Ini Files Continued

Ini files:
-enemies
-items
-spells
-player info
-save

Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon: Another Story - Fun Game Friday

Okay, I'm going to start with an assumption, and then I'm going to make some clarifications with today's Fun Game Friday.

Firstly, the assumption. I'm going to guess that you weren't aware that in 1995, a Sailor Moon RPG was released for SNES. I feel that it's safe to make this assumption for a few reasons. Mainly because, well, it was released only in Japan. Also, I'm gonig to say that anybody who reads this isn't a very big fan of Sailor Moon (as far as I can tell)

Now, the clarifications. Despite what you might think, I'm not a Sailor Moon fan. Yes, okay, I have the dolls, and I import the shows from Japan, but it's not a big deal, really.

No, in all seriousness, the only thing I know about Sailor Moon is that it was a cartoon that was on before Dragon Ball Z when I was little. It was like one of those shows they had to trick us kids into watching.

Despite these things, I was still surprised by the existence of this game. I wasn't really surprised that they would make a video game based on a popular anime. That's to be expected. But what I was surprised by was the fact that this game is an RPG--and a decent one at that.


(sorry for no sound!!! I just can't seem to nail the whole sound part of videos yet...)

Thankfully, it's been tranlated into English so schmucks like us can enjoy it.

Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon: Another Story is built on your basic RPG elements, and plays a lot like a Final Fantasy game. You play through story and fight monsters when the plot calls for it. In fact, one noticable difference from other RPGs is in the fighting system. Instead of MP, you have EP. EP is like a one-time-use sort of thing. What seems like lazy programming at first, actually makes the game considerably challenging later on. You have to balance out which techniques you use on later boss fights, because you only get to use 12 max for the duration of the fight. This is only made harder by having EP resoring items be hard to find.

The world graphics are particularily crisp, bright and snappy, and definitely more than expected. However, the animations are choppy and could use a lot of work.

The story is obviously for Sailor Moon fans, and I hate to say it, but I haven't been paying too much attention to it so far.

Either way,I think you should give it a try. I did find a nice site that goes into lots more detail if you're interested: http://www.fantasyanime.com/animerpgs/pssm.htm
The site has more stuff than you can imagine; music, walkthrough, maps--I actually have my wallpaper set this one right now from the site. Feel free to laugh.

And that's that.

Bland Post about INI files.

Ini files. Probably the most boring thing to talk about. I took a picture of all the data tables as they are on graph paper, but the usb on this old computer doesn't work the way it should. I'll show them to you as soon as I can. This is a very disappointing post.

New NPC Movement

Thing 1 and Thing 2 and Thing 3

Okay, to make up for lost time, I've been trying to get two things done a day versus the usual just one thing a day. (Actually, today, I got three things done, but who's counting?)

Thing 1:
I made a better version of the option box. In the old version, you could only answer yes or no, but with the new version, the text of the options can be customized. Say you want to pick between black and white, or Bill and Ted. That's now possible.


(you can see the new text engine in action too here)

Sorry about the video quality. It makes the checkerboard floor look animated.

Thing 2:
Sokoban. Pretty much the same as the old version, except with a minor change. Before, if you held on the button to push the block, it would continue to move with you. Now, it only moves once per button press.


Thing 3:
The camera was very boring in the first version of the Super Immortal Role Playing Engine, so I'm going to add in a more active camera (I think I mentioned this before, but I finalized it today.) This will be useful for more cinematic story telling.

That wraps it up. As Blue says in the video, I'm going to work on NPC movements, and ini files now.

Fancy New Logo

I didn't have much time to work on the engine today, and I figured that in honor of starting the engine over, it ought to have its own logo. So I threw together this quick trefoil knot thing.

Take a look:


You like-a-da-sauce?

What's done, and what I'm working with

Now, since my laptop is decommisioned until I obtain a new hard drive (I think my brother is giving me his old one, but donations are welcome!) I have to work on a very old computer. It has 930Hz CPU and 256mb RAM. My laptop is more than double the machine this one is. This mean's it's slow. But to be honest, I like working under the restrictions because it makes me want to streamline my code.

I already have the movement engine back in place, and a new-and-improved text system that allows for multiple pages of text, and letter-by-letter progression. I plan to blaze through everything to make up for lost time, which may mean breifer updates on the blog. Either way, I will keep in touch, and I promise, The Super Immortal Role Playing Engine Version 2 is going to be good.

