Sorry for not giving you an update in September. To make it up for you, I'll give you three blog posts this month! You sure are lucky!

So....

I got a job, a lame trainee job with a title vague enough to have me do all sorts of work not directly related to my education or contract (which doesn't exist) and have me work overtime and not get paid for it. This is not a rant however; in fact, there's one cool thing about getting a job, and that is me working on Excalistia regularly again. For some reason, not having much free time makes the little time you get more valuable. Add to that my job being pretty boring, and that makes working on games attractive again. With that said, I still have nothing to release, and won't have anything for a while.

Now, for updates. The first thing I want to tell you about is Sprite Mix, a little program I made for combining body parts to make sprites. It's based on the Charas Project, except that it's more flexible and offline. For an example of what it does, here's a little sprite template combined with pants, hair, and a shirt to produce an NPC:




So instead of creating a new sprite for every NPC, I just work on a pool of body parts and do a bit of mixing and matching to create new NPCs. You could also change colors and do other layer transformations. To learn more about it, or even download it for your own use, check this Sprite Mix topic.

Moving on, I've been working on the Audio Engine, the Pathfinding algorithm used to move characters in battle, and also on the battle system itself. There's also been work on sprite poses, speed improvements, and game design.

The design of the game is organically changing as I work on the battle system, in a good way. My ideas are becoming clearer as they translate to actual code and the system is getting deeper and more strategic. I'll probably talk about it in depth in a later blog post.

Apart from the battle system, I'm thinking of taking the Hotmog companion concept I talked about it in an earlier blog post a step farther; the Hotmog will be able to do things like jumping, climbing, and sneaking around. Dungeons will have special areas accessible by the Hotmog and leading to a variety of challenges and puzzles using the Hotmog's abilities. The Hotmog would also be upgradable, you buy or find parts or food or whatever and improve your Hotmog's abilities and teach it new ones. I still haven't worked on that system, but I'm pretty excited about it.

There's more, but I'd better leave some stuff for future blog posts... until then, keep checking the blog!

Many of you are probably wondering about this game's progress, and why it's taking so much time. Excalistia is an old project, around 7 years old, and yet nothing was ever released. Sounds almost like Duke Nukem Forever, doesn't it?

First, you need to understand that during that period, the game changed so much, to the point where it could be considered several games. The current version is around a year old when I decided to switch to RPG Maker XP. Before that, I've tried so many different engines and never found one that I really liked, this included RPG Maker 2000, RPG Toolkit, RPGDS, C++ with SDL, C++ with OpenGL, Fury2, and finally RPG Maker XP. So even if the game took so long, it was restarted so many times. When I switched to RPG Maker XP, I decided that this should be the last time I switch engines, and I don't see myself breaking that promise any time soon.

Second, when I started working on Excalistia, I was in school. I had a lot of free time, and a great passion for making games. Things are different now, I've had university and now a job taking much of my free time, and making games isn't as fun as it used to be. It's still fun, just not all the time. That's why I get periods where I do a lot of work on the game (right now, for example~), and other periods where I don't touch it. I could probably get myself working on it if I wanted to, but this leads us to the third point...

I'm lazy. I'm the laziest person I know. I've always been lazy, but I'm becoming lazier every day. If I don't NEED to do something, I generally don't do it. I'm a procrastinator who isn't easily motivated, and as much as I hate that, it's not an easy thing to change.

So what about Excalistia? Is it ever going to be released? The answer is yes. I really want to release this game, and I also don't want all the effort put into it by several people to be for nothing. I still like making games, and I still like working on Excalistia. It's just that I can't give any release dates, not even vague ones like "summer 2010". I don't follow a schedule and I don't want to. I appreciate your patience, but I only work on Excalistia when I feel like it, and eventually something will be released. I probably should stop hyping it and posting screenshots everywhere... but I can't help it, I like the praise. :P

In other news I've been working on sprites and poses for the game. I wrote a neat XML parser that reads sprite files and construct poses (it's pretty technical, but let's just say this makes managing battle sprites much easier). I also made a program that combines sprite parts to make new sprites. The program is called Sprite Mix and you could find more about it by clicking the name link. Sprite Mix makes it easier to make new sprites by combining body and clothing parts together. After all, making all NPCs from scratch is so lame!

