A P R I L    2 0 0 3 04-29-2003, 8:28am - The compo is over, and the aftermath has settled. I've uploded the journal that I was keeping during the competition. I wasn't able to finish my entry, but I did get enough done to submit... and hey, it was lots of fun. 04-25-2003, 6:40pm - Well, the third ever RPGDX 48 hour mini RPG competition officially starts in about one hour. Of course, I've decided to enter... so the next few days should be pretty wild. I've decided to keep a development journal this time around. It's something that I plan to post once the competition is over. In fact, I will be making my first, pre-start, entry after this post. Anyway, there seems to be a pretty good turnout this time around, so good luck to all the entrants. Hopefully, I'll see you all in the #RPGDX IRC channel on espernet. 04-16-2003, 8:32pm - I think I'm pretty much finished with this cave tileset. Anyway, here's another mockup... the only thing that seems to look off, are the pedestal thingies... they look more like frosted donuts... oops. Retro Knight - cave mockup (part 2) 04-16-2003, 5:34pm - I woke up this morning, and realized that, although I was happy with the look of the cave tileset, and the way it was turning out, it didn't quite fit with the style of the other tiles in the game. So, with that in mind, I scrapped the old set, and went to work on a new one. This time around, I patterned the style of a Dragon Quest cave much closer, to see if the tiles would fit better with what was already done. Retro Knight - cave mockup (new tileset) There it is. Yes, it's blue... I didn't feel like going with your standard brown cave this time around... although, I'm sure there will be plain brown caves later... as well as gray ones. Hey, it'll be a simple colour swap on these and, poof, new cave tileset. :) Oh yes, I still have the old cave tileset (see screenshot below)... but I have absolutely no use for it now. If anyone wants it, and knows how to implement PP256 image sets, mail me, and I'll send you the tiles, and palette, to use as you see fit. 04-15-2003, 11:06pm - So, I finally did start pixelling a cave tileset. At first, I was going to make it look very similar to the Dragon Quest Remix cave set, but to be honest, I'm not a big fan of those tiles. Instead, I just decided to do my own, keeping with the square and symmetrical style of DQ. Retro Knight - cave mockup 04-15-2003, 3:32pm - Retro Knight is a blast to be working on so far. I don't really know exactly what it is about this little project, but I'm really enjoying the development process. Retro Knight The first town map is finished. Only four houses, and the layout is very similar to the first town of Dragon Warrior (done on purpose). I've also got about 20% of the world map done... it's big, heh... very big. Anyway, I'll probably start on cave tiles today... so maybe I'll show a screenie of that later on. 04-14-2003, 11:56am - I picked up a copy of Final Fantasy Origins a few days ago... so I haven't been doing much in the way of game dev'ing the past few days. On the upside though, I just finished with Final Fantasy 1 yesterday... and I'd recommend FFO to any oldschool fan of the series. Lots of fun. I'll probably start on Final Fantasy 2 today. It's giving me lots of ideas on how to improve my tilework, heh. I've also got a new article up. It's a review of the new site design, done by a good friend of mine. He's not afraid to be critical of my work, so I trust that it's an honest review... even though it's very positive. :p 04-10-2003, 7:43am - Just got back to that castle tileset right now... I've added a table (although, I still need to add the chairs... they can all stand and eat, for now) and also a red carpet. Next up, I'm going to toss some neat stairs in. Here's a quick mockup of what it looks like now. Castle tileset mockup - Dark Crown So... does anyone have any good suggestions as to what to add to that? ...some things that have already been mentioned are: floor standing candlesticks, a suit of armor, some sort of decoration on the wall, and a stool. Is there anything obvious, that is missing in that list? 04-10-2003, 2:22am - Sometimes, I forget how much fun I had working on projects and stuff... heck, sometimes I ever forget that they're still active projects on this page. With that in mind, I remembered that the Dark Crown remake, code wise, is pretty much complete. All I really need to do, is add most of the game, heh. Dark Crown Dark Crown There's two of the latest screenies from the game. I've been adding little things here and there to the tilesets, to make them look a little better. Basically, the overworld now has borders around the water, and I added bookcases to the castle set. I still need to add a few more things to the castle, it's looking pretty bare right now. I'm not quite sure what exactly I want to add. Perhaps some chairs... beyond that though, I'm kinda stuck. Plants, and other such things are out, the castle doesn't need to look too cheery. Anyone have any good suggestions? ...if so, feel free to send them my way. 04-09-2003, 3:01am - Finally, I've finished the new site design. Since it's made a move to darkdreams.rpgdx.net (update your links, and bookmarks, notify your next of kin, etc), I thought I'd also do something new for the site. If you have any comments, and feedback on the design, please send it my way. Other than that, work on Project SAE goes smoothly. Hopefully I'll have some new screens of the reworked tilesets to show soon... as well as some battle shots. 04-07-2003, 3:30am - I bring thee more screens... or something. I just finished up pixelling all the animations for the hero sprite, so I thought I'd pop him into the game engines, and see how he looks. Personally, I think the results were pretty good... have a look: Project SAE Project SAE Project SAE I do have some more tilework to do on this project now though... since the new character sizes will be 20x30, I'll have to make some of the environments look bigger... and change many things, like door sizes in the towns, and such. Oh well, overall, I feel it's going to be worth it. The characters should have much more defenition, and features at this size. Plus, I think they have a bit of a 'grown up' look, instead of being so super deformed... not that SD style is a bad thing, of course. :) -- DarkDread Site design, images, text, are (c) 1995 - 2003 M. Zuchowski. 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