Surprise: Zelda Progress

ACagliano · Guru-in-Training (Posts: 2001)

**For enemies that damage you once, the ATK factor is dealt immediately. For enemies that damage you by burning, freezing, or poisoning, the damage is dealt once per every couple cycles until the damage counter expires.

**The DEF value of an enemy determines how much damage it can take before it dies. The damage you deal is determined by the base attack of your player (increases as you clear dungeons), with the weapon type as an attack multiplier.

**enemy class attacks
Soldiers have swords and swing at you.
Trolls have clubs and try to club you.
Spirits try to collide with you.
Shades shoot a poisonous spray at you.
Zombies try to collide with you.
Keese try to fly into you.
Fire Keese try to fly into you and set you on fire.
Ice Keese try to fly into you and freeze you.
Goblins have axes and swing at you.
Sorcerers fire spells at you. Spell classes include: fire, freeze, and stun. Stun deals damage once. Freeze and fire deal freeze and burn damage.

I added the Deku Tree dungeon for all of those who have played Ocarina of Time. Thus, I also added the STICK and the WOODEN SHIELD as items. Both have a set number of hit points, before they break. The other two shields have no set hit points.

Oh, and I'll be needing routines for 90, 180 and 270 degree sprite rotation.

Compynerd255 · Power User (Posts: 387)

Here's a little AI that's more fail-safe and smart:

KermMartian · Site Admin (Posts: 64060)

How is the AI going? I hope you're starting small and building it up piece-by-piece. Remember, when all of us coded our first AI, we had never done so before, and most of us never read through any guides to learn how to do it! Smile

ACagliano · Guru-in-Training (Posts: 2001)

How is the AI going? I hope you're starting small and building it up piece-by-piece. Remember, when all of us coded our first AI, we had never done so before, and most of us never read through any guides to learn how to do it! Smile

ACagliano · Guru-in-Training (Posts: 2001)

The cliffs: Yes, I know. I'm not an excellent spriter, so I kind of don't know how to fix them.
The ladder: I kind of like it that way Sad

The buildings: I could, but that would involve more sprites. Sad

The village: Yes, I will work more on the flair once a bug with Pixelscape is resolved.

Ashbad · Guru-in-Training (Posts: 2497)

Well, they're not quite Isometric; they're more of a 45 degree (or more) overhead perspective. Combined with the funky cliff perspective, it is collectively commonly called "LTTP Perspective" among many in the game art industry, because the most notable game that used this was Zelda: A Link to the Past. A few examples. Doesn't quite make sense relative to natural forms of perspective, but this one is often employed to allow for a better view of everything on the map, and so that cliffs and high-rises can be equally observable at any angle.

As for some extreme nitpicking, this is the most common form of isometric perspective, being edge-major with roughly a 30 degree overhead slant.

/off topic Cool

ACagliano · Guru-in-Training (Posts: 2001)

Compynerd255 · Power User (Posts: 387)

Basically, the principle of the code is that moving in the previous direction is the last resort, and it should not do so unless all other directions are blocked. Therefore, in this code, if the previous direction is blocked but two directions are available, it should randomly select one of them, or perhaps move in the positive direction.

And while we're on the subject of AI, I also wanted to share a Machine Learning idea that I had for an adventure game like this:
1. For every enemy type, there is a Spawn Score, kept in a large integer space. When the player begins a new game, all of the Spawn Scores are set to an equal, high value.
2. When the player takes damage, all onscreen enemies add 1 to their type's Spawn Score per point of damage dealt. The enemy who dealt the damage adds additional points to theirs.
3. When an enemy takes damage, all onscreen enemies subtract 1 to their type's Spawn Score per point of damage. The enemy who took the damage decreases additional points.
4. When an enemy is spawned from a particular spawn point (which can spawn at least two different types of enemies), use the Spawn Scores to construct a pie chart of sorts to randomly determine which enemy spawns there. This means that an enemy with a Spawn Score of 100 is ten times less likely to spawn than an enemy with a Spawn Score of 1000.