The Current Situation of the Super Immortal Role Playing Engine

So I was installing Rise of Nations Gold edition on my laptop on the 17th. Everything was going fine,until it just stopped at 99%. I wasn't really paying much attention, until I started to hear "click-click-click-click" from my hard drive. Then I noticed the mouse didn't move. Thought to myself, "this is weird," so I restarted. And that was the last time I was on my laptop.

Why this is bad:

I had no backups of the Super Immortal Role Playing Engine. Everything is lost,and it's literally back to sqaure one. Not to worry though--the engine is immortal :) At the start of the project, I knew things like this would come up, but I made a vow to myself to never let the engine die. I've already started working on a new version (and I promise to back things up daily.)

This new version is going to be a lot better. Instead of treating everything to this point as a failure, I've decided to see what I can learn so far.

Things I've learned:

Mainly, the way I approached the engine the first time around. I was making things up as they came along, and everything was messy as a result. Planning from start to finish, all the different values and files that are needed is definately a better way to go when making an rpg. This is a big thing I've learned. Everything is so much cleaner and easy and properly labled, making everything more simple and effective.

Secondly, to do lists. If I would have kept at the rate I was going the past few weeks, then engine would have been playable by the end of this weekend. And the reason why is to do lists. So much time is wasted staring into space, and lists of what to do make the work that has to be done mindless and fun.

Lastly, back things up. If you have any sort of sensitve data on your hard drive, BACK IT UP RIGHT NOW. GO GO GO! My hard drive failed out of nowhere, and it can happen to you. I plan to email myself the engine after each day's work on it, and also, back it up to re-writable cds from now on. Hopefully I won't have to start over.

Tommorow I'll tell you more about what I already have done on the new version, and also, what kind of computer I'm working on now. (Hint: slowwwwwwwwwwwwwww)

Phantasy Star 3: Generations of Doom - Fun Game Friday

Okay folks, I have some good news, and I have some bad news.

The bad news: The hard drive on my laptop ceased up, and very little of the Super Immortal Role Playing Engine was backed up. This is sad, but I'll talk more about it tomorrow. I didn't call it immortal for nothing ;)

The good news: It's Fun Game Friday!

Today's game is very close to my heart. Let me tell you a story. When I was just a young chap of about 11 or 12, I used to have to spend a weekend or two at my grandma's house out in the country during the summer. This was always a drag for me because my grandma was boring and her house was scary. Until one day I stumbled upon my uncle's Sega Genesis, and a game in particular, Phantasy Star 3.



I was never able to make it very far in the span of a weekend, but the atmosphere--and particularly the music--have stayed with me to this day. (unfortunately the soundcard on this old beast of a computer I'm posting with today is so shitty, so you don't get a chance to hear the beautiful melodies)

The game is your standard RPG. It's basically Sega's answer to Nintendo's popular Final Fantasy. This means it's crappy. The graphics are terrible. Very repetitive and down right bland. Everything looks the same. Actually, in the video, I make a point of visiting 3 different towns, and they all look literally EXACTLY the same. The stores in these towns literally sell the same stuff for the same prices. So, if you're looking for variety, look somewhere else.

The story is awful. You take the role of a prince who is about to marry a mysterious woman who doesn't know where she's from. During the wedding, a winged monster steals her away. The prince pleads with his father, the king, to send the army to go find her. The king thinks it's such a terrible idea that he sends the prince to the castle's dungeon to cool off for a little bit. The game starts from here, as you try to escape this first dungeon. Later, you must find a cyborg because there's a man who owns a ship who's got a fetish for cyborgs (well, I'm sort of reading between the lines here. If the dialog wasn't so terrible, I wouldn't have to make this up.)

The combat is sort of interesting. Its auto-battle feature takes the tedium out of leveling up a little bit. And the monster graphics are one of the few good things about the game. For the average player, though, I don't think the monster graphics will pull enough weight to convince anybody that the game is actually fun.

I think everybody will agree that Phantasy Star 3: Generations of Doom is a completely sub-par, boring game--and they have the right. But it has a special place in my heart that saves it from oblivion.

Just seeing the logo come down and the music that starts brings me back to the days when even a game as simple and as boring as this fueled me with creative energy enough to want to explore the whole world. It's an indescribable feeling, and it's something I hope I can create with my games.

Give it a try, but only for the music. In fact, please go search youtube for Phantasy Star 3 music. But don't expect anything else exceptional from this game. Unless of course, you're stuck at your grandma's for the weekend.

Known Abilities

Today, I worked on the "known" spell system. I made it so you can add and remove spells for debugging, but this will be done through various events in the game--say you find a special item, and it teaches you how to use fireball. Or say you meet a kung fu master, and he teaches you how to do round-house kicks.

It was mentioned earlier that it would be awesome if you could level up spells, and I wholeheartedly agree with this notion. However, because of time issues, it's a feature that I have decided to leave out of the initial versions of the engine. But I want it to be clear that this is something the engine will have. I also have an "age" system planned for the known moves, where if you don't use your known abilities enough, they actually "un-level"--basically a use it or lose it sort of thing. But this too will have to wait to be implemented. Again, this is so I can stay on schedule.

I'm going to start working on battles really quick here, so stay tuned. Things are just getting warmed up.

New Desk and New Chair

A little bit of a change of pace today. I got my hands on a new desk, but it's a little bit taller than my old one and my chair no longer reached. So, I decided to take the time I've normally been dedicating to the RPG engine, and make my chair taller. I took pictures so you can follow along:



This is the before picture. Yes I know, the desk is backwards. There isn't enough room to flip it around in my room, but it's okay for now because I'm moving soon actually.



The metal legs are just bolted into a plank of wood that runs along the bottom of the chair. My plan was to simply add a board to add height.



This is what the bottom of the chair looked like after taking the legs off. I wish I would have taken a picture of the legs! Actually, I gave the legs a good bath in WD-40 to get rid of their squeaks.



Oops. The board I planned to add between the legs and the plank wasn't wide enough to drill into. Luckily, cut in half, the two boards measured to be perfect.



Actually, speaking of cuts, it was at this point that I noticed I was bleeding. I don't know how it happened. Didn't even feel it. Strange.



Next, drilling. No blood here, fortunately. (though I suppose it would be more entertaining if there was...:P)



Then it was time to dig through the junk drawer for bolts, because the stock bolts would be too short after adding another board to go through. Lots to dig through...



It was pretty awesome when I found 4 of the EXACT thing I was looking for in less than a minute of digging. The stock nuts even fit these new bolts. (new on the left, old on the right)



Then it was time to re-fasten the legs. I drilled my holes a little small, so the bolts were having a tough time wanting to fit, but it was nothing a hammer couldn't fix.



There. All done. The best part is that it totally rocks more than it did before (literally, it's a rocking chair and it rocks further now because it's higher up.)

Name Entry

I realized today that I completely forgot about a name entry system, so I hammered one out.

Here are the results:

(Sorry about the sound on the video. Still trying to get that all calibrated.)

The best part is that this name is recognized throughout the game, and can be used by npcs to reference your name. I may later add a filter that makes sure you can't use curse words and vulgarities.

I think tomorrow I shall work on moves and leveling up.

Inventory Glitch

This glitch in the inventory is very frustrating. I've been messing with it and debugging today and I'm starting to think I might have to scrap the move feature for the time being. I really need to move on to the next features.

Here is some footage of the glitch:



Grrrr.

Tiny Little Update

Tiny Update: I'm working making the player stats screens spiffy.

Tenative To-do List

(this is mostly a note to myself)

to do:

de-glitch move item system

make player screen show player stats all nice and pretty, plus show what armor and weapons are equipped.

make that yellow set-path npc talk-to-able

change all text to text blitter, and all talking to progressive text (yikes!)

battle (mostly just math and making it flashy.)

a thing in the ini that has known spells, and a cooresponding screen to "arm" spells"

experience points! for both player and spells.

Fun Game Friday - The Legend of the Ghost Lion

Hello everybody! It's time for Fun Game Friday!

This week, I have been playing the shit out of an often overlooked gem for NES; The Legend of the Ghost Lion. I've been trying to keep with an RPG theme because of the Super Immortal Role Playing Engine and everything, and I stumbled upon this goldmine of a game.

Here's some footage!:


Now, I am a huge fan of the Dragon Warrior series, and I'm not going to lie--TLotGL is a rip off of it. But it's done in such a way that I can't stop playing it.

The story is your standard "my parents got lost exploring a cave, and I got lost in the cave trying to find them after then ever returned and now I'm in a strange world with fairies and kobolds and towns named Bread--and mushrooms everywhere." It's enthralling in a silly way.

But I have to mention this: The battle system. In normal RPG's, you have HP, MP, and Levels. Not in the Legend of the Ghost Lion. Nope, you have Courage for HP, Dreams for MP, and Hope for levels. And if that isn't cool enough, you don't gain experience points at all. Then how do you level up you ask? You find "fragments of hope" in chest in dungeons that raise your Hope points.

