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| Wednesday, January 25, 2006 |
  Teh Test! | 
Posted - 1/25/2006 11:58:47 PM | Oh, wow. That was certainly an hour of my life that I'm glad I spent. :)
Tonight I hosted the game for my three primary testers -- Dean, Alex and CJ -- to engage in some combat with and iron out bugs. I finished implementing guns, and then today added health/death and respawning. Sounds small, but this was a lot of work!
We endured some odd bugs; most of them likely the product of me not having reliable UDP implemented yet. But things went quite swimmingly. Surpringly, I didn't own them all as badly as I thought I would. Here's some screens I took:
(Muzzle flashes need to be realigned :P)
(Owning them all with my Almach Hardpistol!)
(Agh. Bitter defeat..)
Hopefully we'll have the public test ready for Friday evening (EST)!
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| Code Wars Episode II: Attack of the Backlog | |
Posted - 1/20/2006 11:59:15 PM | I've been neglecting to write some entries as of late, so I'll have to lay a fairly big one here to make up for all of the stuff that's happened in my little world of gamedev. :)
The Recovery
For those of you who recall, my old harddrive (Eliza) died, leaving my project, Star of Shadows RPG, essentially frozen. The last backup I had was a whole version behind, which meant 2 months of hard work. Not to mention Magma Duel, Gundown, Meteorites, and every other project I've worked on over the last 3 years. Gah.
But today, there is a light. It was much easier than I had thought it would be: I simply unhooked the IDE cable and power from my CD-ROM drive, and plugged it into my [supposedly] dead HDD, set as a slave drive. Booted my new HDD up (Minda), and boom, there it was on the D:\ drive: Eliza! She was beautiful right then. Sure she was dead, but necrophilia doesn't count with harddrives. :P
Long story short, I saved everything, and couldn't have felt better about it. Star of Shadows v0.03 should hit the metaphorical shelves in the very near future. :)
The Server
Finished building up my server in my Computer Engineering class, and lugged it home today. Take my word for it: carrying a desktop home on a 15 minute walk is not fun. My arms were cramped for the next few hours. That, and us programmers aren't really that buff. :P
Spent the greater part of this afternoon getting everything hooked up and functional on the server. Bought a wireless network card for 'her', and tossed in that old 64mb AGP video card I had lieing around, which I knew I'd need one day. ;) Beats the 16-colours 800x600 mode that the 4mb nVidia card it came with offered.
Now it's buffed up a little more. Not bad for $65(CAN). Here's the beauty:
(Playing a fun game of 'Street Invaders'!)
No Apache or FTP or anything like that just yet. Apache looks pretty easy to get going, but I have no idea about how to set up FTP. Am I just to write an application that processes FTP requests, or is there something else? Any software to be recommended here? I'm a complete server newbie. Tips from the pros are welcome.
Skirmish Online
Skirmish Online has been moving along just swimmingly. In fact, I'm sort of worried at how well things have been progressing. It was only the other day that I realized something very important and impressive: the game is very stable. No big bugs, no crashes, and no (known) exploits. Compared to my last online game attempt, Bizlof War (2003), which crashed like mad on players and had wierd glitches occuring on a regular basis, this is miraculous. It feels great to be making such a solid game. :D
So, what's new, you might be asking? You're not? Well, too bad, Joe. I'm telling you anyways:
Started off with the minor stuff: fixing some player input formatting, version checking (so players can't use old clients), and a packet type for the server to send that shows a custom messagebox (usually for something like "cannot connect" or "game is full").
Then I went on and got to the fun stuff: a playerlist with names and pings, key customization (saving, too!), some gamehost commands ('kick' being the highlight :P), and the workings of the HUD. Also a makeshift form for logging into the game. Additionally, Draffurd went gung-ho on the sprites and kicked them up several notches. They look much spiffier now (Robocop-èsque?) and they can by dynamically coloured by the game. This'll be handy for gametypes with teams. Looky:
(Hurrah for local ping times!)
And even more recently I've been getting more work done on the HUD and the slot system for player inventories. You can select your weapon via the number keys, and each item type has a delay associated with it that takes a certain amount of time depending on the item. For example, switching to a rocket launcher is a lot longer than pulling out a pistol or grenade. The groovy part is that the HUD dynamically grows/shrinks the slot rectangles as your switch, so you can tell how fast your switching to your next weapon/item. Soon your player will transition between animation states based on what gun you're holding (eg. pistol-hold stance -> rifle-hold stance).
