seraph1130
Potential Patron
- Joined
- Aug 20, 2012
Short-time lurker, first time poster.
-Ninja'd-
Started a Dev. Blog @ http://ut16sgame.blogspot.com/ where you can keep up with the project if this thread doesn't go anywhere.
I'm slowly, but surely plugging away at a project I've had in mind for a while. I've always loved retro action side-scrollers and, now that I'm putting myself through a professional education as an animator, I figured what better time than to get my spriting on?
The planned structure is pretty simple: 3-4 Playable characters with a mix of male and female. Ryona is absolutely not the main focus, but there juuust may be some elements in there. It was always a nice surprise of fan-service when you got some from old SEGA, DOS, and NES games, so that's the feel I'm going for here. Every element will be original pixel-art spriting. That's the easy part. What I may need help with would be the actual development and coding. I planned to use Game Maker 8.1 as it looks pretty simple. I'm just a little hesitant to go full bore into it, only to find out that some element I want to implement simply can't be done.
Basic premise:
Our characters are aboard a trans-Pacific airship travelling from the orient to west-coast United States. Think roughly 1920's-1930's era, including all tech such as the airship. (Hindenburg, except less on fire... mostly. At first.) The airship, as it is traveling over a remote, uncharted island, encounters multiple mysterious technical failures which result in it breaking up over the water and crashing into the island coast in flames (well, that didn't last long...). So far as the playable characters are concerned, only one will ever survive the initial crash (seemingly because the player is controlling them) and the rest will be seen either at the wreck site or possibly later encountered further into the game. There will be a small number of other survivors out of the original 30-40 passengers aboard the airship which will also be encountered around the island aaaaand promptly killed off in various ways. Your task is pretty simple: guide your character through the game in an effort to find some way to get off the island and back to civilization. (Hint: not going to be easy and may, for some characters, never actually be possible. Woo hoo! Multiple, character-dependent resolutions!)
-THIS FIRST POST WILL UNDERGO PERIODIC UPDATES AS FEATURES ARE ADDED. IMPLEMENTED, TWEAKED, OR REMOVED-
List of planned features:
* Character select screen
* Original chip-tune or SEGA-style MOD music
* Original chip or 16-bit sample sound effects.
* 3-4 Playable characters 2 female, 1-2 male with scattered, mixed male/female interactions around the game.
* Action side-scroller/platformer game-play with enemies and environmental hazards.
* Enemies will have mixed range of attack and kill animations.
* Environmental hazards will have mixed trigger and kill animations (such as arrows firing from a trap, triggered by a pressure plate; spike pit, flaring fire trap, lava, acid, water, etc.)
* Deaths will be punctuated (post-animation) by a dialogue with a graphic dedicated to that death and featuring black humor observations by the deceased character or from an unnamed, omnipotent narrator of sorts; similar to Monkey island or the best Sierra point-and-clicks.
* Character portraits featured in a portion of the on-screen GUI to display health status or be used in sparse dialogue situations. Their primary use will be similar to that of Doom or Get Medieval and various dungeon crawlers. (lower right, upper left. depending on the elements featured in said GUI)
* Damage and death animations will be fully animated pixel sprites.
* Players will be given up to 5 attempts at each level, life-counter style (think Mario and others) before 'Game Over' is declared; final death resulting in...
* Post-death dialogue graphics, which will be full-pixel art graphics. No cheating on my part with vector or Photoshop illustrations.
- No voices or realistic recorded sounds, UNLESS I can find decent voice-actors. It's a bit awkward when you have something that just sounds so terribly phoned in. I'm sorry, but I'm looking at you, Another Dimension (Allie Adventures). It took you a while to get an actress willing to do that kind of game, but she's really not all that great. :\ It also gets really awkward when you come across a game that seems to have pulled clips from a porno to serve as player sounds.
- Not planning on score, or items, but will keep track of physical status and health.
- Level-tracking saves. No checkpoints! The levels will be short enough and move fast enough that, hopefully, it won't be too frustrating. Think Jill of the Jungle, Vinyl Goddess From Mars, or Duke Nukem 1-3. Just like the old DOS days.
Ideas I'm considering, but may or may not make the cut:
# Letting the player fight back. Throwable weapon, melee weapon, projectile, found item?
# Tossing around the idea of an overworld, similar to Commander Keen.
# Death/damage animation gallery
# Death dialogue graphic viewer
# Concept art gallery
# Sound & Music player
Anyone out there able to offer assistance in any part of this, especially the workings of the game engine within Game Maker or even MM Fusion will be credited and much appreciated. I can not promise to be able to pay, but this is a labor of love for retro gaming on my part.
I have no time-frame for completion. Life tends to get in the way of 'labor of love' projects. HOWEVER(!) As proof that this isn't complete vaporware, these are a few sprites I've got made up for this project thus far. These took only about 2-ish days to throw together, so I don't foresee the individual sprites being an issue. Death and damage ones, maybe a bit. Movement, just tedious. Enemy movement and interaction... that'll be interesting and a bit of a pain if they don't implement in the game engine the way I expect them to. Anyway, enjoy!
(Portrait sprites have been blown up from 64x64 pixels to 256x256 to show detail and are roughly 1 1/2 - 1 2/3 the size they appear in full-screen mode in a GM game.)
All art assets are original and take forever to get right.
Hope I didn't just kill y'all's bandwidth. :X
Ultimately, this thread is just to get some exposure on this project to, hopefully, give me motivation to keep bashing away at it. On the off chance of any real interest, I invite you to PM me if you have any desire to get in on this! :D
Experienced GM 8.1 or MMFusion devs needed! Fellow spriters welcome!