I've been working on this city for the last few days. I've finished less than half a map among many other maps that would compose the full city of Vanalia, but I don't feel bad about it taking so long; I've been adding a lot of little details and making new graphics to give the city life. This includes little effects like rain drops, flies around garbage, animated NPCs, and more.



Vanalia City is an old city composed of two parts, rich and poor. I've been mostly working on the poor parts (called Lower Vanalia). The city is supposed to be the biggest place you'd visit in Excalistia, and a large portion of the game would take place within it. I don't want to release a demo without at least featuring most if not all of Vanalia, so it's one of my top priorities at the moment.

Until next time~

It's been a while since the last update. You might expect that much has happened and that the game should be ready for a release soon. Unfortunately, that's not the case. The lack of updates is due to the lack of progress and the lack of progress is due to me being incredibly busy for the last months. I won't say that everything is better now or that I'll be actively working on Excalistia, and I won't give a release date either. It'll be done when it's done, no matter how long that takes (Sounds like Duke Nukem Forever? At least I don't get paid for it...)

With that said, there has been some progress since the last update and I thought I'd share it with you. I've added a companion system of sorts that allow you to have a pet Hotmog that would help you solve puzzles and also in boss battles. The Hotmog follows you around and recruiting it (it'll probably be optional) opens up new quests and dungeons. Here's a screenshot:



Other than that, I've scrapped most of the old story I had and started working on something new. I've updated the story and character pages on this website, so you could get a brief overview of the new plot and changes to the existing characters. The game world itself is still the same; the changes mainly affect the two main characters (Troys, Aleris). I'm personally very excited with the new direction the story is now taking, and I hope this excitement translates to something tangible.

That's all for now. I'll try to update this blog more often, hopefully on weekly or bi-weekly basis, so stay tuned...!

I've done a lot of progress on the battle system in the last couple of weeks. I like the way things are progressing and I'm still hoping to release something this month (February, that is). Here's a preview of the battle system:



The top right box with Troys's face shows the active character's information. The bottom left one shows target information. In the screen the player, controlling Troys, selected Attack from the menu and is now selecting a target. The shield in the information box is the character's shield's threshold, and the heart is the character's base defense. In order to kill a character you must first break the shield and then reduce base defense to 0. It looks a bit like HP but in practice the system uses a weird formula to calculate damage to shield and simply doing 20 damage to a shield with 20 threshold wouldn't break it. The user interface is just for show, and would probably be different in the final version. Ocean's Dream did both the tile and battle graphics so kudos to him!

Oh, the yellow bar shows consumed time units; walking around and taking actions fills the bar, which is similar to many tactical RPGs. The blue part in the attacker's bar is showing how much would be consumed if attacker attacked the target. One neat thing about the bar is that if you didn't fill it up by the end of party turn, you could use the available time to move away from enemies in enemy turn, or even trigger some counter skills.

I still have much to do, especially regarding enemy AI, but I have all the basics down and the rest should be relatively easy. As I said earlier, I want to release a small teaser demo when the battle system is done, so look forward to that. Sorry for the longer-than-usual post!

I had the last final exam for the fall semester today (SPANISH 1!), and now I have about a month with nothing to do. I didn't really get time to work on Excalistia in the last few weeks but that's going to change now... I hope!

I know you guys don't like text posts much here's a little running animation:


It's not very good but it's better than walking fast with the regular walking animation. I always hated that in games.

This is a small part of Excalistia's intro. Thought I'd share it with you:



You could also watch it in its original resolution (640x480) here. :)

Oi!

Last week progress report:

1. Lots of work on the battle engine and on pathfinding in particular.

2. Some work on sprites, here's a sample:



3. A new screenshot!



Erelia is a detective you could hire in a certain side quest. When you do that however, the game's style shifts a bit into something more film noir. Fun!

I know I told some of you people that I'll be having daily updates till the end of the year. Well, that was a trick to lure you in. In fact, I'm finding the daily update deal hard because while I do make progress on the game every day, I'm not sure you'd be interested in some of the less visual stuff like coding enemy AI or implementing pathfinding. People want screenshots, pictures, or interesting posts and I can't do that every day!

So, I'll just update whenever I have something interesting to say or show, but I'll make sure I update at least once or twice a week. Sorry...

If you ARE interested in what I did today, I was working on enemy AI. It's giving me a bit of a hard time because everyone can move all the time, but it's not some ABS and I want my enemies to be smarter than just "move closer to hero". The way I've set it up allows for different strategies to be applied to enemies. Since the number of battles in the game is limited (only boss battles), I think I'll create a customized and unique strategy for every encounter, something beyond generic "aggressive" or "defensive" labels. We'll see about that!

I finished another sprite needed for the intro. Actually, I already had the frames needed for the intro from at least a year ago, but the sprite still lacked walking animation or even directions other than facing down. I like the way the sprite turned out, so meet Professor Ornasio:



He's a scientist working for the Vanalian government, a nice cowardly nerd with too much on his mind. I also have a mad scientist, but I'll tell you about him later~

On an unrelated note, it seems that the site visitor counter hit 32767 and rolled back to 0 for some reason. That number is the common maximum value for short integer variables, which is weird because PHP's integers have a maximum or 2 million something... Well, I fixed that, so don't think too much about it!

Well, haven't done much today. I've improved the weather system of RMXP a bit to allow for more particles (raindrops, etc.). Just to make this post worth your time, here's a new ugly screenshot:



The game starts when General Enriko Mantez and a group of soldiers storm Vanalia's city hall in a coup d'etat against the elected president, Tinto Wallaby. It's much more interesting than it sounds, though.

Today I added a 'keyword system' to the game, a system inspired by Wild Arms 3 where you could inquire more about certain keywords in text.


1. Talk to others, notice the red keywords:




2. Press shift to be able to select any of the keywords (optional, you could press enter to close message window as usual), move through keywords using up and down keys and select one with the decision key:




3. Once a keyword is selected (in this case, Lunands), you get to select the question you want to ask. Gray options mean you don't have the knowledge (see below) or character to ask that question. I'm thinking of not showing these options at all, but this would do for now.




4. Let's go with the first option, here's the answer to your question:




The game also uses a neat knowledge/memory system where character choices and dialogue is heavily influenced by a diary of sorts in which the hero writes down everything he learns (from NPCs mostly). This allows for quests that require specific knowledge, or dialogue trees that become available once you know a certain thing. There's also a personality modifier that keeps track of how good/bad/nice/rude/etc. you are. Nothing really original, but still fun!

Here are some more recent screenshots that can't be found on the media page of the site! (though most people probably saw them somewhere else)

Excalistia is an upcoming 2D game for Windows, currently being developed using RPG Maker XP. It has been under development, in various forms, for many years. That is both a good and a bad things; many people gave up on it ever seeing the light, but on the bright side I believe that my initial idea has developed greatly in that time and the resulting product would probably be better than what I originally intended.

The game is an RPG with focus on gameplay, in the form of side-quests, mini-games, puzzles, and dramatic boss battles. Aside from a dozen of scripted and avoidable boss battles, the battle system isn't used. That's because I believe that battles in RPGs tend to be boring fillers without much strategy, and by focusing on a limited number of foes I can make each battle unique. Another reason (probably the real one!) is that battles involve a great variety of sprites and the more enemies in the game the more sprites that would be required. The game instead focuses on exploration and various puzzles and mini-games within dungeons. There will also be a huge amount of side-quests that are influenced by the player's choices and knowledge (represented by a diary system).

The resources used in Excalistia are mostly exclusively produced for it. Tile art as well as battle sprites were provided by Ocean's Dream. An original sound track was composed by Willow and PongBall. Twinfoxtails did face graphics for various characters in the game. Others also contributed, like Drule, who was kind enough to design the website along with ramirez, and Sleeping Wind who helped with some sprites.

Hmm.. what else? I guess you can find more information on the outdated website. Hopefully this devblog will encourage me to update it more often. Well, that should do for now. I'll post some cool screenshots later!

Okay, let's try this...
I really messed up the HTML for this page to make it fit with the existing site design, so it's probably not as functional as normal blogs. Well, I guess I can just try it. If it doesn't work, I'll figure something else.

More posts to come!