As an example (taken from LOZ Wind Waker):
- When you enter the Earth Temple, Redeads and Stalfoses both have Spawn Scores of 100. Both also spawn from coffins.
- You enter a room with six coffins, which all reveal their contents, which turn out to be four Redeads and two Stalfoses.
- All four Redeads stun you with their scream attacks, giving a Stalfos time to whack you upside the head and deal 4 HP (4 heart quarters) of damage. All six enemies gain 4 points, and the Stalfos that hit you gets an additional 4 points (1 bonus for each HP). The spawn scores are now 116 for Redeads, 112 for Stalfoses.
- After you recover, you succesfully kill all four Redeads (4 HP each, which is worth 1 point here). On each death, all enemies lose 1 point, and the Redead you killed loses 1 additional point. Following the cascade down, the Redeads lose a total of 14 points, and the Stalfoses lose 8 points. The Spawn Scores are now 102 for Redeads, 104 for Stalfoses.
- A Stalfos hits you again, for 4 more HP. The Stalfoses gain a total of 12 points, putting the Spawn Score at 116. The Redeads don't gain any points, since they're dead now.
- You kill both Stalfoses (8 HP, worth 2 points). Doing the cascade again, the Stalfoses lose a total of 10 points, putting the Spawn Score at 106.
- Now, the next time you encounter a coffin, a Stalfos is somewhat more likely to spawn than a Redead, since it has a slightly higher Spawn Score.

The final effect is that, after playing the game for a while, the player will be faced with the enemies they find most difficult. Enemies that can do the most damage to the player and avoid getting hurt are the enemies that are most favored, though respect is paid to enemies that can drive you into other enemies or hazards. Additional considerations include:
- Change the values accordingly, especially if 1 HP for an enemy is not the same as 1 HP on the player.
- If you have more memory, simply keep running tallies of all of these values and calculate the Spawn Scores dynamically. This allows you to easily change the relationships between these tallies.
- Add and subtract points (or keep tallies) for other events, such as stolen coins or items.
- Use a similar technique for enemy AI strategies. Enemies draw from a subset of all the available strategies (the ones that they can execute). In more powerful programming environments, include multiple categories of strategies (walking, attacking, etc.)
- Allow players to view and export the Spawn Scores, reporting them to an online database. That way, you can see which enemies are easier and which are more difficult.

Compynerd255 · Power User (Posts: 387)

What do you mean by this, exactly?
- Do you mean that, for instance Stalfos will generate at a particular spawn point as opposed to a Keese? In that case, the system takes care of that automatically. Since the Keese is a much weaker enemy than the Stalfos, a little time will quickly put greater preference to the Stalfos over the Keese. Pretty much the only time such fundamentally weak enemies will be allowed to spawn is when they have spawn points all to themselves.
- Or, do you mean that enemy stats will go up as time progresses? In that case, the system will still work, since all stats (including yours) are going up relative to one another, so the changes to the scores will still be proportional. This is, of course, assuming that each enemy with the different stats subscribes to the same Spawn Score (e.g. a 20 HP Redead uses the same Spawn Score as a 4 HP Redead).
- Or do you mean that souped-up versions of enemies with new abilities, such as Fire Keese over normal Keese, will spawn at these spawn points over time. That's a little more tricky, and is probably more of a matter of choice for the implementer. You could either decide to combine fundamental types (i.e. you use the same technique to defeat any Keese, no matter how it's souped up), make the souped-up versions of the enemies separate (i.e. they creamed the Keese, so let's see how they do against a FIRE Keese!), or maybe even add enhancements as a secondary category similar to the AI strategy thing mentioned above (e.g. have Fire, Ice, and Lightning enhancements on all enemies).

Compynerd255 · Power User (Posts: 387)

Probably not to that complex of a degree. But you do have ten different types of enemies, so you could probably do just the essential parts of the system:
- Each enemy type has a 16-bit Spawn Score. At the beginning, set them all to an equal, high amount (such as 32768).
- For each point of damage an enemy deals, add 1 to its type's Spawn Score. Cap it at 65535.
- For each point of damage dealt to an enemy, subtract 1 from its type's Spawn Score. Cap it at 1 (so it still shows up sometimes).
- Scores determine which enemy types spawn by using a pie chart mechanism, among the subset of enemies allowed for that room.
And here's some psuedocode for the pie chart mechanism:

ACagliano · Guru-in-Training (Posts: 2001)

It checks whether a coordinate is inside a box. I could use a modification of this for collision detect.