Ultima is the one role-playing game where you start in the present world and then travel into a fantasy parallel world of Britannia, usually via a portal. Here’s a nice video (from RetroHD) of the last game in the Ultima series, Ultima 9 -- Ascension which introduces the beginning of the game.

This guide explains how to set up a Flash and Flex development environment with Eclipse, FDT, Flash Builder and a couple of other editors that you want for ActionScript coding and Flash development with style! This guide is based on Windows because that’s what I’m using but I’m sure you Mac and Linux guys can figure out the parts that differ on your OS! Let’s get started …

>> Continue reading "Setting up the Ultimate Flash Development Environment"

In Fighting Force you play the role of one ruffian (or ruffine) who is hired to intrude the premises of a certain villain named Zeng with the goal to eliminate him.  So much for the story!

The graphics are of the typical early era PSX low-poly style but the environments that act as staging grounds for the rumble work surprisingly well. The gameplay is fun for a couple of rounds. You have a set of attack moves and combos available and you are able to pick up stuff from the ground like weapons, sandwiches, coke cans as well as bundles of dollar bills and even gold bars! Some items like cars, vending machines and trash cans can be destroyed to spawn makeshift weapons like metal bars that help dispatching bad guys quicker.

But the one feature that makes Fighting Force worth mentioning is the soundtrack by Martin Iveson. A well shuffled mixture of Electro and Techno beats blended perfectly together with filtered guitar riffs, fat bass lines and police sirens, sometimes uptempo and other times  subtle and atmospheric. This is one of those soundtracks that has a very personal note and stands on its own among the deluge of orchestral mass ware and prefab sound loops often found in games today.

There has been a lot of hype around the release of Mass Effect 2 some weeks back and some people already start claiming that this game is going to be the Future of RPGs. Rampant Coyote took a stance and so did The Brainy Gamer. Being an old hand RPGer and having played Mass Effect 1 to the end and started playing part 2 I feel I need to have my say to the hype around that game.

>> Continue reading "Mass Effect 2: The Future of RPGs? Oh really?"

However the demo already shows some of the special features of the tile engine. It’s a blitted multi-layer engine which supports animated tiles (but it doesn’t use MovieClips or Sprites for this but animated Bitmap tiles). The demo shows two layers, one as a backdrop and the other with the maze on it. Additionally layers can use layer effects like the second layer here uses a drop shadow filter which is also defined in the tilemap file.

The engine tries to be resource friendly. If there is nothing to update it will not waste render cycles. E.g. if you move to any area without animated tiles on the screen the engine will shortly after start to consume less CPU.

(Please open the article to view the Flash media.)

Quite a list of features is still planned to be implemented, for example map-wrapping (to create endless maps), auto-scrolling and support for hexagonal as well as isometric tiles has already been started before but these implementations are going to be completely overhauled.

If you’re interested in having a look at the engine’s tileset and tilemap data files, they can be found here.

© 2010 H1DD3N.R350URC3. | Permalink | No comments yet | Tags: Blitting, Flash, Lab, Scrolling, SWF, Tile Engine, WIP | Add to del.icio.us]]> http://blog.hexagonstar.com/lab-hexagon-tile-engine/feed/ 0 http://blog.hexagonstar.com/swfm-with-tandy-sound/ http://blog.hexagonstar.com/swfm-with-tandy-sound/#comments Tue, 09 Feb 2010 11:16:34 +0000 sascha http://blog.hexagonstar.com/?p=1508 Today’s video pick (yeah right, as if I had a new post everyday here) is from YouTube user Five5Six and about how he managed to get Sentinel Worlds 1: Future Magic to run on DOSBox with Tandy sound enabled. That’s right, Tandy sound! By default the game uses those bleepy PC speaker sounds as in my own video. Personally I haven’t yet figured out how to get Tandy sound working with this game, so there … a video with the marvelous Tandy-enabled sound of SW1:FM in all it’s glory …

© 2010 H1DD3N.R350URC3. | Permalink | No comments yet | Tags: DOS, Game Music, Nostalgia, RPG, Sci-Fi, Tandy, Video | Add to del.icio.us]]> http://blog.hexagonstar.com/swfm-with-tandy-sound/feed/ 0 http://blog.hexagonstar.com/sword-of-fargoal-for-iphone/ http://blog.hexagonstar.com/sword-of-fargoal-for-iphone/#comments Sun, 13 Dec 2009 03:52:52 +0000 sascha http://blog.hexagonstar.com/?p=1460 The classic dungeon crawler Sword of Fargoal has been released for the iPhone and it turns out that it’s one of the few computer/console-game-to-iPhone conversions I’ve came across that are actually fun to play on the touch-screen (unlike, say, Sonic, Bomberman et al). Go check it out if you’re into RPGs with an ever-changing maze-like dungeon accompanied by nicely done atmospheric music and sound effects.

