Edge avance sur Palm/Zodiac - Page 1

Pour rappel, Edge c'est ça, et ça l'air de bien dépoter



La sortie du titre est prévue pour mai/juin. D'autres images ici : http://www.rzanerutledge.com/games/edge/

Le dernier progress report :

PROGRESS REPORT #...um, what is this? like...7, I think.
(Somewhere in there I stopped numbering as they were short updates. This will be too.)

DONE (since the last update):
- Fixed FATAL bug! ("Dead" enemies haunting memory.)
- Disabled "Load Game"/"Save Game" for now. ("Continue" works.)
- Got NDA written and sent out. (Whew!)
- Switched blood to FX and added fireball and lightning FX animation.
- Added Spell mechanics -- animation for incantation, projectile, and hit.
- Added Spell damage and spell healing. (Types 0 and 1.)
- Added a few combat-based offensive spells (a sample at least). Sample spells are currently in there for levels 1 and 2 of Mage and Priest. (Though currently too powerful I think.) Will tweak as we alpha, but these should give us the mechanics to work out spell-use in combat. May add more as we go along. Need to tweak the timing on "charging" spells and figure out the best indicator for this.
- Updated grey bar with health and mana.

TO DO:
- Update the MainDraw armlet to include FX (for blood and spells) and for the 16-bit case (Tapwave).
- update 8-bit armlet
- do 16-bit version
- When you start a new game, clear the path-builder! (Simple bug.)
- Show short health and stuff in grey if icons clicked on.
- To counter slow loads, I need to add "uncompress all bitmaps" for testers with LOTS of RAM.
- Try optimization from Zlib author! (Probably not before Alpha)
- Scripting for buy/sell working (buy/sell itself and conversations "work" now) -- hack if necessary.
- Talking too! (rough scripts)
- Build a rough location to fight in and test combat (partially done now, actually).
- Bug -- Continue twice leaves something unfreed. (Not critical.)


The only major one of these is to update the MainDraw ARMlet. It's possible I'll end up starting the Alpha without quite all of these finished, but that's okay. We can get started without and I'll release updates as I add them. As long as I can get the ARMlet updated to include my new "Stuff" and "FX" categories, things should be okay. Also need to update it for the Tapwave (16 bit), which requires a bit of a special case.

More soon. Spells are looking pretty cool though, and I wanted to mention that they're in there.

Best,
zane

http://www.rzanerutledge.com/cgi-bin/forums/ikonboard.cgi?s=f673978b4975a666e67c9b52ea2bff3a;act=ST;f=1;t=6;st=90

clair ca dépote

ça, c'est du bon

Nouveau progress report :

PROGRESS REPORT -- ALPHA 1

The alpha is going great. In addition to a very enthusiastic general report from all participants (I'll share some of these comments later), I have also received some very good input and suggestions, some of which have already made their way into a revision.

(Just as an indicator of how much feedback I've received, the private Alpha forum just hit the exact same number of replies as this forum. All in little more than a week!)

Alpha 1 was released on schedule May 1st and Alpha 1b was released last Thursday (May 6th). There are a number more fixes due for Alpha 1c, which I hope to finish by this Thursday, and then Alpha 2 should hit in a week or so from now (hopefully).

The 5 areas of focus for Alpha 1 were:
1 - General first impressions
2 - Movement of your character
3 - Melee/Spell Combat
4 - User Interface Issues
5 - fps reports

1 was almost all positive, minus some great suggestions and some general grumbling of features not yet there. Thanks to some fantastic input from the alpha testers, 2 and 3 made major strides in version 1b, and movement and combat are generally going quite well now. 4 has led to some great suggestions, though there are still some things to work out. And 5 was mostly positive; indeed, with my DrawAll ARMlet active, the game is actually TOO FAST on some devices. (This will be fixed/limited in a later release, plus music will cut into this a little.)

