Out of nowhere - an update!

Well, it has sure been a while - during which time I have switched jobs and moved to an ass-end of nowhere, blowing all my savings in process. I wish life came with an undo button, but without it - I'm stuck here for a year, and I might as well make the best of it.

Oh - and then the flash cart with the latest version of LOI got destroyed, costing me several months of very sporadic work - sad and annoying, but fairly inconsequential.

On the plus side - I've since been working on LOI fairly consistently, probably for the first time in almost a year. The destruction of my recent progress has also finally pushed me to implement real-time backup of my project flash drive to Dropbox and then to a folder on my lappy.

I will post visual updates later - they are currently minor, and include additions all across the board - tileset fixes, new rooms, new decor objects, puzzle implementations (still sort of broken), new enemies/obstacles and new Phaeton creatures. I've also been writing the game's script, and it seems I'll actually have to do a bit of restructuring in the early portion of the game map - nothing major, hopefully.

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.

It's been a while!

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!

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.

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!

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!

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".