Official Sword of Fargoal Website

While doing contract work for the Dark Brotherhood you are being sent to attend a party where the guests are invited to search for a treasure that is supposed to be hidden in a house in that they are going to be locked in, except that there is no treasure and you are not one of the treasure hunters but an assassin hired by the house owner to kill all the other guests. Can a quest be more macabre and fun than this?!

The Whodunit quest which you are being assigned to in the latter part of the Dark Brotherhood guild quest series was somehow the highlight of it all for me. Not only combined it the cozy whodunit mystery with a medieval fantasy setting but it put you in the role of the killer instead of the detective. What made this quest so gleefully entertaining wasn’t the fact that you are the perpetrator but the way how you could manipulate the characters and watch how they became more and more terrified after somebody crossed the bar. There are several different ways how the NPC’s react which is especially interesting in the end when only three or two are left, even if eventually the quest concludes always in the same outcome.

Future Magic was first released for DOS and a port for the C64 was published later which looked almost equally good as the DOS version with excellent graphics done by Michael Kosaka. At times the game is quite bizarre. For example there is a planet with ranchers and farms just like in an old western. Another planet has two very high towers that reach into the orbit and these are the only colonies on the otherwise untouched surface. On another, icy planet you scout an abandoned research base which is overrun by saber-toothed creatures … but this is how the games were made in the golden age of RPG. Despite the number in the title a follower was never developed for Future Magic but instead the acclaimed Hard Nova served as a spiritual sequel.

The game let’s you control a group of five space mercs who are send out on a mission to stop mysteriously appearing raiders which are attacking ships in the local system. Right after your ships drops out of hyperspeed you are being attacked by them. However while the other ships of the space convoy with that you came are trying to fight them you are able to take some distance and locate a yacht floating in nearby space. It’s the space yacht of a tycoon named Grager which turns out to be a luxurious vessel full with the newest technology.

In the last part I’ve introduced the character design template I’m using and mentioned to post a character example next time which I’m doing hereby while introducing you to Eliza Retinienne, a Gessjanian security systems expert from the planet Shielle, a small world bordering on the fringe of the Suulun Sector which in turn stretches over a large area of the southern galaxy.

Eliza is one of the key characters in the game’s story and one of the characters whom the player is supposed to encounter and who eventually joins the player’s party. She is also supposed to receive her own side-quest in which the player can engage to help her out of the threatening situation she is currently in.

Note that this sheet is basically just here to give an example of how the character design template can be used to shape out a character so I suggest not to look too critically into the details. Things can (and will) still change and also the sheet is not filled out completely, for one reason because some details are irrelevant for this character and for another that I haven’t found any other suitable details for her yet. Either way I hope this gives a good example of how to utilize the template!

>> Continue reading "RPG Design: Character Development Example"

Later in the game the SAS unit around Captain Price is moving forward to the missile base deeply hidden in the Altay Mountains in Russia when suddenly two ICBMs are being launched in close vicinity. This is one of those “I cant believe this just happened!!”-moments in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.

The two games are very atmospheric and full of 60ties flair, concealed spy gadgets, exotic locations, fast-paced action, insanely dangerous situations  and spiked with a good dose of humor. Gladly they don’t take themselves too serious unlike some other games of the genre.

In this video Cate Archer and a ninja named Isako (who is - rather unwillingly -- one of the villains henchmen) are fighting it out in ‘No One Lives Forever 2‘ in an impossible showdown taking place in a trailer home which is being hurled away by an approaching tornado and somehow both are getting out of it alive.

(All work done in REAPER. Instruments used: Synth1, V-Station, minimonsta, Nexus, MOTU BPM for drums.)