Oh, and now you can hide underneath trees. Your name vanishes and you can usually completely hide from someone else if you're crafty enough. Me and my testers had quite a few enjoyable rounds of hide-and-seek. Or rather, "Guess the Tree". :P
And then, after I do that, I get to write the guns themselves. Much fun. :)
HardDrives
Am I the only one who has adopted the weird habit of naming my harddrives? My current main HDD is Minda, my last one (dead) was Eliza, my server's is Violet, and my last few were Wilma and Bertha. Aaah, Bertha. We wrote some nice QBasic text adventures together way back in the day. :D
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| Tuesday, January 17, 2006 |
| Burning...out... | |
Posted - 1/17/2006 11:43:02 PM | I think I'm on the verge of burnout. Been working my buns off on Skirmish Online*, and now I'm losing the willpower to keep up work on it. I'm thinking of either taking on another side project, or doing a programming break altogether.
* Yes, we decided to go with "Skirmish Online". Partly because I had already bought the domain, and partly because it's vague enough that I can change the game around without worry. ;)
Anyways, I did implement a couple of bug fixes tonight, as well as strafing, and the beginnings of the HUD:
(Hoorah!)
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| Teh Storyline! | |
Posted - 1/15/2006 10:57:29 PM | Alright, so I took some time to write up a storyline for the game tonight. Nothing is set in stone, but I'd like some feedback on the current storyline. I'm still stumped for a name, though. :)
Quote:
I remember a time where things were different. A time that feels like so very long ago. A time before my homeworld’s sky was coloured crimson red by saturating toxic gasses. A time before the great vast seas crisscrossing my planet’s surface were drained dry by the utterly massive Hydronaut starships of the Almach Empire. A time when I lived in peace and prosperity with hundreds of millions of fellow human beings -- before that number dwindled down to the few thousand. Those of us that still cling on to the fainting strands of life that remain in this dieing world we survive on.
I wish I could say that our world was the only one that suffered this fate. If that were the case, then maybe I would be able to tolerate it. That perhaps our planet sucked clean of its resources and very life essence would serve as a sacrifice for the rest of the galaxy to live peacefully. Alas, this is not the case. The almighty and fearsome Almach Empire’s consumption of our world is only one of the hundreds that have fallen victim to their infinite thirst. Minerals torn right from the ground by colossal magnetic field generators on their ships; the oceans depleted; and the list goes on. It is only by the cruel virtue they call “mercy” that they left a small percentage of the oxygen to allow us to continue living in this hell they have forged for us.
But we are not helplessly doomed. We refuse to die in this barren wasteland that this collective of betrayers -- fellow humans! – the ones that call themselves the Almach Empire – have wrought. None of the victims of their vampiric acts will simply accept defeat and lay down to die. With every newly barren planet added to the list of casualties by this inhuman empire, we grow more numerous and more powerful. On our world, we’re using what little supplies that we have left to construct transport ships based on plans sent to us by factions on other fallen worlds. We’re doing our part in working forward towards a united force to strike against the Almach Empire, and crush their foul work with swift justice.
We hear lots of rumours and stories about this grotesquely large Empire – no, beast. Passing trader convoys or other faction ships tell us horrific stories about them. The Almach Empire is made up of one thousand times the population of all of the factions combined. The Almach Empire consumes about one trillion litres of water every day. The Almach Empire will continue its destruction of the galaxy until every last bit of life is taken and consumed by its inhabitants. Built on the enormous frozen-sun world of Horates-7, and surrounded by two million space colonies, is the realm of the Almach Empire. Utterly endless numbers of people living in the comfort provided by the Empire while being stripped from planets like our own.
War is brewing. I can feel it; everyone can. The first skirmishes have already begun across several factions’ worlds, and with our last few fleets of ships nearly finished construction, we’ll be moving into battle as well. It will finally be time to exact revenge from them for the billions of lives that they heartlessly crushed.
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The basis is that the main combatting teams will be the factions and the Almach Empire. Despite the numerous space references, the game will take place in indoor environments (on planets, in space stations, etc).
Oh, and tonight's testers were feeling rather mischievous. :)
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| Saturday, January 14, 2006 |
| OMGWTFBBQ | |
Posted - 1/14/2006 10:40:14 PM | Oh, gads. Today reminded me why I love writing games. It's only a small step, but damn it feels good. I'll show you in a moment. :)
Today I beefed the heck out of the movement prediction algorithm, and I think that anyone who tested v0.02 with the old algo can testify that it's vast step up. Now the delay in a player reaching a point locally and on another player's screen is negligable ( < ~50ms), and the turns/slides are way smoother. It took a number of hours of work, but it's in. Phew. :D
And y'know, some small stuff like message types (global chat, team chat, announcement, etc). I also rewrote object collisions, but somehow people STILL manage to get stuck. Doh!
