Knight's Escape -- Gameplay Progression

Today's post is about how the gameplay is progressing. My friend, let's call him MegaN00B worked hard on the gameplay attack system, including health, lives and death management and the killing of a dummy monster.
He also did some traps, a pitfall, and arrows that are shot from the walls when the player walk on a switch.

On my side, I did improvement of all the Kight's sprites, adding the shield and a shadow on all the rendered frames. I also added an idle animation in the four directions.

The game's starting to look like something !

Knight's Escape -- Main character WIP

I've beenveryt busy with the graphic update. A lot of tiles were not rightlined so I had to align them precisely.
I also put them all on a tileset, so it will be better for performormance and levelbuilding.
One ofmy friend is helpingme with the logic bricks and brought in somenice ideas.
I'mnowworking a lot on the character: I'mredoing the sprites, I want to add a shadow below the Knight and a trail FX when he slashes with his sword. I managed to do both today, si this is nice. Now I just need to render all the sprites in the four direction.
Oh, and I added his shield, too.

Knight's Escape -- Video Gameplay 01

I guess the title is explicit enough, right?
Check it out here:
http://imogia.deviantart.com/art/Knight-s-Escape-Gameplay-Video-01-408810080

Knight's Escape -- Character + RPG Maker

Finished the walk animation.

Right now I am testing some things for rendering the frames.

Also yesterday a friend of mine told me about RPGMaker after she saw my tiles. She told it may be worth to do the game with RPM, so I gave ita closer look.

I created a few tilesets in order to play around. I also modified the wall andcorner tiles.

Knight's Escape - Character Concept.

Today I let aside the Gamemaker part and I focused on the character:the Knight.
Well, I merely googled "Knight", took the first image and used it to create my Knight.
Result here:

And I spent the rest of the day creating him in 3D, because I don't want to draw each animation frame by hand with pixel art.
Modelling, texture, rigging done. I started the walk animation.

Gamemaker Journey -- Day 02

Another great day of Glory \o/
Couldn't spend to whole day today, but let's say about half a day.
I woke up, grumpy mood because of this damn collision problem. Then, with a fresh mind, I started to work on collision masks again. I felt so relieved when it actually worked! After many trials and errors, it appears that a custom collision mask is the best way.
Now the game can be fully played, this is awesome!
BUT, I came up with this strange bug while testing that almost ruined my day: gates will not open even if the character has picked up enough keys.
For simulating an inventory, each key pickup adds +1 theSILVER_KEY variable, and each collision with a door while SILVER_KEY>0 made plays the open gate animation, replace with and opened gate object (so that the Knight may pass behind) and adds -1 to SILVER_KEY.
But, I think that each time the players collide with a gate, he looses one key, even if he has zero.

Luckily earlier this morning I watched this video, out of curiosity:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9crUsl-VR4c
It appears that, by chance, that was the solution!
Sorryfor the language I don't know how to code (yet?)
By assigning a Begin Step to the player :
Test SILVER_KEY:
if SILVER_KEY<0
then set SILVER_KEY to 0
Thus SILVER_KEY will never be negative! And each key pickup brings SILVER_KEY into the positive, always.

This is so nice!
The first level isfully playable now !

I came up with some new ideas for future levels :

- Obcurity: When the Knight begins, he is in the dark and he uncovers the maze by walking.
- Trapped door: picking an object behind a door makes this door shut. The Knight is trapped! niark niark.
- Traps & monsters : this signifies that I should take into consideration HPs, Lives, etc. (later).

Also my girlfriend suggested that instead of walking offscreen, the Knight should really climb the stairs. This is a nice idea, and I think I know how I could put it up.

So long!

Gamemaker Journey -- Day 1

Yesterday I had an intensive day messing around with Gamemaker. I created some graphics, took some sprites for the character in order to spare some time. I know this bad, but I forgot which website it was from, so I can't give credit right now.

So, Day 01 was more an approach day of the software. Thanks to my previous experience with the Blender Game Engine, I could progress kinda smoothly. Did I mention that Iam a total noob when it comes to coding?
Anyway, here is a first screenshot, everything was correct EXCEPT one damn thing : collisions, making the game impossible to play.
Nevertheless, that was a highly productive day as I managed to achieve the following victories:

- Building a speed game concept: A charcter must escape a labyrinth by finding keys that opens doors. I had Druaga tower in mind, althoug I never played that game.
- Character moving, 4 direction + animations loops and idle pose in the 4 directions.
- 2D graphic creation of all the assets, and doors animation.
- Building the level.
- Making the door impossible to open unless to have the Gold Key.
- Making the metal gates open with silver key, and using a key make it disappear in the (invisible) inventory
- Smooth and glitch-free of the doors opening animations. (Was not easy)
- Collecting an objectmake it disappear, but it is taken in an inventory.
- windows export for a .exe file, hey that's nice.
- Learned about sprites origin point.

Big problem:
 - COLLISIONS -

Synthesis of the work session:
Stable system, but impossible to play due to collision bug that prevents the player to go freely in any possible spots of the game, making the game impossible to play and finish.

Random thought:
I think that there is some kind of short remake of Druaga No Tower in Baten Kaitos, when you must collect the gold pike magnus or something like it.

Screenshot of the project: