turned off and the entire room's tilemap is blitted to that surface once. The tilemap is then deleted from memory, and replaced with an object that draws only the part of the surface currently visible on screen... BAM! - 30% speed-up!
I couldn't be happier: )

Oh - and other news - I have dug up issues 2 and 3 of the old LOI "comic" I drew when I was 11 years old... Not even sure I should make that travesty public, as it is a genie of infinite shame: )

Damn Troll!

2010-09-05T15:37:00.000-07:00

I know publicly posting any kind of information about my game was potentially dangerous. A youtube troll has accused me of "recoloring Lady Sia sprites".... I'm this close to just taking the project back offline, but I guess it's inevitable that some fucktard will pull shit like this now and then.
Just to settle it: (click to enlarge)
There certainly is some similarity, but it ends with "hero girl with a ponytail".

Hate being an attention whore...

2010-08-24T09:01:00.001-07:00

...but it's been forever since my last post, and I really have no time at the moment for a full-fledged update, so instead here is a youtube video:

A small update for the sake of updating.

2010-03-30T18:18:00.001-07:00

Free time has been ridiculously sparse lately, and I didn't even have my daily commutes to fall back on last week. I am getting closer and closer to finishing the *first* boss fight, but somehow the closer I get - more and more tiny new details become vital to address. As of right now - the whole battle is playeble from start to finish, although I'm not sure just how well, since I didn't have anyone other than myself play it yet. Things I still need to add are a more spectacular boss death effect, better boss announcement, ability to punch the boss into non-vital parts with "ineffective" message popping up, tweak the bosses punch range - it's a bit too short, a powerup drop after the boss is defeated, a finished power-up-get animation and effect, and more and better sound effects - but that's pretty true of the game on the whole. I need to start working on the event flag and save systems, so the boss battle and puzzles don't reset every time I leave a room, as it's becoming annoying.
Also started working on a new "cave" tileset - hopefully this will turn out pretty.
My last post got a whopping 1 reply, and the one before that I think got none. Now that there is almost zero interest in the project - I might want to keep it that way for a while: )

No, I'm not asleep at the wheel...

2010-03-17T12:26:00.000-07:00

This is a "dead man's switch" update, mainly to show that I'm still actively working on the project. My main area of focus at this particular point is the first boss battle. Since I'm going with heavily scripted and animated boss fights - it is taking me a while, but the fight in itself is done. All I'm left to do there is complete art and scripting for the intro and the outtro sequences. The first arena art is pretty much done as well, but I am struggling to prevent myself from trying to make it even prettier.
Also - the nearness of this milestone makes me so happy, I want to record a new video to show off my progress, though I realize it is a bad idea to show the game so far away from completion... nahh - not gonna do it. Posting new videos has a tendency to give people impressions that the game is close to be done, while it is far from that.
In other minor updates:

Added new elements to the first area of the game - now the background buildings have more architectural variety.
Continued working on new animations for Iya. Almost finished with 30+ frame cycle for Iya collecting a new powerup.
Started the overhaul of the magic system, though it is now more broken than "better".
More map areas added, but not skinned. The game still can't be circumnavigated: (

GunGanesh-arena progress.

2010-02-02T06:52:00.000-08:00

It's gotten a little hectic lately, but I continued to work on the game in every spare moment I get.
Since the last update I have finished tiling the first large sewer area and began work on a puzzlette in that room - it's a simple "flip switch to turn on machinery, then use special moves to get through a set of smashers" kind of deal. The machinery graphics aren't done yet, though the preliminary smashers are already in the game.

Additionally, I have worked on visually distinguishing the first boss arena - I think I'm moving in the right direction with this.

Slugging through the sewers

2010-01-27T07:58:00.000-08:00

Well - I started laying out the sewer portion of the map, and it's currently looking really, really nice. In order to get everything running on lower-end systems such as my netbook I attempted to optimize the sine-wave water routine, and stumbled upon a nasty bug that made things run slowly regardless whether or not the water was on screen or not.