The Beef
Okay, okay. Why did I call you all here into my cozy little blog? Managed to get a bunch of people in for some nice, tasty, wholesome testing. Sure you can only run around, but darn was it fun!
Started off with a few of us:
(Chaos!)
Then we got a couple more. But since we're all masters of the shadows, I bet you can't even see us:
(Empty screen; nobody around? ;))
The Hard Part
People are really hard to organize. It took us 5 minutes (I jest not!) to organize this screenshot in game. Gads. :P
(Say cheese!)
This felt great. The rush of writing a game and watching people come on, meet eachother, and interact, all in your little constructed world. Oh yeeeaah.
Also: special thanks to everyone who tested. Even our very own ShoeString Games stopped in to get in the action. Thanks! Plenty more to come!
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| Thursday, January 12, 2006 |
| v0.02 Complete. Onward to v0.03! | |
Posted - 1/12/2006 12:10:01 AM | v0.02 of Mystery Project is complete. Finally. The roadmap ended up much larger than it had started out. You can view it in all of its uncensored glory here.
What was added? Well, I tweaked movement prediction some more, and now the player 'warps' to his proper position if he's offtrack by more than 80 pixels. This is a little lame (and looks sort of ugly), but it's better than shooting at a player that's in the wrong spot. Hopefully I'll fine-tune my movement prediction method in the future so that this occurs less often. :)
Players can also leave the game, now. Seems like a given, but it was one of the last features, hehe. A server will drop a player if: a) the player has sent a quit-notify packet, or b) the player has been inactive (no packets in) for more than 3000ms. The server will then bounce that packet to all players. The client will drop a player if: a) they've gotten a quit-notify packet from the server, or b) the player is inactive for 5000ms. I'm a bit more leniant with the client dropping players since during some lag spikes, it can last for several seconds. The numbers will be tweaked based on performance.
The Test Map(tm)
Draffurd finished the Test Map today, which he tentatively named, "13th Street". Quite chucklesome. ;) It's a very nice map which I think is going to be a total blast to play with other players online once we get some firepower in. Draffurd has worked his buns off making new graphics for Mystery Project, and the map certainly reflects this. It's covered with all sorts of grime/blood/paper/etc objects that create a nice ambient feel to it. Today myself and two brave testers -- thanks ShoeStringGames and Eliwood! :D -- logged on and ran around the map a bit, playing a game or two of hide-and-seek and tag. Still able to have fun without guns. Maybe I should just not add guns and create "Pacifist Combat". :P
(Nobody else around; I took this one before they caught up to me :P)
Server!
Went computer shopping today, as well. Draffurd gave me $500(CAN) to buy him a nice computer for his residence at U of T, so I went off and nabbed him one. While I was there, I couldn't resist but to buy a cheapy PII 866MHZ compy to use as a server for my own uses. It'll sit nicely right under my desk, and host my files, my website (when I make one :P), and one day the master server for Mystery Project. Here's the clunker:
(Don't mind Simba; he's quite photogenic!)
More news on that as it develops. ;)
Map Editor
The Map Editor got a healthy beefing as well. Thanks to suggestions by Draffurd it now checks the existance of files before attempting to load them. An obvious one, but I forget these things. :P You can also now hold CTRL and click to erase tiles, rather than having to scroll up to the top and select the Eraser tile. Also optimized the map drawing, cutting down about 25% of the degenerate tiles being drawn. It still runs pretty slow on big maps, since GDI+ is software-limited. And software is teh slow. :)
Phew, lots done today. Started v0.03 tonight and converted all bitmaps to PNGs by writing a little Python script. Next up is global chatting ingame!
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| Wednesday, January 11, 2006 |
| YIPPEEEEE! (Big update!) | |
Posted - 1/11/2006 12:30:22 AM | First: the nearly completed v0.02 Roadmap.