This brings up an interesting dimension of the gameplay of Legends of the Ghost Lion. There is no reason to fight besides for making money. Just like real life. :P Yep. I found myself having to break my old habits of going to level up before venturing further. This has its Pro's and Con's. You never feel like you're getting stronger, but you do feel like you are testing your own personal strength to see if you have the courage enough to venture further into the dungeon. (get it? courage? as in you don't have HP)

Other than that, Maria can use items to summon Warriors and Magicians and Elfs and stuff, but you still are left feeling like battles were just thrown in. The battle music starts to get really annoying--in fact you almost want to avoid fights if it wasn't for the fact that you get to see a cute girl wink when you win.

I like it in a kinky way. It's a little bit broken on the edges but it's a generally captivating game. Give it a try. You will be addicted.

EDIT: Oh man! I didn't notice that I recorded sound in the wrong way. I had it set to microphone instead of input. So you get to hear our conversation about Food Party instead of the in-game music. I will leave it for funny sake, because after all, it's Fun Game Friday! Sorry for the mix up though!

Inventory Scminventory

Quick update: Did work on the inventory today. You can now use items and equip weapons and armor. I'm going to work out a system to move items around to organize your inventory later.

UPDATE: Been messing around with a moving system. Basically, it sets all the needed values to a counter, and imprints the counter values onto the new spot. It works, but it is glitchy. For some reason, when you switch an item from the bottom, it sets the quantity of the item to zero! So, one step forwards, two steps back on that front.

Progressive Letter-by-Letter Text

I've been messing around with bitmap fonts, and threw together a text engine that reveals text a letter at a time like in practically every older game.

Take a gander:


At the moment, the text engine for the Super Immortal Role Playing Engine is different. Instead of the standard "press a button" to talk to somebody, you automatically talk to them when you walk up to them. This is admittedly because of laziness--but a great idea came out of this. Instead of saying the same thing no matter what, each person says different things depending on which direction you approach them from. This is cool because you can get directions, or have people tell secrets and say stuff they don't want the others to hear. It's just cool.

I think I will keep the direction specificness, but implement this new system I've been experimenting with. It will take a little bit of extra work to put in a push-button, letter-by-letter system, but I think it will be worth it for legitimacy.

Also, GOOD NEWS! I read up on the recording software I've been using to capture video and did what had to be done to get sound to work. Now you can hear sound in the videos!

Cleanliness is Next to Godliness

Began work on the equipment system, but mostly did some housecleaning today.

Here's what I all did:
-fixed a glitch with the chest that would turn the first slot item into a potion instead of adding a potion to the inventory
-messed with the timing on the inn screen
-made the zeros on the sell screen hide
-tidied up the inventory menu.

Selling = Done!

So now you can sell items. And the inventory fixes itself. This is a load off my back because I have been putting it off for too long.



Things to do still:
-equipment
-using items
-changing maps (very easy)
-battles

After doing these things, I'll clean up a little and make the commentary look nicer, THEN a playable demo will be ready! I'm still not sure if I'm going to make a complimentary example adventure to go with it during release, or afterward.

Selling/ Inventory Conundrum

Working on selling/ removing items from inventory. I have the basic selection part of the code done, but I still don't know how to go about re-ordering the inventory if an item is removed from the middle of the stack.

Here's the dilemma:
Say you have
4 Potions
2 Herbs
1 Sword
1 Shield

And you sell 2 Herbs. With the code I have so far, your inventory would then look like this:
4 Potions

1 Sword
1 Shield

So basically right now, I am brain storming different ways to recompile the list of inventory--hopefully without making the code too complex. I want it to end up as this:
4 Potions
1 Sword
1 Shield


Shouldn't be too hard, but will take a little thinking.

Also, I hope to work out an "organize" feature, that organizes Items you can use outside of battle, Weapons, Key items, and so on. I'm guessing that the key to my first problem will lead me to the solution of this one.

----
EDIT: Actually, while typing this I think I figured something out that will work! The code will basically check if a slot is empty, and then check if the next slot is empty. If the next slot isn't, it will take the values and print them onto the first slot, and then make the next slot empty. The only problem I can see from this is if there is two slots open--the initial check will see the that next slot is empty--BUT I think it will fix itself because the "next" slot will be checking for its next slot, so the item will move from that THEN the first check will move it up again.