My old slime enemies look very nice in the sewer, which might warrant their partial overhaul, as their current AI and attack pattern are quite terrible and somewhat unpredictable. Also - since I can populate the sewer by the slimes, I might as well recycle the huge slime boss, though, it needs to be redrawn to make it less cartoony-looking.

Now I need some alligators, sludge-cascades and rusty machinery - this is gonna be awesome.
I continued working on the game's map layout, as after some thinking I realized that Iya ends up getting her core moves way too late into the game, so I reshuffled the powerup order. Also, it was decided to reduce the number of magic attributes to three - each with 3 levels of upgrade (the third one is a single secret item that powers up all three magics).

Over the last two days I was playing Return of Egypt - an older indie metroidvania. Not a great game, but it made me think - with its map about a fraction of LOI's and only about three distinct environments it still provides several hours of moderately fun gameplay, Return of Egypt is just long enough for an indie project... is it possible I went overboard with LOI's ginormous world?

Here's a lesson kids: don't make big games all by yourself!

2010-01-18T11:45:00.000-08:00

Well, damnit! I spent almost an entire day yesterday planning out the game's world. Previously I had a basic skeleton just to get me started, but now I actually have the whole thing more or less laid out from the beginning to the end, and guess what - it's HUGE!
For the later branches of exploration I didn't even bother to plot "explorable rooms", as it just got so complex - I'm sure this will bite me in the ass eventually - but I'll cross that bridge when I get to it. Furthermore the area tileset coloring is subject to change, as I am now leaning toward dividing the game into distinct worlds ala Metroid's Norfair, Brinstar etc, and analogous Castlevania castle wings. The number of health and mana containers is also a subject to change, as I am now debating if I should find a way for the HUD to accomodate more than 5 of each container.

An unexpected leap forward.

2010-01-15T23:46:00.000-08:00

Ok - small update - In one day I have added an entire tileset from scratch. This one is for the sewer system in the game. As all other tilesets it's only 16 colors and under 512 tiles (not that it matters, but I couldn't pass up an opportunity for an additional pat on the back: ) Now to add all sorts of decrepid machinery and as much terrifying water as possible.

The town tileset looks even nicer now - added more elements to it as well.

2010-01-11T21:08:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year, and holy crap! It's been five months since my last update, and I really don't have any groundbreaking progress to report on account of me being horrendously busy all this time.
There has, however indeed been SOME progress.

For one thing - the starting "real world" city location - is closer to be done. It currently has only a small tilable building element, but now that I have a starting point it should go quicker.
Additionally - I came up with another cool effect just for this short area - fake-reflective windows. It actually looks pretty cool - you'll see: )
The Gun-Ganesha boss is almost done. His pattern is almost complete, as well as the animations, scripting and background elements, including a colossal Ganesha statue.
Metroid-like minimap as well as a full-sized map of the world have been added, and work perfectly.
Another boss has been partially added. This one should be awesome to animate and script.
A projectile-firing enemy has been added, codename Bazooka Fox.
A wall-crawling enemy ala Metroid Zoomers has been added, but has no finalized graphic.
A walking tank enemy has been designed, but isn't animated yet.
A rock golem sprite sheet is almost done.
A lot of the background foliage is now animated.
Dust floats in indoor sunbeams.
Breakable blocks to hide secret paths.
More tileset refinements.
Some screen filters added to make similar looking areas have slightly different flavor.
Much, much more, but probably too small to mention.

So, yeah - I guess some stuff happend in the last five months. The game isn't dead... just somewhat comatose.

Legend of Iya history so far...

2009-08-06T08:11:00.000-07:00

OK, since I never elaborated on what Legend of Iya is, or given you any idea of what happened in the development so far, I might as well do it now.

The original Legend of Iya or LOI was an episodic game I did back in middle school for ZX Spectrum. It was written in basic, and was essentially the training ground for my art and programming skills. All in all – five episodes were created, all slightly varying in gameplay mechanics, though rarely straying from the established formula of being sort of platformer-adventure games.