Oh yes, the adrenaline is certainly flowing. Today was a hugely productive day; I'm extremely happy and proud of my accomplishments. Yes, yes. I'll get to the details. :)
Map Editor
I put Draffurd in charge of creating a Test Map for any public Alpha tests we do, since the current 100x100 map is a little too big for that sort of thing. Thus I had to continually beef up the map editor with various features/fixes throughout the night. Aside from the bugfixes/minor tweaks, I added in Rect-Draw which lets you draw a rectangular area of the selected tile with the right mouse button, and plotting regular one-by-one tiles with the left mouse button. Not too exciting, but functionality is what counts!
Online Play
Oh yeah. Been working my tail off the last few days on getting the online play going on Mystery Project. First thing I did was remove the entire class-wrapper I had for HawkNL and used WSockets instead (sorry Hawkers :P). Lost a lot of work, but gained a lot of productivity.
I decided that the ugly method of sending prebuilt structs ('records' in Delphi :P) wasn't preferrable, so I built a small C-style system that lets me built packets by appending data types into a memory stream, and fires it off to its destination at the end. Commands like PB_Clear, PB_WriteByte, PB_WriteString, PB_Send, etc. Works like a charm, and it additionally lets me tack together more information per-packet, such as sending player movement information. In my last online game (circa 2003) I sent an average of Players*(Players-1)*2 packets per second. Now with this system I'm only sending Players*2. That's an exponential increase! Thank markr and hplus of the Networking/Multiplayer forum for that tip. :D
Added in names below your player, too. Guess we can't hide under trees anymore:
Then I hit a massive snag -- a bug to end all bugs. Or something. You see, Delphi has four string types. That's right, four. Borland apparently thought, in their infinite wisdom, that this would be a nice addition. This 'nice' addition cost me several hours of debugging hell, trying to get a darned string sent across the network. I tried WideStrings, ShortStrings, AnsiStrings, and PChars (C char* equivalent). None were getting me anywhere. So I just grumbled and settled for building the strings in the packets character by character, fitting in the string length in the first byte slot. And it worked. And I was happy. Phew. One big bug down.
At this point players were now able to join the game. Not move. Not talk. Not shoot. Just join. Still, it felt good to launch another client and see "Player 1" sit there complacently. Now it was time to work on player movement! What happens on the server's end is it collects movement data from the player (which currently is sent every 500ms) and serverside it sets a flag on that player that they have new movement data. Every 500ms on the server (which is not necessarily at the same time as the client), it builds up a packet consisting of all players with new movement data, and sends it to all players, and resets the flag. This way I don't be sending old data that players already have, further optimising my bandwidth-output.
Had a bug with movement, too. Another biggy. I wasn't thinking straight, and I had something like this:
PACKET_MOVEPLAYERS:
begin
len := PB_ReadByte;
for a := 0 to len-1 do
begin
pID := PB_ReadByte;
Plr := Players[pID];
if (Plr = nil) or (Plr = Local) then continue
else
begin
Plr.tX := PB_ReadWord;
Plr.tY := PB_ReadWord;
Plr.tRotation := PB_ReadByte * (360/256);
Plr.Keys := PB_ReadByte;
end;
end;
end;
Can you spot the bug that will occur there in my logic? It sure as heck took me forever, hehe. Anyone who can find it will get a nice big juicy cookie. Hint: it's a logic error. :P
Testing Testing Testing!
I must've run that goshdarn client and server well over 40 times. Well over. And testing with myself isn't that fun. So I decided to poke a recent friend of mine, ShoeStringGames, who I had been helping with his code throughout the evening, and coaxed him into helping me test the game. He didn't really resist. :P
Anyways, I sent the client, and hosted the server. And sat there patiently waiting for him to arrive. If it worked. Let's just say:
(Player names not implemented yet, but that's him, Mr. #1)
YIPPEE! Oh man, I was so happy to see us frollicking around in the fields of a Test Map. I'm still glowing with glee, really. Writing online games I find is the hardest sort to write, so getting this major step down makes me feel great. While it may not look like much, you're looking at packet building, movement prediction, trigonometic movement, pixel collision, animation, and a whole whack of hard work. What can possibly beat that, now that v0.02 is almost done?
v0.03 will have guns. :D (Testers welcome!)
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| Who reads these titles? | |
Posted - 1/8/2006 11:08:42 PM | The Book
So I picked up the copy I ordered off Amazon.ca of "Introduction to 3D Game Programming with DirectX 9.0", after leaving it sitting at the post office for a few days to marinate. ;)
I'm very impressed with what I've seen of it so far. I'm not going to jump into it right now, since I have enough coding-related stuff on my plate at the moment. But once things calm down a little I'll stick my nose in there. Lots of interesting topics: 3D math primer, stencil buffer'ing, HLSL & pixel/vertex shaders, effects framework, models (progressive meshes, .x files, etc), and a bunch of other stuff that has already eluded my mind. Even though I don't really use low-level APIs like D3D in my games, I still enjoy learning about What's Going on Under the Hood(tm).
