Monday, March 30, 2015

Gold-Box Version Returns

The Gold-Box-like version of the game was apparently really popular.  There was a lot of positive feedback to the video I posted last time.  So, I have returned to working on that version.   I have to say that I'm glad I did.  The development time seems to be moving along much faster now.

My first order of business was to get rid of the odd corruption that had plagued that version of the game and forced me to go back to the full 3D version.  That required me to rewrite the inventory screen, which I did.  I don't have screenshots of that to show off yet, but it is mostly done.

However, I do have some screenshots of the main exploration panel.  The panel now has life points and mana points that change color as each character loses them.  They will turn yellow when they are below the maximum value.  This is so that the player knows that a particular character isn't at full health or mana at a glance.

In addition, the armor rating of each character is now also shown on the main screen.

Notice that some characters have been damaged.

I've also been making sure that I keep the game workable in multiple resolutions.  The above screen is in the 16:9 aspect ratio.  Here's the same screen at 4:3 in the lowest resolution available in the game (1024x768).

Different aspect ratio.

There's a lot of "behind-the-scenes" work going on.  Some dabbling into the combat engine, for example.  The handling of the equipped items (those Armor Ratings in the screenshots above are fully working; because those characters have armor equipped).  So, a lot of fun things happening.

Tuesday, March 17, 2015

Gold-Box Version Video

As some of you may know, I had been working on a version of the game that was very similar in style to the old Gold-Box games.  Here is a quick video of that version in action:


With the nostalgia factor high for the Gold-Box games (and the recent discussion about how TSI isn't really continuing the tradition), I may want to return to this version.  We'll see what happens.