Fast-forward five years – in the year 2000 I was collaborating with an indie group – S+F on several Visual Basic game projects. All that was required from me was art, and I had little say in how the games were put together. As one of our projects was winding down in a stir of inspiration I have in one night created a tileset and the characters sprites for a remake of one of the Legend of Iya chapters. The next day I approached the programmer/creative director guy about, perhaps remaking my game as a quick, contained one-month mini-project. My proposal was met with apathy. As I couldn’t program to save my life at that point – I had no choice but to shelve the graphics and begrudgingly continue to work on projects that were not mine.

One day, after listening to me bitch about being unable to program worth of shit, a friend has let it slip about GameMaker. I was initially skeptical – after all, I tried other “game-making” packages before, and they were all, as a rule completely terrible. Either they were incomplete, or so limited, building a game in them was simply not worth the time, as the final result would’ve been sub-par at best.

As with everyone’s first attempts at GM programming, my first project was to modify the platformer tutorial. For that I used the Legend of Iya graphics I had sitting on my harddrive for almost a year now. In less than a day I have concocted a platformer game that was significantly more advanced than anything I was expecting from my S+F programmers. Over the next month, the new LOI took shape, but as I explored GM, the new-found freedom has driven the project further and further away from being simply a remake of a single chapter of the old game.

One day I decided to forfeit the one-single-huge-room design I have been using up until that point in favor of a Metroidvania layout – with smaller interconnected rooms and scripted RPG-like events. That day marked the end of the first LOI remake.

The next two years I spent expanding the game into a much larger, more diverse world, with many more zones, enemies, puzzles, boss fights and NPCs. Some scripting was implemented at key points, playing out simple in-game cutscenes An elaborate front end and, albeit unfinished intro were added. An inventory and equipment systems were implemented.

This was the furthest LOI has ever progressed, but then a weird thing happened. Around Halloween I took a month off working on the LOI project to create a small sideproject – Maziac. The game turned out quite decently, and was finished in a record time. After playing it, however, I noticed that it wasn’t particularly fun. I went back to Iya… and began to notice the same thing – the gameplay was just dull.

Disillusioned, I scrapped the project that was probably close to 70% done, but if finished would’ve been only mediocre.

However, it didn’t stop there. As my art skills have steadily improved over the years, I decided to redo Iya’s animation, making it as smooth as I could by inserting in-between cycles for transitioning from any cycle into another. LOI mark 3 was born. This time I tried to make the gameplay as fast, dynamic and real physics based as I could. The graphics, partially recycled and edited from later areas of previous LOI game were made more and more elaborate, and this time around actually used some semblance of color theory. The project went on for almost a year, by the end of which I had a fairly impressive physics playground finished.

And then I met a programmer. He wanted to port my game to then-more-popular-than-hotcakes GBA. To do that, he wanted to simply auto-resize the sprites to about 2/3 their current size, and color-reduce them to 16 color – which to anyone who ever did pixel-art will sound like a travesty. Despising the idea of simply auto-adjusting my pixel art, I decided to do a manual pixel pass over the reduced graphics, and discovered that it would probably take me less time and produce better results to just redraw everything from scratch… so LOI mark 4 was born.

And that’s the one you see in the screenshots... or at least that's the game that was born of my intention to develop for Gameboy Advance. GBA has since died, and even the NDS is now on its last leg, so this is a now, yet again, a mostly PC game.

The game was started with more or less a clear plan - first for me, and actually has a finalized story, of which I don’t want to divulge any detail, other than to say that it starts out as a standard Wizard of Oz-like scenario of a girl getting whisked away to a mysterious and possibly magical land.

Currently, Legend of Iya is an exploration platformer with melee combat and ranged “magic” attacks. The game features a world structure similar to games like Super Metroid and the recent Castlevanias – a lot of smaller rooms strung together to form an enormous labyrinthine world with themed areas. Some areas can only be accessed after acquiring a certain ability – be it a running wall-smash, ground-slide, double-jump, or “the ultimate doorknob” power.