Mystery Project
Okay, okay. Me and Draffurd and working on a good name for it. (Quasi-serious) Suggestions are welcome. :)
EDIT: Looking through the Department of Defense glossary and pulled out "Unlimited War". Who knows? Too lame? :P
v0.02 is nearing completion! Today I finished the TGameServer and TGameClient classes and tested them until satisfaction in the testbed app I had created. Just a simple thing that lets you bounce some data back and forth from the server, but it shows that all of the pieces are functioning properly. Reliable UDP will need to wait until v0.03 or later, when I'm ready to dive into network code again. Hopefully we'll see eachother walking around the map at one point early this week. :)
You can view the v0.02 Roadmap right here to see how very close we are, and what other stuff I've added/fixed.
Edumacation
Holidays are over. Back to school. A couple of weeks, and then exams. My courses are ludicrously easy, so I doubt it'll even put a dent in my gamedev schedule. ;)
| |
| Saturday, January 7, 2006 |
| Happiness through agony -- it works! | |
Posted - 1/7/2006 11:23:27 PM | Ah, so today was my quasi-annual job review. Got my raise, got my praise. Yay. :)
Networking
This was my night, more or less. Winsock was giving me headaches aplenty, so I retraced my steps back a bit and gave HawkNL another go. Trying not to be too turned off by the website's colour scheme (hehe :P) I bookmarked the documentation and checked out the Delphi examples, which I hadn't spotted the first time. I was pleasantly surprised at what a nice library it is. :)
Long story short -- and I mean a LONG story! -- I learned a whole bunch about the API mostly through experimentation, and one particular obscure bug cost me about 2 hours, whereas I needed to forward ports 1024+MAXPLAYERS in order for a UDP server to receive packets. Fun. :)
So here I am, finally got the testbed I've created for my (fairly) flexible TGameServer and TGameClient classes to rest in whilst I experiment and add to them. Right now the client can just connect and toss a user-inputted string or a random number to the server, but the functionality is there. Tomorrow I'll work on grouping connected sockets to a dynamic list of players and using HawkNL's group system to poll sockets quickly and sort received packets. I don't think I'll have reliable UDP implemented for v0.02, so the first online game test might be a little whonky, but it'll definitely be in for v0.03.
All in all, I went through a lot of dismay and worry that all would be lost, but now I've come out on top and have squashed the once-mighty bugs. So yes, Mr. Donahue, I had a nice day. :)
| |
| Victory! | |
Posted - 1/6/2006 1:40:50 PM | Har har. Notice anything different about my journal title? Told them. :P
In more Mystery Project news, I'll be getting going on the networking side of things today. Grudgingly I'll be writing the whole think from scratch with Winsock rather than putting blind faith in some 3rd party networking lib and hoping to heck it works well. It's going to mean a longer and more arduous path for me, but at least it should be a learning experience. If you're a network programming buff, maybe you should help me out. :)
| |
| Thursday, January 5, 2006 |
| Of pain and pleasure.. | |
Posted - 1/5/2006 11:29:02 PM | Pleasure
Wrote the map objects 'system' for Mystery Project, which isn't really that much of a mystery anymore. I'll do a little overview of it in my next entry or so for those of you who are interested. Now you can place objects in the map editor both fixed to the grid and with pixel-offsets. It was tricky to get the Erase tool to properly get rid of the ones not fixed to the grid, but all is now good.
The game now loads these objects and interprets what genre of object it is based on its ID (tree, rock, crate, etc.) and generates the object in the game and sets up its collision data.
Had fun adding the first mapobject today: trees. My artist has a few variations done, but right now they use a unique collision model that lets the player something hide themselves beneath it, since the game uses an overhead perspective. See if you can spot which tree the player is beneath. You'll get a cookie*. :)
Okay, so it's not that hard. :P And as for the map's general barren and ugly look, it's all temporary stuff. Programmers don't have nice art! Wait till I get to the dynamic lighting, hehe. ;)
Pain
After the map object adventure was completed, it was off to get the networking started. Here's the Mystery Project v0.02 Roadmap at its current state. As you can see, my goal is to get basic online play going (adding/removing players, movement) in by the time I release v0.02. The plan is to add network support concurrently as I add game content.
