Castle Paradox

[Joe Man]

Huh?

Just to clarify, I only mean the filetype discussion.
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"Everyone has 200,000 bad drawings in them, the sooner you get them out the better."
~Charles Martin Jones

Last edited by Joe Man on Fri Dec 13, 1957 1:21 am; edited 2,892 time in total

[Chenzi]

By "hard coded", you mean what in which language?
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Allow me to preemptively disclose that I probably hate the person posting below, including myself.

[TMC]

Hmm? With the exception of SDL's support for RLE compression of software surfaces, graphics are pretty much always uncompressed for display when loaded.

I ran into dozens of PNG quantizers a couple days ago when I was trying to look for quantizing algorithms (of which I found a real drought of available source code) but none of their descriptions mention whether they support 8bit colour with 8 bit alpha channels, so it'd be a real slog to find one.
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"It is so great it is insanely great."

[Bob the Hamster]

[TMC]

http://www.w3.org/TR/PNG-DataRep.html:

[J.A.R.S.]

[Newbie_Power]

[Artimus Bena]

I donno. I see a lot of the technical side of this game, but that's only half what would make we want to work on a game. Give me the graphics and a list a features, and I see gimmicks. I need more. At least a story premise. You say "epic plot", but lots of epic plots cause epic boredom, no offense. And I've never been a believer in alternate endings. It defeats the purpose of telling a concise story (which really is a medium through which to convey a definite message.) If there's no definite message, then you're making the video-game equivilant of a short-lived summer thriller movie. The new war-of-the-worlds is a great example. Or 300. (Haha 300 was good, they just pushed for that epic feel just a bit too intensely, and it made the film a little two-dimensional). But then 300 at least had a definite message to give, which is why it'll always leave the new war of the worlds in its dust.


Anyway, these are my theories, I thought you'd like to hear them.
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SACRE BLEU!

|||Compositions!
|||Eldardeen Soundtrack!
|||Red Mercury!

[Joe Man]

[J.A.R.S.]

[Artimus Bena]

It's been generally agreed by pretty much every writer that there is no original story, just "orginal" combinations of elements. So yeah, I think you're being very paranoid, and you'd probably get the public-interest ball rolling, if you at least had a simple premise to go off of. Seriously, it only has to be a sentence or two.

Aaaaaand even when I beat chrono trigger, knowing that there were other endings... I did not go back and beat it again to see the other endings. I think, generally, people don't care that much about alternate endings; not enough to play the game over again. Basically, the re-play value has more to do with the gameplay. I personally do not believe in "bonus" endings either, for the same reason. It's kinda pointless to me. But that's me : )

I also am kinda hesitant because of the "based off chrono trigger" comments. It's a lot like hero worship, and less like making an original game. I don't mean to blast your game before I play it, I'm just wondering to what degree you're basing your gameplay on CT. Because you mention that game a lot. And I'll tell you something, every time I started on some idea that was inspired by chrono trigger, I never ever finished the project.

: p

Hope I haven't bruised any egos.
_________________
SACRE BLEU!

|||Compositions!
|||Eldardeen Soundtrack!
|||Red Mercury!

[Joe Man]

It does depend very greatly amongst games and users. Very often with games I try to squeeze out every ounce of playability, and even find my own ways to do it. In Wario World, for example, I even went back to beat the game without freeing any of those impish freaks while getting everything else.
_________________
"Everyone has 200,000 bad drawings in them, the sooner you get them out the better."
~Charles Martin Jones

Last edited by Joe Man on Fri Dec 13, 1957 1:21 am; edited 2,892 time in total

[Joe Man]

Topic change!

I don't have much of a portfolio to offer, just some random fun junk I've whipped up, so perhaps if you could throw a minor assignment at me before my Pro Motion trial expires you could judge me off of that.

Sound good?
_________________
"Everyone has 200,000 bad drawings in them, the sooner you get them out the better."
~Charles Martin Jones

Last edited by Joe Man on Fri Dec 13, 1957 1:21 am; edited 2,892 time in total

[J.A.R.S.]

Artimus: I see your opinion is heavily based on perception, and so is mind. Therefore, I'm not gonna try to convince you. But, for the record, I did play chrono throughout to get all the endings, and I did up all characters' skills up to level 99.
As far as being "copied off" chrono comes in, well, for starters, the graphical input and plotline are somewhat irrelevant, as in they don't really match one another well. Similarly, most of the game is significantly different. What I meant by basing this off Chrono was to base it of what Chrono had that made it a success, and mostly on the systems' point of view. The battle system we're coding is semi-real-time like the one in chrono (but with several fixes which makes, even IT, much different than the one used in CTs). I want to express here that I have an aversion for "fangames" myself, and as such, never in my entire life will I do a "new magus", and this, as much as I'd love to... Magus WAS done, and I just can't try to make a revamp 2.00 of him So if that was the kind of things you were affraid I would drop into, fear not.
As far as being original comes in, the story is NOT original, nor did it even try to be. We use several cliches, don't use others. We picked a theme and tried to take the best out of it, and the theme is NOT time travel (I absolutely can't come across any game that uses this theme and not feel like its a theft from CT...). Time travel was very popular in the 90s' science-fiction universe, and I think a lot of movies/games used it very well. I don't personally have to offer any new "cool" interpretation of time travel, none worth making a game based on it, and as such, I didn't use this theme (at all) in the process of crafting the lore of this game.
It seems the 21rst century is forged around the critic around the catholic church (and as much as I didn't like the Da Vinci code, it is but one book in a series of published works on the topic).
My personal professionnal career is in medieval studies, and anyone who would've studied them (and I'm sure, a lot of profane) will understand that with studying the middle ages comes a study of the christianity itself. The very name of this game (Angel's Earth) hints towards this direction. Without spoiling anything here, the largest lore of this game is, as far as we can tell, authentic, but it might not be about what you expect it to be.... *shhhhhh*
Lastly, I would like to point out that, although we are working heavily on the replayability value, nothing of this will be implemented until we have insured a good degree of play value. This game is a classic one player rpg where the player is brought in a universe of fiction, and we understand that before adding replayability to it, we must give the player one heck of an experience to keep him/her coming. That's the main focus, obviously, but I've always liked the idea that, after letting one game lay down for months/years and feeling like beating it again, you don't get the chance to do 100% the same thing if you don't want to. Different endings are not all there is, and on this, we also borrow a little from Deus Ex's possibility system

Joeman: Here's a good assignment idea for you if you feel up for the task. Make a tree thats 2 tiles high (tiles are 24X24 double sized for the classic pixel feeling ) 32 bits pngs for now. If your tree is good, we'll talk about the modalities