In addition to utilizing tons of full-frame animation, the game also features Phaeton Engine – a custom animation system to allow modularly animated bosses and environmental objects, allowing for enormous, yet well-animated boss enemies.

The plot will be delivered via non-intrusive environmental storytelling and (maybe) soliloquized voiceover of the protagonist.

In the end I hope to deliver a game with at least 5-8 hours of non-recycled gameplay content, plus some cool extras.

Weather or not the game will be free is still undecided.

2009-08-03T07:38:00.000-07:00

It's been a while, but work on LoI continued all this time, though even slower than usual, as I had some freelancing work to rob me of even the tiniest bit of free time... and then there is Red Faction Guerrilla. I never thought I could have so much fun destroying things - it's like I'm a little kid again - spending hours to build robots out of Legos, just to bombard them with AAA batteries...But I digress: )
Over the last weekend I added some background elements to the first puzzlette of the game - the one with the turning wheel.

...Oh, the turning wheel - I hope it wouldn't become the bane of my existence as it right now has all makings of one.
Among other things - I added another enemy - a Moai head that pops out of the ground and shoots fire, and can only be destroyed with a rolling smash. I gave the thing a very nice and elaborate breaking cycle, but unfortunately almost nobody will ever see it, as at the moment of impact a lot of dust and sparks are spawned, covering most of the animation... oh, well.

I've been somewhat burned out as of late.

2009-06-25T10:12:00.000-07:00

Even my commute has become slightly less productive lately, as I've just been so damn tired. However, this didn't stop me from adding more room data and beginning to code puzzle elements in.
In addition to large set-piece puzzles every now and then I decided to pepper the game with less complex, but somewhat interesting tasks throughout. First such task I planned to implement was the balancing platforms - two platforms suspended on chains, and a crank to turn left or right to move one platform up while the other moves down and vice versa... Implementing this took me surprisingly little time, so I decided to kick it up a notch - remove the crank, replacing it with a giant rusty wheel connected to the platform chain. Grabbing and hanging off of knobs along the the circumference of the wheel turns it in that direction, lowering and raising platforms. Not only does this make the whole system more realistic, but it provides for a possibility of very cool set-piece graphics (of ancient rusty machinery)
On the graphical front I have continued rehashing one of my existing tilesets adding more elements to it. A new parallax background for another area of Sanctuary Woods has been preliminary pixeled, but needs to be detailed out. It currently looks like this.
^^^

I have been slowly adding more flashy effects for things getting hit. Now when a hit connects with certain enemies, not only there is a fountain of animated sparks, but also a cloud of dust - this adds a lot to the robustness of the game's look... or something: ) Began drawing other hit-connection effects drawing inspiration from Street Fighter 3.

As I mentioned in my previous post - I began working on the game's starting area - a modern city, but honestly haven't made it far enough into drawing it to even show it here. Maybe the next time I update.

Fixed a few annoying glitches in the ledge-grab routine, which apparently I originally hacked in. Also - floating enemies no longer become invincible when uppercutted.
There is still an annoying glitch in moving along with horizontally-moving platforms - I need to fix that pronto, as this will be key to some puzzles.

Anyway - so many things to work on... so little time - and even less energy to do it.

The work goes on...

2009-06-04T08:10:00.000-07:00

And the work on Legend of Iya continues at a leisurely pace…Ever since I bought myself a netbook computer I have been using my daily commute to keep adding stuff to the game. The shaky, unpleasantly brightly lit, uncomfortable environment of the train isn’t great for pixeling, the work I do is mostly map, code and Phaeton animation-related.

