[community project] RPG

[superfreaky]

WARNING! THIS POST CONTAINS MINOR SPOILERS! IF YOU'VE BEEN WATCHING THIS THREAD BUT DON'T WANT TO BE SPOILED, SKIP IT!

If you're part of the team, you have to read. Sorry!

The name of the game is Hero.

Character list: this character list will sketch the characters out not only for how they should look (so the sprite designers have an outline) but also a bit of personality to help me with the plot when I write it.

Markos: The main character. He is a mechanical genius, which will affect the gameplay, but he's also a master swordsman. He is always willing to help people out. He has spiky hair, if that can be put into the sprite. His sword, for most of the game, is really wide and somewhat short. It gets upgraded if you unlock things from one-time minigames, like the powerups in Super Mario Bros. 3, if that's possible to do. The upgrades do not affect the appearance. Not like it would be possible, with such limited resolution, but, well, might as well note that down.

Myra: Markos' girlfriend. She has been captured by the enemy you fight, because he likes her. Only a hero can get her back! (What were you expecting would happen with the love interest? I'm not an original person! Save the girl works for me.)

Lord Garmadon: Obviously the badguy. He got his position of power through the might of his sword. The sword has a strong vein of dark energy, and was forged by elves from the Dark Regions (more about this later). It has not only given him the strength of ten men, but protects him in battle, and has prolonged his life for several centuries. He takes women that catch his eye and adds them to his harem. Shoulder length hair, and I dunno, some lame cape.

That's all the important people to the plot, believe it or not. The rest are just side characters, any old design will do. They're just there so you have something to interact with. Some are at least a little bit important, because they help you in different ways, but no description is necessary.


So here comes the basic plot. Oh boy...

Opening scene, where Markos and Myra are taking a walk in the park. No dialogue yet. Suddenly a huge spike thing punches through the ground next to them, with someone sitting on it. He grabs Myra and the spike falls away into the ground again. Markos: “Myra!” Garmadon (from under the ground): “Mwa ha ha! You will never see your precious Myra again! I'm taking her as the prize of my harem, the chief concubine. Don't worry, she probably wanted to break up with a little wimp like you anyway. Hahahahahahaha!” A flash comes from the hole in the ground, and he's gone. Markos: “I don't have much time to save her. It's a long walk to Lord Garmadon's palace, but I can't just teleport... I'll have to head into town and see if anyone can help me.” He walks off screen. The next place is on the edge of a town. STAGE 1: (insert stage name here, map designer.[and by the way you have freedom in the next part. Just follow the outline I'm giving.]) You are in a village on market day. There are little sale booths everywhere in the center of the town, stage designer picks what they all have. There only needs to be a few minor upgrades, and you have to pick one. An extra heart, a minor healing potion, a better knife – which is what you start with – you get the gist. People everywhere throughout the outer edges of the town, who have an exclamation point over their head, who ask you little favors. I mean like finding something of theirs or getting them an icecream cone. You get the gist. When you recover the item, you only need to talk to them again, and then you pick something up in your inventory at random. It might be something important, but it might just enable you to get a different favor out of the way, in a chain, leading up to something more important. I think you should be able to pick and choose whether you want to put the effort into a hard favor, or blow through quickly. How fast you go through the game will affect your score, and percentage of completion. My vision is that, even if you don't complete everything in a level, you can always go back later on in the game, which will indeed be necessary if you want to complete everything at all possible. See, I have planned already a zipline crossbow gadget you get, and other things in the works later on, which I will mention as necessary, but the zipline thing is what you get in the first level. You need it to go to the next one. I want a separate map area you go in when you walk out of the exit to a level, but not like Super Mario Bros style. What I'm thinking is a sort of out-of-scale map you need to interact with to advance, rather that the set pathways of the aforementioned famous game. From the first level, zipline across a cliff (or whatever the map designer thinks is best – have complete freedom in designing the puzzles!) You get what I mean, right? If you are unclear, let me know and I'll expand.

Another concept is one using some kind of magic jewel, which in combination with some supplies (Collected through favors) allows you to cross dimensions to reach previously unreachable places. Let me explain. When you stand on areas of black and white criss-cross (Let me know if you're confused about what I mean by that) you can use your jewel-thing-with-no-name-yet to “Cross dimensions” meaning black now = white and white = black. You can go through white and not black, you're just inverting the place you can go. This can open up a whole new world, if it's properly designed. I think to help along the effect that you're in an unstable, non-natural place, the backlight could be flashing and the view shaking, like when you're down to your last life in Crabator. You dig? I think it's a pretty fantastic idea.

Well, my next update will have lots of actual story, but for now, I just wanted to throw some ideas out there, and give the map designer something to design, you know?

[Sorunome]

I made a new thread for story-related discussion: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=3438

[Sorunome]

Oh, I just left those for reference in case I screwed something up, the first "wall" of text/code that represents each channel in whole is the one after each "Channel X Everything" section.
or I can just paste those here to make it 999% easier :