First problem: HawkNL doesn't like me. Things just were not working the way that they should have. The documentation is existant, but that's about it in terms of resources. And then I'm not even sure how sound the Delphi header is. Ho-hum.
So, to banana-trees with HawkNL. I'll grab this fairly low-level Winsock wrapper component for Delphi I found, WSockets, and use that. It's what I used for Bizlof War -- my first online shooter game -- so it'll hopefully serve me well this time around.
Second problem: My router has it in for me. Me and my router have a long history of not playing nicely together. If I had things my way I'd plug myself directly into the cable modem, but I suppose the other resident members of my local wireless network wouldn't be too thrilled. Anyways, port forwarding was not working for me, because I was too dense at the time to figure it out. Then I had the overly wise idea of believing that changing my Local IP address would fix the problem. Boom. No internet for 3 hours. After some experimentation and *actually reading* the instructions, I got back to square one again. Phew.
Pleasure
Payday tomorrow. That's got to count for something. :P Also got my review on Saturday, which means a raise. Woot.
Got my router finally working with proper IP forwarding. You can't imagine the glee when I saw someone I pulled off MSN connecting to the little TCP server app I whipped up. This means that I can get cracking on the networking part of the game tomorrow. Perhaps I'll poke my head into the GD.NET IRC channel and see who I can pull in to help me test. :)
Oh, and hey, you're reading this. So things are still pretty good. :)
* No, you won't. I ate it while you were reading that last paragraph.
| |
| Wednesday, January 4, 2006 |
| Mystery Project v0.01 Alpha | |
Posted - 1/4/2006 5:52:46 PM | Well, I just started from scratch and wrote the whole first alpha version of Mystery Project in 4 hours. ;)
I decided that writing up a big-arse framework in C++ and then writing the rest of the game would both take a long time, and be a painful process. I was pretty close. :P Took the safe route and went with Delphi, a language I'm very comfortable with, and the Omega game components and got cracking. Sure I'm doing less actual "work" compared to writing my own engine from the ground up, but doesn't actual progress matter more?
Networking. The main rationale I had for using C++ was the feature-packed RakNet library. There's no Delphi port of it, and the best candidate I can find is HawkNL, which someone was nice enough to create a Delphi header for. It looks pretty solid, although it lacks all of the high-level features that RakNet has like encryption, autopatching, or master server/clients. It sports reliable UDP ordered packets though, which is the key thing I was looking for. It'll be more work, but it'll do the trick.
A screenshot for this release would look boring, as would an actual binary distribution. So just take a look at the v0.01 Roadmap for Mystery Project and be somewhat satisfied. I promise when I get to the networking it'll get a lot more exciting. ;)
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| Mystery Project and the enigmatic New Year! | |
Posted - 1/1/2006 11:51:11 PM | New Years
Happy New Years everyone. Hope you had a fun time and enjoyed 2005. I was at a great party with a bunch of good friends -- and a bunch of good drinks :P -- and had a generally good time ringing in the new year. I hope everyone had an equally, if not better, experience. :)
Mystery Project
Whew, things are heating up in this realm. I've been working away on the 2D game engine for MP, and so far it's going well. I'm building it as a rather high-level engine atop the very excellent Allegro game library. A while back I mentioned writing a component-based 2D game engine for easy reusage of code for future projects, and so far that plan is turning out pretty darn well. The screen, images, image-cache, and drawing are all coded and are working just fine, with plans to write the sprite engine and maybe input tomorrow.
Draffurd (the mastermind artist/composer) has been hard at work making some awesome material for Mystery Project. It's safe to mention that the game will be an overhead 2D game, and he's created some wonderful characters and their animations based on what equipment they are holding. I had originally planned on loading the animation up into a nice GIF, but I can't find any free GIF-builders that don't cover the animation with their advertisements. There goes that plan. :/ So I'll plop down the spritesheet for the main template character which the rest will be based off of. It doesn't do its animation justice, but if anyone knows of a free GIF-builder I'll gladly update. :)
However, take a moment to sample the titlescreen music (in progress!) if you like. It's more like a foundational jingle for the theme/mood of the game, but I particularly like Draffurd's work on it. Listening to it a few times while I code gives me a nifty little motivational boost. Far better than those Potions of Motivation I scummed off those monsters a few dungeons back. :P
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"Good night, Monster Land."
"Good night, brave warrior."
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