Speaking of maps – I guess it’s too late now, but I realized that Game Maker’s built-in map editor is total crap, and for my next project I’m building my own: )

On the animation front I have added one fluff cycle - a wobbling-on-the-edge animation if you send Iya sliding off a platform - it's pretty, but will rarely be seen. I have also started to expand the aerial pummel animation, which was previously nothing but a single lightning-fast punch repeated endlessly. It is now more along the lines of an all out Naruto-esque string of fist, knee and leg attacks - hopefully this will make the aerial juggling look more fun. Oh, and I began to correct the wall-pushing animation, as previously Iya lost about 25% of her size when pushing against things.

I finally added the third tileset - the first Catacomb location. It is currently rather rudimentary and is lacking ladders or any kind of ornamental flare or creepy necropolis parts (that I have planned for it), but with its cold gray walls and slightly iridescent background it adds a cool contrast to the game's other overly green areas. So far I only have one area-specific enemy for the catacombs - an indestructible floating eyeball that serves to impede vertical progress. The parallax layers for this set aren't finished yet.

The first Phaeton monster in my game - GunGanesh - a mid-boss is beatable, but as of right now lacks a clear boss pattern and the emphasis of his boss-ness. I am yet to add some more animation for him as well as come up with a clear pattern for the fight - something I need to play a lot of Noitu Love 2 and Legend of Princess for... although - his "home" screen isn't done yet, and I want to do something really cool with him.

My next logical step in development should probably be doing the opening area of the game - a modern city, so I can finally release a demo of LOI... let's see how that turns out.

Phaeton! Now with 100% more ZOOM!

2009-04-16T08:28:00.000-07:00

And so.. without actually explaining anything about my game I'm making an entry about the tools I am developing along with it... How totally moronic of me, but it's 2 AM and I have a crunch-filled work-day tomorrow - so, suck it up, all things will be explained in time.

Have you ever played a 2D Konami or Treasure game, like Contra Hard Corps or Gunstar Heroes and gawked in awe at those huge bosses that visibly consist of independently moving modules? I know I did, and still do whenever one of those modular monstrosities shows up in any game (except maybe for recent Castlevanias, where the modular bosses looked mighty cheep and sloppy). Phaeton is an editor I wrote to allow me to insert such creatures into my own game. It ended up being a rather complex animation program consisting of three stages - a module import stage, where you load a bitmap with all of your creature's body parts on it, a frame generation stage, where you arrange the imported modules into animation frames, and lastly - an animation stage, where you order the pre-created frames into animations. The editor then saves a file that describes the animation in an easy-to-parse text format, that combined with a module bitmap comprises all the ingredients needed for the creation of in-game modular beasties.

Tonight I have finally added a zoom in/out feature to all three stages of the editor. This addition was prompted by the fact that I am working on my netbook with a 10" screen for about 4 hours a day...

Oh, hell - since I have nobody to tell this...

2009-04-16T08:26:00.000-07:00

I hate the idea of blogging - I really do, especially when it serves no real purpose other than attention-whoring. News-blogging - I can understand and relate to, but putting up what equates to your personal diary for all the world to see - it's douchy and pretentious... All that said - it's exactly what I'm doing now, despicable as it might be.

For a while now I have been making a game. "A while" in this case means almost a decade, and even longer if you count the 8-bit incarnations from my childhood. Now, before you say anything - it wasn't the same game all along, and the game has gone through at least 4 complete resets since its initial PC build back in 2001, but one element remains unchanged at its core - the protagonist, or more precisely the protagonist's name -Iya. Her age has changed over the years, currently hovering at about 12 years old. Her appearance went from a rather simplistic, poorly animated "chibi" figure, to what now is an almost properly proportioned and well-animated human child. Her personality and attitude also went all across the board from insipidly heroic, to sad, to bratty, to the current mix of determination and wonder, leaving any outside observer to conclude that I have absolutely no freaking idea of where the hell am I going with this. And that observer would've been right, or at least he would be up until the last reset of the project which happened three years ago - in 2006.

Now the game is finally shaping up, and though it is still far from completion, I want to keep a log of what is happening on the project - a log that can be read by anyone out there.

So, whatever: )

This is what at the moment passes for the title screen