I have been working on what is basically the same RPG for almost two years now which can get a little frustrating and disheartening at times. When I started this project I knew nothing of my engine and was trying to decide between two games to develop. I decided on the RPG since I had no experience with AI, and felt turnbased AI on a grid would be easier to learn and tweak than real time AI in free space. Oddly enough they both play out to many of the same principals, with optimization being equally important for the two.

So I will now be throwing in the other project for development along side this one, most likely meaning that The Soldred Kingdom will go another year into development, while I at long last release a game this year. I would have never made this transition on my own, but I have a glint of hope that might mean some help on both projects. Not only will it help in completing them faster, but having someone like-minded to discuss things with will improve my sanity immensely.

I am about 6 hours into development on the second game and have had it playable since about 4 hours in. It is a sidescrolling action game idea that I have been wanting to do for almost two years and it is possible that a few months of work will render a polished game. I will have more to come with screenshots and an official announcement as soon as I get some art in place of my polygon mockups.

I have read many forum requests for a way to turn 3D models into sprite sheets. If your 3d program can spit out animations as images then this program might be able to help. I use Cheetah3D, and if you do likewise then you are sitting pretty because I have a javascript file you can stick in the Macro Scripts directory for spitting out the frames into separated folders for 8 directions. You will simply have to adjust the camera settings, FPS, and maybe a few others to suit your models. stripanimation.js.

When you are prompted, find or make an empty directory and it will create (or you might have to create) 8 folders named se, s, sw, w, nw, n, ne, and e. It will insert 8 frames into each one of these directories. If you have another 3d program you might want to set something like this up.

The program that puts it all together is a java application (it’s what I’m decent at). You need to do a few steps for this to work quickly if you are using the 8 folders as mentioned above. First, decide how you want the strip layed out with the columns and rows text boxes. Next, open a Texture/Template from the menu. What this file does is it gives the size all the images will be scaled to. If the images are already the size you want just open one of them here. Finally, in the file menu press “Open 8 Strips”. When the file dialog opens select the folder that contains the 8 direction folders and press open. You will see your images strip quickly followed by a save dialog, just name that direction with a “.png” extension and do this 7 more times as it prompts you.

If you either want to do individual strips or just make one big sprite sheet then use the “Open Mask/Strip Directory” option in the menu rather than the 8 folders option. Please bear in mind this is a development tool, quickly put together to accomplish a necessary task. I am also including the source code with it. I put a BSD licence at the top of the two files I wrote.

uglyiso.jar

This is a Netbeans project file, the gui code was generated.

uglyiso.zip

I would prefer to answer technical questions about this on the forum, so please post those comments there. Thanks.

A lot can change in a year, I thought I would have a game released in a year and it is nearly at the two year mark. But, as things change you just have to change with it and endure. Right now I have two really big todo’s on my list.

1. Finish my Bachelors Degree in Software engineering at age 30. (You can tell I was an over acheiver in my younger years.:)

2. Release a game, maybe? (I’ve got 4 kids, a full time job, and full time college, just gi’me a sec OK!)

I really thought I would have more time to work on the game this year because I am mostly taking development classes. I have hobby developed for over 10 years now so Databasing, Java, and C++ have been pretty easy so far. What is going to kill me later on in the year are the marketing and business classes I opted to take as my electives. I seriously doubt I will be skimming the reading in those courses.

On my quest to perfect this stats engine I keep pondering the question as to whether a cRPG should mimick a PnP RPG, or mimick the big number stats like Diablo and Final Fantasy. I actually designed several instances of the engine based on a hybrid of both. I actually planned on making a simple PnP system based on what I did with the computer, but now I am thinking it would work better to do the reverse. I always get balanced gameplay to a point, but there is always that infamous gotcha that makes you realize you missed something. I went for 6 months not realizing several problems because I hadn’t tested several combat techniques properly.

So tonight I am breaking out the dice and I am going to hash out a PnP game based on my existing stats engine, improve the rules, then import it back into the game. Luckily with the rules already loosely based on PnP, implementing dice rolls is not a big change. The question largely remains as stated, should I loose the dice coming back into the engine or keep the dice. The longer I play RPG’s the more I like the dice.

I am probably the worlds worst. When I see something I like in a game, it always causes me to rethink the design on my own game. I also find myself questioning things when I read through the comments on a blog. I have been trying desperately to nail down the final aspects of the stats and skills section of the design doc so I’m not floating on my ideas, but with no luck yet. I kinda like the AD&D, but at the same time kinda frustrated with them in a CRPG. Fallout has a good system, but it still lacks a few things I would like to add. I would love to add classes back into my game, but the nature of the gameplay just doesn’t justify it at this point.

The oddest thing I keep doing lately is trying to justify my decisions based on what I see in jRPG’s, and to a degree it is within reason, but I think things would get wierd fast. For instance, the stats in Chrono Trigger stay low for a while and damage and HP is both balanced and challenging. Something I see as an improvement over Final Fantasy where the HP and damage rolls are just too high for comfortable stat management.

Gurps is probably the closest thing to what I would invission my rule system as. There is one stat in particlular in the game that can’t be allowed to exceed a certain point or the game will offer no challenge what so ever. While I don’t like low stat caps, I ponder the reasoning in capping some stats and leaving others free, maybe even making that skill cost more skill points to increase. I actually have most of these stats and skills working for the most part in the game already, they just lack level management and proper creation right now.

So with the same base stats I have had from the beginning, I am hoping to just change up the skills section and make them manageable with game balance. I keep telling myself there’s no rush, I still have dozens of denizens to animate and many levels yet to build, but the constant flip floping and re-tweaking is about to drive me crazy.

What great news! The freedom to play the music you buy on the entertainment devices you desire to play them on. If Apples sales on iTunes doesn’t take a large dip this might persuade other vendors to start fazing out their DRM sofware. I know piracy is hurting the industry, but is DRM helping more than it’s hurting? I won’t buy DRM enabled games for the PC because the last two I bought three years ago wouldn’t work, so I returned them both and swore never again.

You can go here and read it at Apple.

I am really liking this new web set up. Several weeks ago I made the comment that I was going to integrate my blog, forum, and main page using Ruby on Rails stating that if I fail I fail. Well, I conveniently failed and I was happy to so. I was pointed to Onepress by Rick Overman via a Garage Games post and I immediately decided that this was the way to go.

I had looked at Wordpress several times and really wanted to go this route, and I had looked at several pieces of forum software. My biggest gripe was zero integration and two logins for one site. Onepress seems to have done the trick, and I got my site up and running in two days time (based on hours, not days).

Honestly, it would have been more than a months worth of free time finishing the site I had started in Rails. On top of that, I had already had to fix the site a few times and it is currently down again, yet my php applications are running just fine. So really, Ruby on Rails is a great framework, but it seems to be a little too high maintenance for an independent. And really, it is hard to beat the robust nature of an apache server.

So yes, I failed, I learned something from it, and I saved myself a lot of time.