Castle Paradox

ShakeyAir · Joined: 27 Apr 2004 Posts: 93

Hey. It's been a long time. I wasn't going to announce this, it's not very far along, but I do want it to go somewhere and something tells me that if I show what I've done my motivation will continue better.

The game is tentatively called 'The Aftermath' and takes place after what is basically an apocalypse. There are very, very few people left around. Well, very few living people left around.

The cause of the apocalypse left all sorts of wild black magic in the air, and corpses all over the place have been rising up and living again. Some are still talking and walking and 'living' and others are more in the vein of film zombies, all kill!kill!kill! and that.

You are a skeleton, who starts in a crypt after he had just 'risen,' which basically means gained consciousness. The mystery there is that rising a skeleton takes a much more more concentrated sort of spell, as in, someone meant to raise you.

That's about all I know I can say for sure without ruining everything, as the pace of the game is more figured out I can probably give away some more story. (it is written, i swear, haha!)

Yeah, writings boring. Here's some screenies.

Your lovely resting place.

There's a battle.

The graveyard.

Are those textbox choices? In a textbox? Whoa. Haha.

Portraits! You're the skeleton.

Sorry about the image compression. Does photobucket do that? I'll find a better uploader for the next batch.

No clue on when it'll be demo ready. It will be awhile. There's about 1 minute of gameplay right now.

The Wobbler · Joined: 06 Feb 2003 Posts: 2221

Jack · **the fool** Joined: 30 Jul 2004 Posts: 773

These are really great, and I can't wait to see more.

Try saving your files as .PNG. Photobucket is a jerk when it comes to .BMP, and likes to compress larger files into .JPEGs.
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Newbie_Power · Joined: 04 Sep 2006 Posts: 1762

Holy cow, the artwork in this game is incredible and classy. Very "Midieval" like. I love it.

Even with your skills, though, I agree that a lot of the non-character foreground objects need to be readable. The contrast needs to be upped a bit to bring out details more. Zoomed in, yeah, there is far more detail that you put work into making, but zoomed out, it all becomes one big mass of PURE BLACK.

You can still add contrast without taking away the overall brightness of the scene, I found.
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Bob the Hamster · Posted: Tue Dec 23, 2008 8:37 am Post subject:

Niiiiice! Can't wait to see more.

ShakeyAir, were you known by some other name previously? I don't recognize your name, but you seem to be familiar with the community.

Moogle1 · Posted: Tue Dec 23, 2008 8:40 am Post subject:

I have nothing to add, but let me parrot the previous posters' sentiment. Looks amazing.
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Slime Salad :: Independent Game Design

ShakeyAir · Joined: 27 Apr 2004 Posts: 93

Thank you very much everyone with the kind words!

Surlaw: Honestly, I don't think I'm at the point to have a real preview. I will come back to that link for sure when I have some more done (and it is christmas break so hopefully that'll be pretty quick.)

James: I don't think I ever contributed a real lot. But I think I've been ShakeyAir and then LionX5 waaaay back in grade/middle school. Maybe something else too, because I could have swore I had a really crappy game up on here? But really I've been pretty shy about my OHR use because when I was younger I didn't have the patience to make anything good, so I just fiddled with it for personal use mostly.

Contrast: Is it mostly the buildings you have an issue with? Or the trees too? Or everything? I've noticed on my monitor the grass on dirt looks good, and very separated, while on other monitors it all bleeds together. It's hard because I'm barely using the set color gradients. Like I'm jumping around for all my shadows and such. Maybe I need a different master palette to make it look decent on any color configuration?

Regardless, I'll play with it.

Onlyoneinall · **Bug finder** Joined: 16 Jul 2005 Posts: 746

These graphics are amazing. I personally see no problem with the contrast, though, my screen's gamma and brightness rating is probably higher than most people's.

Can't wait to see more, if only there were others like you lurking around the community...!
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http://www.castleparadox.com/gamelist-display.php?game=750 Bloodlust Demo 1.00

Moogle1 · Posted: Tue Dec 23, 2008 7:43 pm Post subject:

The Drizzle · **Who is the Drizzle?** Joined: 12 Nov 2003 Posts: 432

Wow, I just love these graphics. They look completely different from anything I've seen. Can't wait for you to release this thing.
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Blue Pixel · Posted: Tue Dec 23, 2008 8:24 pm Post subject:

Well, rather then adding to the great wall of complements, i think ill ask something.

did you use the old master palette, the new one, or a custom one? if its custom can you post it?
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ShakeyAir · Joined: 27 Apr 2004 Posts: 93

I used the new master palette. I am a big fan of it! It makes much nicer pictures possible than the old one.

I don't know enough color theory or whatever to come up with my own palette, haha.

Rya.Reisender · **Snippy** Joined: 18 Jan 2008 Posts: 821

Wasn't there an OHRRPGCE game where you could set the brightness? Maybe this game would need something like that to fit with different monitors.

The graphics / art are really good as the others already said.
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Mariel · Joined: 15 Oct 2008 Posts: 78 Location: In your dreams

Wow, those screenshots are incredible. Love the game premise too, it's very original. Just one question. How'd you get choices in the text box like that? I've been wanting to do something similar for my game but I could not figure it out (admitted, I'm not very good at plotscripting yet). Please share?

TMC · Posted: Tue Dec 30, 2008 9:04 am Post subject:

That looks really great, I hope you keep it up for the rest of the game!

OOIA added a contrast setting to the menu in Bloodlust. I think that brightness/gamma options should be built into game.exe because some monitors are really awful. And I know I'm guilty of sometime also using the darkest colours in the palette for half of everything.

You can make menus of choices like that using custom menus with the right settings attached to and displaying over a blank textbox, no scripting required.
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