YAY! Now, to test it out...

Test Graphics

I've been playing around with some tile design ideas to use for the example adventure to be included with the Super Immortal Role Playing Engine. I want to capture and early NES feel, and have been trying to stick to the NES resolution restrictions of 256 by 224. The other NES restrictions are a lot more difficult to follow--FIRST OF ALL, there are only 56 colors total, and from those colors, you make a palette. A palette is made of 3 colors plus an alpha channel (for transparency), THEN, you can only have 4 distinct palettes in the background, AND 4 distinct palettes for the sprites, AND THEN, you can only have 1 palette per 2x2 tile. And it only gets more tough from there.

Anyways, here's the tiles I have so far:


And here is a quick mockup of a castle I've been putting together:


Tell me what you think! If there are any tiles I should include that you don't see, let me know. I know that for sure I'm going to add some trees, and maybe like, a waterfall, and those kinds of things. But let me know!

Fun Game Friday - The Adventures of Lolo 3

I have been playing The Adventures of Lolo 3 for the Nintendo Entertainment System lately, and I have to say, it's an addicting little puzzle game. I thought, instead of posting an update on how the project is going, I would post a quick review of the game. This is something that I could do every Friday. We'll call it Fun Game Friday. (its 11:51 pm as I type this, so hopefully I get it posted before Saturday!)

Here is the intro stages to the game:


The Adventures of Lolo is a puzzle series for the NES, and features very simple gameplay. You can move things around, and shoot after you've collected certain hearts. When you get all the hearts, a chest in the room opens. Get the treasure in the chest and move on to the next level. This simple gameplay is deceiving however, because the difficulty of the puzzles progresses so subtly that suddenly you realize that you have no clue how to solve one. Baddies of all sorts try to prevent you from getting the hearts. Like I said before, I've been playing this all week. It's very inspiring, and I hope to include a few ideas from it in future projects. I especially enjoy how the whole atmosphere of the game is very carefree and fantasy. You have to find keys to unlock doors. I definitely recommend at least trying it.

The music is amazing, but unfortunately, I can't record sound yet. Actually, there's something interesting I'd like to say about that. In place of the beautiful in-game music is an unreleased song from Basic Bus Driver (http://myspace.com/basicbusdriver), which is a small indie electronic music outfit, who offers an entire album for free, so definitely check them out, too.

Buying Stuff

I finally ironed out buying stuff at the shop and adding it to the inventory. Before, it would only tell you if you didn't have enough money to buy something. But now, if you have enough money, it will added it to your inventory and subtract the price from your wallet. This might sound simple, but I was having a brain fart on how to get it to move to the next inventory slot. Anyways, I got it worked out.

Here are the results:


It's my highest task to finish the buying and sell system. I might work on the selling portion later tonight, but for sure tomorrow. Then I can move on to more exciting things, like battles...

Stay tuned!

Inn

There is now a working inn. The code here is pretty straightfowards. Basically re-using the store code and the chest code to make it usable for an inn.

Here's what it looks like in action:


Since the engine is getting closer and closer to being openly playable, I was planning on making a short adventure to go along with it, to demonstrate its power.

High priority to do:
-finish stores (selling, and adding to inventory)
-battles
-map changing
-save points
-name entry

Battles Battles Battles Battles

I've been putting a lot of thought about how to do the fighting in the Super Immortal Role Playing Engine. Standard turned-based with attacks and MP and items is fine, such as what you would see in the early Final Fantasy games or Dragon Warrior games, but the problem with these systems is that it doesn't allow for very much customization.

There is something I always enjoyed about the Pokemon series. You get to choose what moves to keep when leveling up. It adds a whole strategic element that just simple attacking and using spells doesn't quite achieve. So there's that. I also really like interactive type battles, like you see in most Final Fantasy games. You know, "Don't attack when the tail is up!" type of stuff. So I hope to for sure include those types of things.

So anyways, what I think I'm going to go with is a system where you have a "bank" of moves that you know. These moves are learned by doing various tasks for people, finding certain items, or growing to a certain level. Then, from this bank of known moves, you can choose and equip, or "arm" 3 of them. You then can use those 3 in battle. So when you are preparing for a boss fight, you might want to arm the skill that is more effective against dragons. Or, you might find that your fire-based skill will do nothing to a fire-y demon.

This will hopefully add the most strategic value, plus add more reason to do side quests and the like. Let me know what you think in the comments!