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.

I am currently playing Star Ocean on the PSP and really enjoying it. I had a brush with it back in the PS1 days, but never had more than a few hours to invest at the time. Now, I am probably getting near the halfway point and the game just doesn’t let go of your interest. The story is fairly basic, but there are certain levels of complexity and enough wonder of things that it feels very deep.

One thing I have noticed about this game is that tutorials are very much optional. You talk to people who offer advice, and you take it or leave. I am the kind of player who would rather learn by hurling myself against a brick wall than being stuck in a never ending tutorial on how its played. I really don’t think I have done everything possible in Civilization 2 yet, so every now and then I pick up where I left off in the manual and conquer the world again with my new found discoveries. This is in contrast to games like FF8, which is a great game, but the replay value is almost 0 when you dread the miserably long tutorial at the beginning.

With the freedom to take things on when I feel like it, I find that games are much more enjoyable in the long run. In Star Ocean I am just now starting to get into the little skill distractions such as weapon customizations and cooking. While each one is basically a recipe in a slot machine, the clever dialog really makes it enjoyable once or twice to loose. Enix seemed to be a king in this area, as Dragon Quest 4 would present you with some fun alternatives at certain points in the game. In a long RPG it is nice to get a break every now and then to tinker with things.

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.

Every story, be it a movie game or book, that is worth taking in will diverge through a series of situations leading up to the end result. A good writer can probably outline an entire book simply in situations and then connect the dots with drama lines, action sequences, an array of emotions, or some history. Take for example Star Wars where Luke first fights Vader. A situation arose which lead up to a vengeance action sequence and then on to one of the most memorable movie situations I can think of. The action scene before really built up the suspense and drama and lead beautifully into Luke’s frightening reality.

Now back and take another look at this. What if Vader simply entered the room, put Luke into a choke hold and let him have it with the “who’s your daddy” line. It would have OK, it would have been a little more difficult on the escape, and it wouldn’t probably wouldn’t have been as quotable. The struggle built the drama, Luke was loosing and you could feel, and when you were finally on the edge of your seat the perfect situation had been generated.

Now lets swing over to one of my favorite series that every now and then gets on my nerves. I love X-Files. Great show, I am a bit of a conspiracy theorist myself so I easily bond with the looming plot lines and back story. So as a fan I think I can fairly criticize this one a bit. In the latest movie toward the end there was a moment where Mulder was pushed off the road and crashed. So here he was, someone attempted to kill him, he survived, and rather than calling for some back knowing that this probably wasn’t over, he conveniently never realized his cell phone missing and went after the truth with my mind screaming from the moment he got out of the car to get his cell phone. By the time the bad situation come about I really didn’t care that he just might get killed. For me, that ended the movie, I watched the rest of it, but I couldn’t get that out of my mind.

Now lets plug this into game development. When generating situations for your heroes it is important to remember that the events leading up to the situation are just as important as the situation. If the situation completely dependent upon someone doing something that is going to have the human player throwing the controller at the screen, it is best to do it through an NPC or a temporary party member. Unless you are a truly remarkable story teller, using the main character to do something stupid for anything other than a light hearted humorous moment is likely to make the gamer feel that their role in the story has been eroded.

Well, boxman is now retired and I am working with a pretty nice model right now. It took some time, but I am pleased to reveal the first character ready to take on the baddies in The Soldred Kingdom, Snow. Snow was a pretty simple concept at inception, basically a somewhat cheerful looking but fairly high maintenance girl with a lot of color. My wife actually helped me with the colors (don’t tell anyone, but she admitted to enjoying it) and afterward started helping me design one of the villains in the game. I have to admit, I am starting to enjoy the art side of this as much as the programming and scripting.

Christmas break proved to be a grand opportunity to accomplish a great many tasks that have been backlogged by both college and the ever present day job. I wasn’t planning on announcing this for at least another month, but progress is moving me forward, so without further introduction …

The Soldred Kingdom is a turn based RPG with some strategy elements included. It is not intended to be groundbreaking with new features, but rather intended as a creative composition of many existing RPG elements. The game will take place across a few realms as the player actively unfolds the gravity of the situations facing them. The plot will take on some tasteful twists as you try and decide who is friend and who is foe, it’s not always a clear line.

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.