News/release from Baro:
Hello you guys! I don't know if you remember this from the old board. It's Tanuki Tail, a Legend of Zelda style game I'm developing. The thing is still in progress and there's still a lot of things to do in the engine until I start making the actual levels of the game, because engine goes before content.
If you saw it in the old board, maybe you won't notice too much progress, but that's because I've been busy with college stuff, and also spent some time making the script compiler as a tool I will use for multiple things in the game.
But let's get into the stuff. As I already said, the game will be on the style of the zelda games (console versions, think of Minish cap and earlier), but instead of items you'll transformate yourself to gain a set of abilities (for example, transformate into a bird to be able to fly for a while, but also be smaller so you can sneak in small places, and that sort of things). The engine of the game is being designed so each transformation changes almost all your attributes: size, speed, jump, accelleration... Also, in the actual game, you will be able to select your next transformation by drawing in the bottom screen.
Right now I've done the basics, the collision system (perfectioned two or three times... I keep finding mistakes that take me days to fix from time to time), map loading (partially. I load maps divided in blocks of tiles, with collisions and block data separately), the basis of the script system and movement of characters, including things like pushing eachother and stuff. They don't attack yet though.
Although the game is in 2D, I'm making the maps having different heights for each block, having slopes, etc. This and treating the objects as cilinders give the game a slight idea of a rudimentary, theoretical 3D world.
I think the result of the engine can be very interesting. If everything goes well, I'll probably maybe perhaps likely release it as open source so it can serve as basis to other games.
HOW TO USE THE ENGINE DEMO
THAT IS ATTACHED TO THIS POST IF THE UPLOAD WENT ALRIGHT
Don't pay attention to ugly green things and ugly world map. Those are placeholders.
Untested on hardware. Works on No$GBA
Pad to move, A to jump. X and Y to change into an ugly test thing or go back to the cap dude. R to run a script I've put into the game (just a message).
You won't transformate if there's no room for your transformed shape. The green thing is taller and wider.
On the east part of the map (move right) there's something that looks like a +. They're slopes, you can walk into them while you're the dude. The green things can't climb them (this is done in purpose, there's a parameter that sets the maximum height a character can climb).
Check corners and inclinated walls. The engine turns away making movements smooth and avoiding getting stuck when running into those kind of walls, and other characters
The yellow thing at the bottom part of the map represents a building. Now, this will be very weird to explain because you don't see its volume, just the ground below it, but I'll try: you can enter through the dithered block in the south part in the building, and then there's a two floor staircase (slopes are those 4x4 blocks with 4 different colors in them). On the bottom screen you may see a clock, and a number that represents your height (sometimes they disappear), so when you climb the first slope (as the dude, the green thing can't even get in) you'll see your height increasing, as well as the position of the sprite.
The staircase goes up clockwise, twice around the center pillar (in yellow), then you can walk on the roof (height 88).
I hope you get this because heights, slopes, multiple slopes in a single block, parts of the block being collisions and others not, and all these things that make my blocks a quite easily customizable (for me as designer) volume are a very interesting part of the project.
Once again, press R to run a script that shows a message. The font (PAlib's original) is a placeholder that will be replaced by a better looking, taller, non-monospace font in the future.
Once again, take in account that subsequent maps will have a more visually explicit volume, so you actually know where are you walking.
The green 'enemies' will chase you if you're close enough, otherwise they will stay and face random directions. Remember you can push them away if you are cornered
Reply with comments, ideas and things you don't like, except the ungliness of placeholders, on which I agree beforehand
Enough of the engine: let's talk about the game and what will it be about
The game is being made entirely by me, currently. Slowly but steady.
So this will be the story of the game, more or less:
As you will see the story is not suitable for creationists. Too bad.
The game is set in a post-apocaliptic future, where an evil leader of a certain country launched an atomic bomb with unclear intentions, causing the continents to collapse and making them move and rearrange forming a pangea, the so-called "pangea subita". This leader took advantage of the chaos of this to take on the world, and now, decades later, his grandson is the current world ruler, in charge of small cities spread around the continent, as the human population was highly diminished. However, with no powerful enemies in this world, this tyrant is preparing a bomb similar to his grandfathers'.
You play as Pol Keine (the dude in the demo), a boy from the city next to the tyrant's headquarters, Lowheaven, who is trying, along with his friends, to sabotage the making of this bomb almost every night. But one night, while heading to the headquarters, a being from a different universe, where racoons evolved to be intelligent rather than apes (as in your universe), captures Pol and attaches to Pol the tail of a fallen Tanuki hero, granting him the ability to transform that every evolved mammal with tail in every universe possesses. With time, you'll learn to transform into stone, transform your arms into a cannon, or even transform into a bear god, so you can not only free your world from an evil ruler, but also the entire poliverse of an evil demon, angry because his species lost the ability to transform because of their evilness - just like humans. (By the way, demons are evolved goats and are the main bad guys)
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Hope you guys like where this is going
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