Aeges Road Weekly Update

As an opening note, we had child number 4 Tuesday morning. Babies are always fun, and make things crazy around the house for a few months. :-)

April is nigh, and it is time to fork development. I have spent this week doing clean up work and trying to make the game presentable. It could use a bit more TLC, but as far as the contest entry, it's about as good as it's going to get. I have Keszin's character close to done, but needs more décor, he looks pretty drab. I did not have time to address all the requests, but that will probably happen within the next few weeks.

Does this mean it is finished?

Sadly no. Aeges Road still has a few more months of development ahead of it. This is just a release as part of the competition I am in. I plan on keeping an open development routine going on so I can get feedback from interested gamers. What's nice is that this deadline looming over my head is gone, and I can now concentrate on what I need to do, rather than what I have time to do.

This month I am trying to decide on a format for a weekly blog article other than the Aeges Road development article each week. I want to keep it RPG related, probably something in the retro realm or in the indies since I have not been keeping current with modern PC RPG's.

I have a question for some older Mac users. I saw a game for mac only that was released probably around the same time as Lord of The Rings. It was a top down adventure, possibly an RPG, and you could mount horses and had other such features. I have tried to track it down, but have been unable. I would appreciate it if anyone could point me in the right direction.

Aeges Road Weekly Update

This brings us to Alpha 9.

This has been a productive week for Aeges Road. This weeks weather gave me a couple days off, and I was able to get more done than I expected to. The most exciting thing this week is that I got to remove a character blank and plug Illindey into the artwork. I have also begun rendering the final versions of the gui interface.

Character creation is finished. You can now modify your character for combat. With this inclusion I tweaked the AI a bit, and quite honestly made the game harder than the final version will be. I just thought it might be a fun challenge to test stat tweaks on. Also, the character creation screen will also be the level up screen once I get there. I also have yet to clean up the inventory gui, so further stat tweaks for testing are still available. Just as a note, the rogue has two skills that are not programmed in yet, hide and locks. So don't throw away you points on these.

I whipped up a rough track this morning before church and plugged it into the game. I have another specific place for this track, but thought it would be a nice change of ambience. This track actually helped me to remember the importance of music for setting the mood. If it wasn't for the score in Final Fantasy 6, I don't think this would have been as great a game as it was.

On a side note, I got dos box working on my new mac, and noticed something. All these years I have been running on the cheapest hardware I could find, including soundcard, and I never realized what an incredible music score Star Trail has. None of my previous sound cards would play the luminance behind the leading melody, and all I ever heard was the simple midi melody lines. So a real favorite of mine is shining brighter than ever.

Aeges Road Weekly Update

I will make this quick this week. There is finally progress in the art department. After a long week and a half of frustration, I gave up on variable height terrain. I just couldn't make it look right in the art department. So now that I am behind I did a few things to speed up art. 

Yesterday I programmed a tile maker and splicer in java. It takes a texture, turns it into an isometric tile, batches a directory full of masks, and outputs a nicely formated png full of tiles and fringes. It essentially turned 2 hours of work into about 5 - 15 minutes depending on how long it takes me to process a texture into usable form. I am calling it UglyISO right now. After the first of April, I plan on extending its functionality to do wall tiles and overlays. 

Once I am done with the game, if anyone is interested, I will put some error handling on the thing and release it for free download. It is nowhere near the caliber of programs such as World Creator, but I can stay in my Mac environment to do it. There is also a new java project working on making such a utility. It will probably be much more robust, and will probably beat me out. I need to find that link again and post it here. 

As soon as I get the starter dungeon reworked, I will release another alpha that will mostly be art improvements. I personally haven't run into any new errors with the application. The only big problem I am aware of right now is an AI glitch that leaves them suspended there doing nothing until you kill them. If anyone finds another error, please let me know. 

An Aeges Road Exclusive: It's Rant-tastic!

You might be wondering what I am ranting about, well, me. Me and my inability to produce a decent tile set. So I am throwing in the towel on multi-height terrain, and sticking with that pure old 2:1 isometric goodness. I have wasted about a third of my time on graphics for this game, over 3/4's of that time trying to get these multi-heights to looking good and ready for final release. 

What was I thinking? Multi-height sounded like a good idea, with a few nasty little script tricks, it became a reality in the invisible world. Unfortunately, it was the visible that proved to be the greater adversary. I don't completely regret the time, because I have gotten much better with graphics. Just not good enough. I just could not get everything perfect, it was too great a give and take. Every time something got better, another got worse. When I finally got as close as I could, the pixel patterns of the rendered output was dull and lifeless, and I was unable to liven it up to satisfactory with further processing. 

So now I am going to use many of the textures I have created and generate tiles through a process that has given satisfactory results almost every time. While this does skew the vision, and possibly brings me at odds with my design doc at too late an hour, I might be able to finish the game within 2008. 

Other than multi-height disappearing, there is not much that is going to change. I am going to add narration. I thought my art skills would have improved faster, but now I realize I need to stick with my existing strengths, and I do much better with words. So western RPG fans should be happy about this. I am actually happy about this. So I am ready to return to some productive work. So now if I can just find that usb pen drive so I can finish transferring files off my old laptop. :-)

Aeges Road Weekly Update

Not a whole lot  to report this week. Alpha testing is going on right now. If you want to help just download an alpha here and report bugs through the links listed. Alphas are available for Mac and Windows. Several bugs have been impounded.

It will probably be a slow week. There are still a few features that need implemented to finish a full on demo, good graphics being one of the major features. I did manage to implement the manipulation interface last week, still needs some work, but it is functional to play with. Since finals are this week with college I am just going to stick with bug fixes. 

Aeges Road Alpha Update

A couple of scripting errors have been fixed that should help with a number of errors. The latest update is available for Mac and Windows on the Aeges Road page. There is also a partial manual available for download. It currently contains basic instructions for combat. I am also working on shrinking the zip file size to make things faster.

Fixed:

• There was a path following error that allowed the player to loose position for a single frame. The code is now in-lined properly and keeping position constant
  

Current Bugs:

• The windows version does not load the ambient audio for game play
  
• The windows version does not always load the sound effects
  
• Both versions offer an escape from dialog lock at the beginning by rolling over the bag before the event begins
  
• In both versions the AI tries to run for no apparent reason at times
  

Feature Requests

• Have the dialog progress itself
  

Finally, a big thanks to Cucumber for getting things started in the test forums!

Aeges Road Mac Alpha

The Mac alpha is now available. So if you are interested in testing or just curious, go pick it up from this page. This page contains all the links needed for alpha testing.

Alpha Testing Begins

It is now time for the brave ones to step forward. Aeges Road is up and ready for testing. So if you want to help or are just curious, feel free to give it a try. As a brief disclaimer, this is alpha software. It has not crashed or hung any of my computers in a long time, but that does not mean it won't. This is typical of any alpha software and you should be aware of this before you download it. 

A bit of fun can be had, since I have yet to lock down stats and class gains to experience. This will enable you to edit the character and note improvement. In the test dungeon, you will run into two types of enemies. One is a low level enemy that should be a pretty fair fight for an un-leveled character. The other is an even match without leveling, and there is just one.  

Currently everything is done with the mouse. Just right click for game menu when you are exploring. So, without further introduction, here is the game link.

Windows Alpha 1

Report Bugs Here