With a standard keyboard we lefties actually have a  slight advantage over right-handers when it comes to playing First-Person-Shooters or third-person-view games since we have a nicely separated block of keys that we can use for controls with the right hand where right-handers would need to use some obnoxious key layouts in the depths of the left side of their keyboard, in particular the notorious WASD keys.

>> Continue reading "For less Left-Hander Discrimination in Gaming!"

Realms of Arkania is classic hardcore role-playing, flip3D style intermezzed with isometric combat screens and you can get this for a ridiculous cheap price now.

So far gog.com is only releasing DOS or Windows based games. For some games I wish they’d add Amiga games to their line-up simply because many Amiga games were better than their DOS conversions, just take a look at highly regarded Hired Guns. in case of Hired Guns you feel that the developers were a team of Amiga enthusiasts. The DOS version feels bland and rushed compared to the shiny and atmosphere-oozing Amiga version.

Either way, for DOS games Good Old Games are packing their releases up with a copy of DOSBox pre-configured and ready to install and run. For Amiga versions they would probably have to pack up a copy of WinUAE to assure a hassle-free experience. Not sure how that would work out.

Aah, back to the game design topic! The thing I love most about game design is that you can create worlds full of life, intricacy, intrigue and interesting characters, experimenting with scenarios and situations (that would otherwise probably have negative  repercussions in RL™).

As a programmer you’d ever only write your code and if you are happy with it that’s fine but we one-man-game-developer types are more like Jack of all trades who want to create complete worlds … and stories. And then tell those stories by means of the game. And maybe throw a bit (or a large chunk) of dynamics in there again … as programmers.

One extremely satisfying aspect of game design (for games where narrative is important) is the development of characters that should act throughout the game. Creating characters is just as much fun as the other bases! If you do it right and create deep and sympathetic characters people will love them.

And even villains can be sympathetic. In fact they should be! Who likes an antagonist that is completely unsympathetic? Nobody, right? But why should you even like a villain, after all he’s the guy who needs to be defeated? The answer to this is that the guy who is the villain is so only in the context of our story. Maybe he’s not so bad after all in a different context. Or in short: Antagonists also have a life, feelings … but guess what? Now I totally digress! I actually wanted to show you my new and all fresh character template that I came up with to shape out characters for my game.

>> Continue reading "RPG Design: Character Development"

I could go on and make this project an oldschool-style game with 2D graphics like some other indie devs are doing but I feel that going 3D would be the best bet to convey atmosphere and tactical gameplay at the same time (you could use switchable first-person and third-person views). This makes me think if ActionScript is actually sufficient for this but the experience of some of my recent coding tests with Away3D which already start to bog down the CPU with a few hundred polygons on the screen tend to say “no!” to my ambitious plans.

Since this is a desktop game my platform choice is AIR which offers more freedom that the Web Player but there are still many let-downs that make you grind your teeth …

>> Continue reading "Flash for big Games?"

But after we finished bouncing off the intruders and I’ve started a dialogue with him it turned out that he’s not such a gentleman after all. In nearly every second sentence in his dialogue he makes use of the notorious ‘F word’! No exaggeration! After a short while listening to his insults (calling me a moron several times) I got fed up of his overuse of nasty language and started to loathe this guy. Note that it turns out that he’s supposed to be an unlikable character but this could have also been very well transported without the overuse of bad language. … *Spoilers ahead*!

>> Continue reading "Bad Language in Games"

I’ve been designing on a rather ambitious Role-Playing game project since a while now (in fact quite a long while but I’m not in hurry to finish it anytime soon) and while I’m in the process of working out the story, technical details like the combat mechanics, skill system etc. and creating interesting characters I still haven’t made a decision on the type of graphical projection for the game so far. I’ve been thinking about five kinds of projection from the most basic one (2D orthographic) up to full dynamic 3D which would be quite an effort. As my development platform of choice happens to be Flash, the resources in terms of 3D are limited.

So with that in mind I thought it would be good opportunity to introduce some of the most-used projections in computer and video role-playing games to get to know them a little better. This is by no means a complete list of all sorts of projection used in games but I believe these the ones most commonly used for role-playing games.

>> Continue reading "RPG Design: Choosing the right Graphical Projection"