[GAME][IN DEVELOMENT] - Project FrostFire

[Codestar]

Hello and welcome to the Project FrostFire devlog!

This game is set in a world "frozen in time" by an evil tyrant named Lord Touketsu (or King Cold as he is sometimes referred to as). It's the story of a young boy named Nicolas who lives on a small island in the outskirts of the mainland, who begins a journey of peril, excitement, and mystery. He is born into a small village hidden in the mountains of Glacia island as the child of the village's protector and hero, Kumara. Kumara wields the power to create fire literally out of thin air and uses this power to protect the people he cares about in his village. This power comes from a magical scarf that he wears that transforms a persons most inner desires and ambitions into an element. Nicolas always looks up to his father and hopes to one day be just like him and have his courage. Little does he know what the future actually has in store for him in this world frozen in time...

Main Characters
Nicolas


Kumara


Various NPC's


Various Baddies


Youtube channel with FrostFire's BGM and in the future, it's demo trailers
http://www.youtube.com/projectfrostfire

My personal Dev Blog that I post updates on throughout the game's development
http://studiokaikimi.blogspot.com

[Sengir]

Still looking really cool!

[Codestar]

Thanks. I'm going to keep this thread up to date as much as i can with my progress.

Currently I'm working on Frostfire's level editor more than i am on the actual mechanics of the game.
I'm looking to have as much of the actual game development as i can outside of GM.

Basically the actual .exe will be a compiler for all of my stuff.

Currently I have...
+ all of the sprites external
+ all of the dialog files external
+ all of the music external
+ all of the sfx external
+ an entity system that creates objects and whatnot within the game all from common parent classes

what I'm working on adding
+ having tilesets external (done, just not implemented into the main engine)
+ having all the levels external
+ having the ability to create entities (players, npcs, enemies, bosses, cutscenes, items) in the game via an external scripting environment (GMLua)

The advantage to all of this is that I can have a good ground work to develop the game with. This will speed up the process a lot. Not to mention I will have a fully functional engine to make other games with, including sequels. It also allows players to create their own content and their own mods via the level editor and the open scripting environment. Which should keep people busy after I release the first demo and give me time to work on finishing the game.

[Vipershark]

this is pretty cool because it also makes the game's loading time drop by a lot since the opening preload is basically just a program that calls up external resources when needed.

[Codestar]

Not only that, but it drastically lowers the size of the exe. I mean throughout the entire game GM will only use one room basically.(excluding menu screens and whatnot)
Once you move to different areas it takes care of all the loading code and object placement from the dynamic loading of level files.

Plus, the more of the game development I have outside of GM, the easier it will be to port the engine to other platforms.

[Vipershark]

teach me how to implement external content loading please

edit- Not only could you create an easily port-able game, but as you said, it would allow players to creat custom content, characters, and levels.
I just got a good idea revolving around this.

[Kat]

So basically if I wanted to, I could replace every single sprite and as long as I name it right it would work?

[Goemar]

Been a long time since I checked on this, like over a year and it still looks really promising. A bit disappointed there isn't a demo out but I'll live.

[tsr moderation staff]

wait weren't you were going to give the sprites some shading?

[Vipershark]

(01-26-2010 03:26 PM)Lunyka Wrote:  So basically if I wanted to, I could replace every single sprite and as long as I name it right it would work?

Yes, that should work.
Same with sounds and stuff too.
I'm assuming it's as simple as a texture edit in 3D games?

[Codestar]

(01-26-2010 03:58 PM)[fish in space] Wrote:  wait weren't you were going to give the sprites some shading?

yeah, those are some older screenshots.

As for lunkya's question, yeah it's pretty much as simple as that, although you can extend upon that with GMLua and actually make your own entities with their own actions, sounds, and sprites.

[Kat]

Thats pretty awesome.

[Codestar]

Here's a screenshot of what the level editor looks like currently.

[Vipershark]

TEACH ME THIS.

[Codestar]

Nothing I can really teach... You just have to come up with a system for doing it. I pretty much have an ini file for each characters set of sprites that tells their location, bbox stuff, and whatnot and i have scripts in my engine that load them accordingly from reading those. It's really no different than how you would design a resource loading system in any other programming language/library. I would probably recommend looking at the indie brawl source to get some ideas. that's one place where I somewhat got an idea of what i wanted to do.