-Ninja'd-
Started a Dev. Blog @ http://ut16sgame.blogspot.com/ where you can keep up with the project if this thread doesn't go anywhere.
I'm slowly, but surely plugging away at a project I've had in mind for a while. I've always loved retro action side-scrollers and, now that I'm putting myself through a professional education as an animator, I figured what better time than to get my spriting on?
The planned structure is pretty simple: 3-4 Playable characters with a mix of male and female. Ryona is absolutely not the main focus, but there juuust may be some elements in there. It was always a nice surprise of fan-service when you got some from old SEGA, DOS, and NES games, so that's the feel I'm going for here. Every element will be original pixel-art spriting. That's the easy part. What I may need help with would be the actual development and coding. I planned to use Game Maker 8.1 as it looks pretty simple. I'm just a little hesitant to go full bore into it, only to find out that some element I want to implement simply can't be done.
Basic premise:
Our characters are aboard a trans-Pacific airship travelling from the orient to west-coast United States. Think roughly 1920's-1930's era, including all tech such as the airship. (Hindenburg, except less on fire... mostly. At first.) The airship, as it is traveling over a remote, uncharted island, encounters multiple mysterious technical failures which result in it breaking up over the water and crashing into the island coast in flames (well, that didn't last long...). So far as the playable characters are concerned, only one will ever survive the initial crash (seemingly because the player is controlling them) and the rest will be seen either at the wreck site or possibly later encountered further into the game. There will be a small number of other survivors out of the original 30-40 passengers aboard the airship which will also be encountered around the island aaaaand promptly killed off in various ways. Your task is pretty simple: guide your character through the game in an effort to find some way to get off the island and back to civilization. (Hint: not going to be easy and may, for some characters, never actually be possible. Woo hoo! Multiple, character-dependent resolutions!)
-THIS FIRST POST WILL UNDERGO PERIODIC UPDATES AS FEATURES ARE ADDED. IMPLEMENTED, TWEAKED, OR REMOVED-
List of planned features:
* Character select screen
* Original chip-tune or SEGA-style MOD music
* Original chip or 16-bit sample sound effects.
* 3-4 Playable characters 2 female, 1-2 male with scattered, mixed male/female interactions around the game.
* Action side-scroller/platformer game-play with enemies and environmental hazards.
* Enemies will have mixed range of attack and kill animations.
* Environmental hazards will have mixed trigger and kill animations (such as arrows firing from a trap, triggered by a pressure plate; spike pit, flaring fire trap, lava, acid, water, etc.)
* Deaths will be punctuated (post-animation) by a dialogue with a graphic dedicated to that death and featuring black humor observations by the deceased character or from an unnamed, omnipotent narrator of sorts; similar to Monkey island or the best Sierra point-and-clicks.
* Character portraits featured in a portion of the on-screen GUI to display health status or be used in sparse dialogue situations. Their primary use will be similar to that of Doom or Get Medieval and various dungeon crawlers. (lower right, upper left. depending on the elements featured in said GUI)
* Damage and death animations will be fully animated pixel sprites.
* Players will be given up to 5 attempts at each level, life-counter style (think Mario and others) before 'Game Over' is declared; final death resulting in...
* Post-death dialogue graphics, which will be full-pixel art graphics. No cheating on my part with vector or Photoshop illustrations.
- No voices or realistic recorded sounds, UNLESS I can find decent voice-actors. It's a bit awkward when you have something that just sounds so terribly phoned in. I'm sorry, but I'm looking at you, Another Dimension (Allie Adventures). It took you a while to get an actress willing to do that kind of game, but she's really not all that great. :\ It also gets really awkward when you come across a game that seems to have pulled clips from a porno to serve as player sounds.
- Not planning on score, or items, but will keep track of physical status and health.
- Level-tracking saves. No checkpoints! The levels will be short enough and move fast enough that, hopefully, it won't be too frustrating. Think Jill of the Jungle, Vinyl Goddess From Mars, or Duke Nukem 1-3. Just like the old DOS days.
Ideas I'm considering, but may or may not make the cut:
# Letting the player fight back. Throwable weapon, melee weapon, projectile, found item?
# Tossing around the idea of an overworld, similar to Commander Keen.
# Death/damage animation gallery
# Death dialogue graphic viewer
# Concept art gallery
# Sound & Music player
Anyone out there able to offer assistance in any part of this, especially the workings of the game engine within Game Maker or even MM Fusion will be credited and much appreciated. I can not promise to be able to pay, but this is a labor of love for retro gaming on my part.
I have no time-frame for completion. Life tends to get in the way of 'labor of love' projects. HOWEVER(!) As proof that this isn't complete vaporware, these are a few sprites I've got made up for this project thus far. These took only about 2-ish days to throw together, so I don't foresee the individual sprites being an issue. Death and damage ones, maybe a bit. Movement, just tedious. Enemy movement and interaction... that'll be interesting and a bit of a pain if they don't implement in the game engine the way I expect them to. Anyway, enjoy!
(Portrait sprites have been blown up from 64x64 pixels to 256x256 to show detail and are roughly 1 1/2 - 1 2/3 the size they appear in full-screen mode in a GM game.)
All art assets are original and take forever to get right.
Hope I didn't just kill y'all's bandwidth. :X
Experienced GM 8.1 or MMFusion devs needed! Fellow spriters welcome!
Last edited by a moderator:
