Monthly Archives: June 2010

In Game Menus

By chompy | Published June 28, 2010
Posted in Blog | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

I am no where near done with the in game menus but I just finished enough of it to show it off.

First off, yes the status page is incomplete, I still need to put the mental and exp information under the level.

Secondly, I wanted to talk about some of her stats…

Mental is health in this game. It represents your mental health state. Monsters will constantly try to drain you on mental health so that you can fully become a host to extending the existence of the dream world.

Magic represents your mental abilities and your ability to affect the mental status of others who exist in the dream world. Namely being the monsters.

Spirit represents your mental recovery. The higher it is the faster you are able to recover from a mind assault!

Resistances represent the different ways the mind can be penetrated, they take the form of different elemental attacks. I should also note that resistance also affect your offensive abilities with those elements.

Pushin' along…

UPDATE: Yep I spelled abilities wrong. Or maybe it's a cool new way to spell it, you decide!

Epic Ruins of Chompz

By chompy | Published June 27, 2010
Posted in Blog | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

I haven't much felt like implementing the ingame menu in the game so I started working on a level instead. I decided to make a fancy rendering of it so everyone could enjoy it!

I just get random inspirations to make these kinds of levels. The cool thing is that given the nature of the game I can do whatever I want for levels and technically nothing have to make sense! Naturally I still want a seamless world for the most part but it's not going to be perfect.

I know this rendering isn't perfect. Someone already pointed out that textures need aligning and it's pretty clear that the ground gets clipped off by the sky dome. If you don't like my shotty attempt at a fancy 3D rendering then you probably will like Digital Blasphemy's. Yep my desktop backgrounds on all my computers have his renderings!

Well guys… I think it's time to set a deadline for myself. I want to have a video I can show you guys of the game by the end of July. If at all possible a playable demo as well. Right now there simply isn't enough content to make offering any of that really worthwhile.

Lets get started!

Ubuntu it Up!

By chompy | Published June 24, 2010
Posted in Blog | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Well I don't really have any updates as I've been working on programming related stuff for DreamSphere lately. So no game updates other then that I've been working on the in game menus for setting up spells and abilities.

I recently got myself a new laptop, the Lenovo G555 on sale at newegg.com for $380. I loaded it up with Ubuntu 10.04 and it has become a great machine for working on the game with. I thought I'd show a screenshot of it running in Ubuntu for all you Linux junkies out there!

It's run at about 30FPS here, the max it should do is 60, the snow particle effects is killing the framerate and it really would appear that I need a better particle system. Another thing I noticed is there is no anti-aliasing I don't know if that has anything to do with the ATI drivers in Linux or with Panda3D not having support for it.

Make me a cutscene!

By chompy | Published June 15, 2010
Posted in Blog | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

The action player, or system for playing out cutscene events in DreamSphere, is coming along great! I've already made it possible to make actors move in any direction and change their animations. The textbox can be triggered as well.

Making cutscenes couldn't be easier either! It reads from a very simple script that looks something like that…


player moveto 10,0,15
player animate run,1
player wait
textbox This is some important dialog!
textbox wait

This cutscene is a simple one, the player character would move to coordinates(X,Y,Z) (10,0,15) while the animation “run” is playing and looping (run,1 where the 1 indicates a loop and a 0 would indicate play once). 'player wait' indicates that the cutscene should wait for all actions involving the playing character to finish before continuing. Then it pulls up the text box and it's the same deal. It should wait for the player to finish reading the text box before proceeding. If you didn't put a 'textbox wait' you could have some actions occurring while the text box was open as well. So I'm hoping it'll be a flexible system. I really want to build a system here that makes it easy to push updates to the game as well as have a community of players make their own content!

So what's next after cutscenes? Well of course there is always tweaking to be done but ultimately we need to add…

* A way to trigger cutscenes.
* Add all the menus for the game. (ie. setting up spells, other options, etc.)
* Add all the spells.
* Add all the levels. (Will definitely take a while.)
* Add more enemies.
* Add epic boss fights.
* Make the male hero character…who still has no name.
* Make the male villain character…who also has no name.

These will probably be added after the initial release…

* Making the male hero a playable character and giving him his unique spells and abilities.
* Making it possible to add additional characters, enemies, spells, cutscenes, and levels for anyone who wishes to make their own mod.

So yep…got my work cut out for me. I know I haven't mentioned this yet but I am hoping to enter this game in the Indie Game Challenge so it has to be done by October. I don't know at this point if I can make it but I'm gonna try!

Wish me luck guys!

Bigger and Better Spells

By chompy | Published June 9, 2010
Posted in Blog | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Been working on the spells some more. All the spells have levels and get stronger with each level. They now get bigger in size as well, which means they hit a larger area. The ice spell is particularly nice at level 9, the max level, as it can cover the entire horizontal of the screen.

I've also got a new spell to show off. It's called Mega Fire(tentative name). It's basically a huge explosion that centers around the character. At higher levels it easily covers the entire screen.

You start with that and you get…

This! It's huge and it's wrecks your foes! So what's the catch? First as you may have noticed in the screenshots it takes a lot of mental to cast. Remember that mental is also your life in this game, so it's a dangerous thing to mess with. It also takes a long time to cast(about 7-8 seconds), so it's not safe to use in the midst of a ton of enemies.

The plan is to have three different types of spell for each element. One spell is the weak but cheap costing and fast casting spell. One is the strong but costly and slow casting spell. The last one is still kind of up in the air… the first idea was to have elemental weapon summoning, but now I am considering just having elemental creature summoning. Regardless this other spell will have some beneficial effect that does more then straight damage.

I've also been working a lot to fine tune that wall jump. I think you guys will like it.

That's all for now!

Going Vertical

By chompy | Published June 2, 2010
Posted in Blog | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Our friend Maleia is going to need all the tricks she can get if she is to survive the cruel ever changing environments of the DreamSphere. To aid her in her quest I have bestowed upon her the ability to wall jump! I don't think she could have ever dreamed of such a thing…oh wait… (Watch for that line as dialog in the game.)

I'm happy with what came out of adding the wall jump. It's an ability that is more or less expected in modern platformers. I am really trying to go for a feel that gamers are used to in a platformer. I should also note that the control scheme will be extremely simple as well, the game won't require any more buttons then you'd get on a NES controller.

Maleia isn't the only thing clinging to the walls either!

The earth spike spell can now be shot on to walls. So far there isn't any real use for this. I am thinking that being able to use the spike as a platform could be an interesting addition.