[David-kyo]

You better hope players notice. It's sad when small bits of effort are unnoticed...

Well, not having to make blinking animations takes actually LESS effort, so it's no biggie.

Anyway, I'm trying to enter subtle clues and symbolism into the game, not too obscure but not too obvious either. I'll try and make it so that it won't matter that much if the player happens to miss something small. Especially if they go through it again to see the other ending.
I've played some AGS horror games where the story, the symbolism and the characters' emotions are explained so elaborately that the whole thing loses all its mysterious charm. We'll have none of that shit here. Balance is important though, we don't want a Neon Genesis-style pretentious bullshit ending that no one gets because there is nothing to get, either.

This post has been edited by David-kyo: 23 March 2009 - 04:00 AM

[Gobbler]

Balance is important though, we don't want a Neon Genesis-style pretentious bullshit ending that no one gets because there is nothing to get, either.

Marry me.

[David-kyo]

Marry me.

No.

[Gobbler]

Then you leave me no choice.

[David-kyo]

Being a fickle bastard, I've decided to return to my previous Egyptian sci-fi horror project, but with a whole new concept gameplay-wise. I'll stop using this silly RPG Maker engine in favour of Multimedia Fusion 2 which enables me to implement stuff that has nothing to do with the whole top-down JRPG thingamajig, but has more to do with important features such as alpha channeling, mapping of complex movement patterns, handling different object sizes and last but not least, fucking MOUSE SUPPORT. Amongst other things, the battle system will be completely revamped, so instead of stupid round-based give-and-take twatflappery, we're going to have real-time first person swordfighting.



Forearm kinda looks like shit but I don't know what to do about it, would someone with good anatomy skills mind drawing a few key lines on how I should shade the thing? Left arm is missing because I haven't finished that layer yet.

Technically (if anyone's interested), every body part is on a different layer, meaning I'll be able to animate the arms holding the sword and the shield, give the opponents different attack patterns, et cetera. What the player does is use the mouse to control his own sword to parry the enemy's attacks and hit him at the vulnerable spots with good timing. As the filename suggests, this character will be used as a template, so other opponents will be wielding other kinds of weapons, shields, some will be wearing differently coloured headbands, aprons, some even going as far as wearing Anubis masks to add to the freakiness level (not to mention to the challenge, as later enemies will be using deadlier attack patterns as well) but there will be bossfights as well.

This post has been edited by David-kyo: 05 December 2009 - 12:33 PM

[Gobbler]

Bones, muscles and tendons are aligned by nature to hug each other and give your limbs that certain action radius when used in combination. Stupid thing is, you normally don't see most of that artwork because that boring old skin gets into the line of sight.



This line is a bit too much. In reality, it's hardly there - if at all, only the skin folds. The muscles there actually reach beyond the elbow and tie in with the rest of the gang up north.



So normally it wouldn't look that distinctively separated. Here's a nice example of how the lines flow into each other. As for the rest of the shading: Just take a bite out of your arm and have a look at how many supinators, extensors, flexors and whatevors you find in there and how they wind around your bones.


But no real need to go that deep into the materia, just reduce that line a bit and nobody will notice.

This post has been edited by Gobbler: 05 December 2009 - 02:18 PM

[AdamM]

To quote HMC, 'skin is a buffet of colours'. Right now Mr. Egyptian has such flat, shiny, opaque skin - not to mention the harsh folds all over the place as Gobbler pointed out - that it looks like he's wearing plated armour.

What the hell were you doing using RPG Maker anyway? And now you've switched to something by Clickteam? Come on man, get a more powerful application i.e. something a monkey wouldn't know how to use.

This post has been edited by AdamM: 05 December 2009 - 04:30 PM

[David-kyo]

Gobbler: Brilliant, many thanks for the references. I'll get started on that as soon as I get home from work.

Adam: The reason I had been using RM2K before was to take part in a "competition" and to show a particular community that while it is usually used to create pseudo-animu bullshit it is also quite capable of evoking horroristic atmospheres, if one uses the resources cleverly. Now that that is done, I can actually make something better of this project, because while the atmosphere was said to be unique, it was indeed lacking in gameplay, and I do believe that it has the potential to be much more.

Guess I could write it in C+ as well, but I don't know how to use the fucking thing. What exactly is your problem with Multimedia Fusion, anyway? I've used the Games Factory engine before when I was around 10-14 and got pretty good at it, so MMF shouldn't be that much of a hassle to learn. Moreover, if you create your own stuff instead of using the default graphics and player movements then you can actually create something that is unique AND fun. Right now, I'm planning the game to be a side-scrolling, old-school Prince of Persia-esque adventure for the most part (ledge-climbing, trap-avoiding, gauntlet-running, gate-switching shebang) with many puzzles involving mathematics, thinking outside the box, et al plus the fighting would be reminiscent of the Elvira-style first person pushing-sharp-objects-into-each-other's-face type of thing, although a bit less repetitive and not involving any RPG elements.

The reason of the colours not being so detailed as before is that I was trying to go for a more comic book-like feel with this drawing. Partly because of the atmosphere I intent do evoke, partly because of technical constraints, as if I'd done many more shades for the skin, it would take ages to complete the animations for the arms and the head.

This post has been edited by David-kyo: 06 December 2009 - 08:34 AM

[Ghello]

David-kyo, on 05 December 2009 - 01:32 PM, said:

Being a fickle bastard, I've decided to return to my previous Egyptian sci-fi horror project, but with a whole new concept gameplay-wise. I'll stop using this silly RPG Maker engine in favour of Multimedia Fusion 2 which enables me to implement stuff that has nothing to do with the whole top-down JRPG thingamajig, but has more to do with important features such as alpha channeling, mapping of complex movement patterns, handling different object sizes and last but not least, fucking MOUSE SUPPORT. Amongst other things, the battle system will be completely revamped, so instead of stupid round-based give-and-take twatflappery, we're going to have real-time first person swordfighting.



Forearm kinda looks like shit but I don't know what to do about it, would someone with good anatomy skills mind drawing a few key lines on how I should shade the thing? Left arm is missing because I haven't finished that layer yet.

Technically (if anyone's interested), every body part is on a different layer, meaning I'll be able to animate the arms holding the sword and the shield, give the opponents different attack patterns, et cetera. What the player does is use the mouse to control his own sword to parry the enemy's attacks and hit him at the vulnerable spots with good timing. As the filename suggests, this character will be used as a template, so other opponents will be wielding other kinds of weapons, shields, some will be wearing differently coloured headbands, aprons, some even going as far as wearing Anubis masks to add to the freakiness level (not to mention to the challenge, as later enemies will be using deadlier attack patterns as well) but there will be bossfights as well.

I thought that was a Waxworks sprite when I first saw it, though this one does look better.

[David-kyo]

Actually, that's the game that gave me the original idea for the whole thing years ago. However, I'll try and make mine less of a keyboard-bashingly frustrating, backtrackerrific piece of shit with a combat system that doesn't overwhelm you with a dreading sense of BOREDOM. It was just like those Sierra adventure games, ridden with dead-man-walking syndrome, only worse, because restarting from the beginning and getting back where you'd gotten stuck (because you didn't check EVERY pot for a fucking tuning fork on your first attempt or you let the mining cart run up till the end of the tracks and now you CAN'T FUCKING JUST GO PAST IT) was a lot more difficult. In my game, the player will only die because they'd screwed up something there and then, not millennia before.

This post has been edited by David-kyo: 06 December 2009 - 10:45 AM

[Ghello]

Well now it sounds better then Waxworks.