Fate by Fire: The Sword of Neisius

[james]

i saw u had 99 posts so i wanted to be the 100th person to post a message

justin fbf is awesome,it has come a long way since i first saw the tilemap routine.Even better its now being done in greyscale!!



congrads on a job well done
and congrads to the rest of the team

james

[Adm.Wiggin]

is it gonna have the cool rain like the other b/w version? cause that looked pretty cool! u could make a few different images of rain with the background dark gray, and then use the masked sprite routine, and have it do the animation switching! it would rock!

[james]

im not sure if justin is putting the rain in on the greyscale engine,but the first engine(not in grey scale) had an awesome rain engine that made the game look kewl



james

[Pascal]

We still plan on having about 5 parts. Each part will be considerably large, so that 5 parts will satisfy the vast majority of the users. Few people would ever beat the game if there were more parts becasue they would give up, run out of time, or simply loose intrest after playing a few 1000 screens of world. However, depending on the success of FBF, we were considering an expansion, but, we were just playing with the idea.
Furthermore, you have to realize most people or many people who play this game will get it from other people calculator-calculator at school or elsewhere. That is, most users wont have a fresh installed directory on their computer where all the files are for the game. This means we need to limit the number of programs and parts. Think about how much of a pain it would be to have to find the 8th part, 8(which would include probably 3 programs) from random calculator users at school...
This brings me to the games production success:
That is one of the most theating issues, spreading a large production like this efficiently. As the game planner/programmer it is my job to make FBF self explanitory and presentable in the first sequene fo the plot, while as you progress talkingto npc's and experimenting slowly wil build your knowledge base until by the end of the first act you are an expert at the game control. Why? becasue many of the users will not have a documentation (from the download) and the game will be their sole item. By making the game playable and learnable without a documentation (instead, a blended explaination in game), the game will be much more independant and professional.

[Justin W.]

And yes I will be adding a rain effect to the first part the same as before. The routine itself is a little more complex as i will have to do a mask to the first buffer as well as the sprite to the second buffer so as to achieve a dark gray rain effect.

[NETWizz]

Justin,

If you add rain, will game play slow down al little?

James,

congrats or contatulations

[Justin W.]

Actually the rain routine doesn't slow it down much at all. It is a very simple proceedure and takes only a couple thousand clock cycles. The biggest spped advantage is self modification of the rain sprite itself. Instead of using multiple sprites I simply self modify the sprite for my purposes.

[Pascal]

Yea, the rain didn't seem to slow gameplay down at all. When I was playing an early tile map test and the rain began to pour, I din't notice any slowing of game play.

[NETWizz]

Is the rain random?

Also, I am going to make Pascal a moderator in this forum.

[Pascal]

Thank you Jbirk. To answer your question, the rain was random, though the primary reason for having it was just to test the routine. The rain mostlikly will continue ot be random, but we may ned to vary the randomness to make it more natural.

[NETWizz]

Read the routine called Ion Random.

You can get it by downlaoding the source for ION, and looking in ionlibs.asm.

[Justin W.]

Yes I already use IonRandom as I am programming FBF in Ion right now. The only problem is that by using one IonRandom the rain turns on and off very quickly. I'm currently using 2 Random Tests yet sometimes it still is too frequent.

[Justin W.]

Yes the game will have a very in depth storyline. The graphics you saw were early demo tiles that I used from Zelda. They will almost all be replaced because some of the tiles I did make myself.

[Pascal]

Justin-
Perhaps the Rain could be quest/story related; "a storm just rolled in while you were in the cave, it has been raining for hours, and the southern bridge has been completely flooded, you muct find another rought to the village...
or something in the order of that

Backing up Justin, the FBF will be the most detailed and large scale storyline of any 83+ game in history. We hope it will be one of the attracitve features of the game and will allow people to get into it, but it's tough to
make the story's parameters fit the common calculator user in math class. Too complicated and th user will be lost and annoyed, too simple and it's a joke. For this reason the storyline is a flexible attibute of the development, however cannot be ignored as it harmonizes the game play.

[Arcane Wizard]

Will you also port it to ti83 ?

[Justin W.]

It would be impossible to fit even one part onto the TI83. Considering each part will be nearly 48kb. I regret to say that I cannot make it for the ti83 as well because the 83 is just not capable of meeting the memory requirments for this game.

[Pascal]

I hope the 83+ can even take it... People will need to completely empty their clac's mem to fit the game in, the great sacrifice it shall be called! It is the formation of our world! When the 48k god ram, entered the metalic portals of the universe emiting unknown energies to the great graph buffer and ok this is getten cheesey.

[NETWizz]

Can you give us an prolog to the story?

[Adm.Wiggin]

ya, a prolog would be pretty cool, so we can look forward to it even more!

[62 52 53 53]

Prolog! Prolog!

or just any info about the storyline(except it being "the most detailed and large scale")

and how about a progress report?