It won't be very long, and its coming together rather nicely. I just got done implementing a real-time rendering shadow engine which runs at a froody 50 FPS, which you can see in that screeny. It'll make wandering through caves alot more spooky until you get a better lantern. And you had better believe that Grues will be a problem
For those of you who haven't played the demo, its available here:
http://www.create-games.com/download.asp?id=6797
Anywho, my reason to make this post is that I could use a little hand. As you can probably tell, my graphic skills aren't quite up to par, but even more damaging is the fact it takes me like an hour to design every single enemy. And I've already created the bindings for about 20 more enemy animations. So if anyone would be so cool as to do so, I could seriously use any 24x24 sprites to use as an enemy (preferably in the same general art-style). I can animate them and such on my own, so anyone who feels like drawing a simple 24x24 sprite can probably get me to add it in, and get their name in the credits.
Yarr, I'd be much thankful.
Just as a reference, heres the enemies I already have:
Wow thanks mate. I'm animating those two as we speak <3. And yeah, I have lots of cool little effects tied to some enemies; for that vampire, I made him have a standard ranged attack in his normal form (which just so happens to lower your max HP by 5, temporarily), but when he gets low on hitpoints he turns into a bat and flies around recovering Makes them super annoying, har har.
And TY alot, a zombie was actually the very next character I was going to draw
it took me this long to just implement those first 3, lol. Thats definately more then enough to last the whole game I'm in your proverbial debt.
Anyway, the zombies are just a normal enemy, same with the minotaur, but I made the cyclops use a giant ball on a chain that it swings in a circle:
Geez, I barely have room to fit all of those in. You might want to hold off on drawing any more I've only got spots for about 32 enemies total, and that includes spots I'm going to have to reserve for boss effects. With all those combined, I'm at 28/32
DaVince: Lufia 2? Never played it. If you're referring to the selection, I just went for all the obvious monster cliches. I have been playing Lost Labyrinth a lot lately, which is a really good roguelike (www.lostlabyrinth.com), so that and HeroQuest were probably the main influences.
Pixelthief: Don't worry if you don't want to use them all - I won't be offended Also, I'm curious about that shadow engine - does it calculate proper grid-based line-of-sight? I've given up on a couple of games because I couldn't figure that out (maybe share your secrets after you release this...?)
Oh its nothing complicated; I actually started out gridquest as a test while I was working on more complicated shadow engines. Then I completely forgot it had a shadow engine in it, and rediscovered it while I was tracking down stray flags and variables to see what they do. I have very obfuscated code But yeah it uses rays projected in a circle from the player to see if theres a line of sight to each square, and if there isn't it just turns them black. So it makes it very very cool to walk around the cave levels.
Anyway, if you want, you could give me ideas on some spells/abilities that I could add to some of those sprites I'm animating/adding them one by one right now.
That's really good - very atmospheric. It's too slow to use in a game that will run on my pc (1GHz) though - I'm getting 9fps.
I've actually tried methods similar to that before. The problem I always have is with making it grid-based (so a whole square must be either visible or not). I try snapping square "shadows" to the grid; I try checking just the centre pixel of each square, but I always end up with squares being visible that shouldn't be, or squares being in shadow when they should be visible. I've looked for other methods to try and adapt for MMF, but they're always extremely complicated, usually using Bresenhams line drawing algorithm (which is a little scary in itself).
Re. special abilities.
The standard cliches which you may want to use/avoid(?) are;
Ghost - walks through walls etc / only vulnerable to magic weapons / invisible until player walks into them etc
Spider - poison keeps doing damage each turn (25% chance wearing off per turn) / web attack stops player moving
Mimic - obviously just looks like a treasure chest until the player tries to open it...
Mummy - always powerful but really slow with it
Zombies - respawn after a short while
Sorceror - summons skeletons / magical ranged attack / any other magic...
Gargoyles - can fly (don't ask me what good that does them)
Water Elemental - small chance that attack rusts players armour
Earth Elemental - small chance that players weapon may break when they attack
Fire Elemental - usually just shoot fireballs or something unimaginative like that...
Air Elemental - whirlwind spells - like teleporting player back to start of level / freezing spells
always elementals are vulnerable to opposing elemnts (eg. water magic is extra powerful against fire elementals) and resistant/immune to their own (eg. water magic is weak against water elementals).
Other;
* thieves that steal the players item are always irritating (you'd need a new sprite for them though)
* monsters with the ability to clone themselves (blobs, rats etc)
Yearh I cheated and used a raycasting formula; it will pretty much ONLY work in a 9x9 grid, since the 15 degree angles happen to line up just right or whatever. I'm surprised at how it works, actually.
Anyway, I've finished all the enemies up to the Mimic; all the animations for enemies are saved in a single active object (the enemy object)- each type has 3 animations; walking, attacking, and getting hit. Currently, that enemy object ALONE, takes up 430kb of graphics. Thats a different animation for every single direction on 80% of the animation slots.
And for shits and giggles; I made it so the Treasure Chest mimic stay stationary until you hit it, but then it goes berserk, runs rampant for a few seconds, then chases you down for another second, and the explodes in a giant fireball. Ooooh yeah. I'm going to start piecing together the NPC system fairly soon, then just shining up the edges and putting the whole project together. This will probably be done within a month.