Code: Select all

Channel 1 Everything :

const unsigned int stry1[] PROGMEM = {0x4040,0x4038,0x4030,0x4038,0x4040,0x4038,0x4030,0x3838,0x8EC,0x42C,0x424,0x810,0x810,0x810,0x810,0x810,0x810,0x810,0x410,0x410,0x808,0x808,0x808,0x808,0x808,0x808,0x808,0x408,0x408,0x800,0x800,0x800,0x800,0x800,0x800,0x800,0x400,0x400,0x808,0x808,0x808,0x808,0x808,0x808,0x808,0x408,0x408,0x800,0x800,0x800,0x800,0x800,0x800,0x800,0x400,0x400,0x800,0x800,0x800,0x800,0x800,0x800,0x800,0x400,0x400,0x808,0x808,0x808,0x808,0x808,0x808,0x808,0x408,0x408,0x800,0x800,0x800,0x800,0x800,0x800,0x800,0x400,0x400,0x808,0x808,0x808,0x808,0x808,0x808,0x808,0x408,0x408,0x3810,0x468,0x468,0x468,0x468,0x368,0x568,0x000}; Channel 2 Everything :

const unsigned int stry2[] PROGMEM = {0x87C,0x878,0x87C,0x1084,0x87C,0x878,0x870,0x878,0x4EC,0x868,0x4EC,0x145C,0x4EC,0x85C,0x868,0x870,0x868,0x870,0x1078,0x870,0x878,0x87C,0x884,0x4EC,0x898,0x4EC,0x148C,0x4EC,0x884,0x87C,0x87C,0x878,0x87C,0x1084,0x898,0x88C,0x898,0x8A0,0x4EC,0x8A8,0x4EC,0x1498,0x4EC,0x898,0x890,0x88C,0x884,0x47C,0x4EC,0x88C,0x884,0x87C,0x878,0x868,0x870,0x4EC,0x884,0x4EC,0x1878,0x8EC,0x870,0x468,0x470,0x878,0x87C,0x884,0x87C,0x878,0x870,0x470,0x8EC,0xC68,0x1868,0x85C,0x868,0x870,0x468,0x470,0x484,0x47C,0x878,0x87C,0x878,0x870,0x868,0x47C,0x8EC,0xC98,0x188C,0x88C,0x898,0x8A0,0x498,0x4A0,0x8AC,0x8B4,0x8AC,0x8A8,0x8A0,0x890,0x49C,0x4EC,0x49C,0x4A0,0x8A8,0x8AC,0x8A8,0x8A0,0x89C,0x8A8,0x38A0,0x40EC,0x000};

Sorry it took so long (you know, university&life&stuff.....), it's sounding nice!

However, I am confused: I didn't hear any volume pitch throughout the entire track?
Also, are the two tracks the same length in steps? I don't know the song that well so I can't tell if when repeated the tracks shift a bit. Keep in mind that pauses are needed to keep the tracks in sync

[Quirby64]

Ayy Thanks
Oh, the volume slide is really meant for the noise / cymbal / ect at the very end of the track, on Channel 1.
The two channels / tracks being the same length should be a good thing, or else everything would be off-sync

[Sorunome]

Oh, you did that noise manually? I thought you used the noise wave, if you change the instrument ID to 1 then you actually get a wave with a random volume every iteration, thus causing noise....

[nuts4ever]

Hope this works out!

[Sorunome]

This project is not dead. It may seem to you as I haven't posted anyhting on it since quite some time (That is, almost two months!)

Let me explain why: I work on multiple projects simutainiously, cycling between them. Which one I currently work on depends on how much motivation I have for that current project. Right now in my cycling list are this RPG, a calculator RPG, multiple web-developing things and some other misc. stuff. (well, such as being a full-time university student, heehee)

What I am trying to say is that I will pick up with project eventually, however, it's supposed to be a community project for a reason
Even while coding on other projects I'm more than willing to guide people into development on this thing, such as writing enemies / writing stroy etc.

That being said, @superfreaky how's the story coming along? Are you at a point where you can gie maybe a general overview of how the map should look like? (e.g. mountains in the west, big city in the center etc.) so that people who want to do some map development / side character writing can easily start with that, so that they have a feeling of the world?
Are j0z0r and konbick still around for that?

I think we are at the point where we should stop talking about "concepts" and start becoming more specific, even if the story / side-stories will be re-written, you can't tell how it all fits togeather until you actually try something.

[naed]

Count me in on this project, as you can see from my posts on the board I'm still a beginner but would love to help with this project

Great to see that this isn't dead and work is still being done on this project

Let me know what I can do to help and I'll crack on with it to my best ability

[Sorunome]

Count me in on this project, as you can see from my posts on the board I'm still a beginner but would love to help with this project

Great to see that this isn't dead and work is still being done on this project

Let me know what I can do to help and I'll crack on with it to my best ability

Well, for one you could easily help with spriting & tilemapping, as such things don't require programming skills, but artistic ones. Then there's also background music.

Programming-wise I think the main thing that needs to be done currently is coming up and actually making enemies (think Legend of Zelda-style game). We don't have any enemy at all currently, and there could be many different types of enemies. Such as random-moving ones or ones that specifically follow you and much more....they need to be come up with and be implemented in coding. The handler to handle multiple enemies at the same time is already in place, so what you'd need to do is actually rather simple then, i guess.

And don't worry about in-efficient code, that is why you are here to learn! I also have no problem looking over other peoples code and suggesting improvements etc.

So just tell me what you want to get done and I can help you to get started, the first post has some instructions on how to actually be able to compile the game (as it uses e.g. a custom gamebuino library for enhanced performance etc.)

EDIT: I'd recomment anybody who is working on this project to turn on email notifications on this topic so that they can easily stay up-to-date

[superfreaky]

CRAAAAAP!!!! I'm super super sorry guys! I had a really big busy summer which involved two week-long vacations, working during the week and every weekend, and other busy crap and I totally forgot about this! I know that's really not an excuse, but at least I'm back? It's late where I am right now, but a time line will be posted some time tomorrow if I have time (I should). Again, I am really sorry.