Here's the advances that happened with Alpha 1b:

- Angling through doors no longer happens -- it now forces you to go straight through.
- Can no longer attack through walls (Doh!)
- Can no longer pick up items through walls (Can still spellcast thru walls though. Fix this later.)
- Block is delayed, now longer and more effective (still might not be effective enough).
- In combat, you now automatically face an enemy before attacking them. (Regardless of the "Automatic Combat Assistance" setting.) This should help Tapwavers who are not quite lined up. (This does not work for enemies "behind" you, however. Only 180 degrees.) (This might not fully address things. But let's try it out.)
- Dodge is slightly more effective.
- The slight delay when moving up/down/left/right with the Tapwave joystick should be gone.
- Having Informational Text at the top of screen is now an option in Preferences.
- Tile Movement is always ON (no longer a Preference).
- Last spell no longer works between game starts.
- ARMlet has been updated to draw map edge trees.
- ARMlet has been updated to include health bars of you and your current enemy.


In addition to the above, a Tapwave-tailored version of Alpha 1B will be going with them to E3, along with some new screenshots. We'll see whether these end up out along with general E3 news on Tapwave websites starting Wednesday or so. If not, I'll probably post them or more on the main site soon.

So, that's progress. Still to come (in 1c) are D-Pad fixes, some additional UI features/options, and some cosmetic fixes to the sample map.

More importantly, Alpha 2 and 3 will feature:
- Range (projectile) weapons.
- Fast switching of weapons.
- Dialogue interface and Buy/Sell.
- World Builder fixes.
- More!

Best,
zane


And Just For Fun, a Few of my Favorite Comments from Alpha Testers:

"...first of all, graphically the game is beautiful. Smooth animations, i especially like the dodging. Even a simple level that Zane threw together still is amazingly nice."

"I just tried a new game and used the spells. They are awesome! They are so smooth and very effective! (and yes, do go through walls)."

"I like this game a lot. I have to say that it is a lot of fun to play, and I cannot tell you how much I like the way the spiders looked...I have already played around with the world builder a little bit and like the interface very much...Overall consider this an encouraging post, because I like the game very much. We all do. I've got a lot of ideas to make this game great, but a lot of them aren't important right now. Ill share later, but want to let you know that your work is absolutely incredible zane. Keep up the good work, and we'll be here to back you up all the way. This will be the best rpg ever...I still can't get over the way the spiders look, they are awesome!"

"Fantastic first impression. When I showed it to my husband he couldnt believe this was a palm game."

"I have no doubt that this game will be the 2004 Game of the Year and the fact that is is also the most graphically apealing is an added bonus."

http://zanegames.com/

Cool !
Vivement !

Dernière mise à jour du développeur :


PROGRESS REPORT
or: Dang these graphics take a long time

On the negative side, I haven't spent a great deal of time on the adventure, except organizationally, these last few weeks. I have spent ridiculous amounts of time cranking out tile sets, which takes quite a bit longer than I'd like, especially if you want them to look good.

I'm happy with about 80% of what I've done, and hoping to tweak some of that other 20%. I'd say I've gone from having about 40% of the tiles done to having about 85% of them now. I'm still missing some hard stuff... Snow cliffs and mountains; things that are hard to look good in an isometric grid.

Some of the tiles I am wrapping up I am thrilled with, in particular: water (animating! looks quite nice), castle tiles (including round towers and broken battlements), blowing flags, ladders, fences, and cemetery tombstones. I've added some other details I'd rather not ruin. I've also improved the grass (no longer quite so obvious a repeating tile) and added a boggier grass...not quite swamp yet but I'd like to get that look as well. Ice is somewhat done but needs work. I wish I had one other person who was good at this stuff, especially the matte-painterly type who can make things look real and good with just Photoshop and an airbrush tablet. I spend way too much time in Softimage XSI...

Also, the process of converting these to BMP tiles for use in the game itself is tedious. Takes way too much time. Then you have to export them into the game and see if they all line up properly. Sometimes they don't, so it's back to Photoshop to tweak it and try again. Laborious and exhausting.

The stupid round towers took forever! (Silly me, wanting round towers in an isometric world.)

Now that I've spent a few days in graphics land, I'm wanting to go back to programming.

Ironically though, I am a bit happier. Even though I still feel behind like crazy and had hoped to be halfway through with the adventure by now, I can see all the many pieces of the world coming together. I still have a lot of monsters to build as well. If there are ANY 3D animators out there who think they are capable of helping with this and would have fun doing it -- by all means, contact me!

I need to get 15% more tiles done and move on to the monsters. A few weeks on that and there will be nothing but the adventure and debugging between me and Beta. Onward!

P.S. No screenshots yet, although there's lots of new stuff built. But I *will* sneak peek a few fairly soon.