That looks very nice game! Very well donePale Meridian (Working Title. New name needed)
- Action RPG in a massive world
- Seamless. No loading, no room transitions
- Three sided war. Your foes have more enemies than just you.
- Non-Linear. Dozens of small to medium choices and a few major choices
- Stealth or combat options
- Strong focus on diplomacy and social choices
- Full 1080p resolution with no forced upscaling
World Size
World Building
That bottom zoomed out portion is slightly less than 1% of the total surface terrain.
Day-Night CycleThe ingame editor that helps me drastically. Here it is in action.
All terrain transitions are automatic.
No room transitions? How will you go in houses?
If you like the game, I have a lonely twitter that would appreciate any follows. Any feedback welcome!
You have good tastes. =)The new forest obviously looks better than the low bush thing you had before but I now feel it lacks a theme. There should less different graphics but immerse you more into being a forest.
In that regarde, Secret of Mana still wins in the example you showed.
{c_cody1} Did you get the windmill mechanism yet?
[|cody_a2a] [?:0,1 == 3] Here it is. //COMPLETED
[|cody_a2b] [?:0,1 == 3] Yes, but I want a reward. //COMPLETED
[|cody_a2c] [?:0,1 == 5] It's broken beyond repair. //FAILED
[|cody_a2d] [?:0,1 < 3] I'm still looking. //ACTIVE
[|cody_a2e] [?:0,1 < 3] I can't help you with this anymore.} //ACTIVE
//[?:0,1 == 3] converts to: if array[0,1] == 3 {show this message}
var detail1 = (map_val & 4095);
var fore_val = (map_val >> 12)&1; //single bit
var roof_val = (map_val >> 13)&1023;
var detail2 = (map_val >> 23)&2047;
var zone_val = (map_val >> 34)&123; //for roofs
var anim_val = (map_val >> 35)&1; //singly bit
You're right that changing colors like this is going to look like crap compared to picking the colors yourself, but it'll still be a good tool to do quick color tests with. I'd be glad to take it! =)If anyone wants the stupid color dying thingy I can send it to you. It's very easy to use with any images you have laying around and it would make me feel better for wasting a few hours.
If you don't include any colors, I've found that you can get better results by colorizing the original sprite (if its greyscale) and applying it to itself in bm_add blend mode. Of course, I'm still tweaking a shader that can take in multiple color values and use them to adjust a greyscale image, letting different tonal ranges have their own color. For example: you might pass in a brighter/less saturated color for higher tonal ranges (0.65 and up) and more saturated mid-tone for the darker tonal ranges (0.35 and below), with notable shifts in among the three color values. Better contrast, less uniform color.Finally, here is a failed experiment.
I thought I could save a ton of time using the draw_sprite_color() functions and use a single gray-scale image for a dozen colors. Like instead of needing a red, blue, and green floor tile, I could just make a white tile and save the color overlay into the tile data. Like this:
So I made this cool demo thing that lets you highlight portions of an image and color it however you want.
And then I realized something. Colorized images don't look as good as actually drawing the image in color yourself. They look dyed and artificial. So that was a waste of time.
If anyone wants the stupid color dying thingy I can send it to you. It's very easy to use with any images you have laying around and it would make me feel better for wasting a few hours.
Thanks again for your comments!
WHAT?! NO NO NO!!@YanBG Boobs limited to 10 pixels are dang hard...
@CMAllen Thanks for taking the time to draw that out! As to the large hands and feet, it is a bit cartoon-ish, but the large hands are needed to not look super weird when holding a weapon. The large feet kind of even it out. Again, thanks for the drawing.
As to the colorizing thing, I've thought about using shaders but I'm not sure how heavy it is on the GPU to be constantly switching colors. In the end, I just decided it's easier to just draw the sprites myself.
@blackstrawhat @Necavare Thanks guys
@Felipe Rybakovas It's going to be an action RPG with an emphasis on story and NPC interactions. Also some fighting of course!
Okay, here is my "Update" if you can call it that. Pale Meridian is a pretty big game. I suspect I still have a year or two of development time and I'd like to be able to say I've finished something before 2020. After a lot of thinking I've decided to take a few months break from this game and work on a much smaller game.
I'd love to hear your comments on my new small game if your bored. Link:
https://forum.yoyogames.com/index.php?threads/sock-sock-goes-pop-pop-gifs.36711/
Thank you all for the support but for now, I guess Pale Meridian is:
What you need is a palette swap. then you can directly choose what colors are going to be swapped with what. no artificial looking tiles because the colors are hand picked... yet you can use the same art at the same time.@DividingByZero @lolslayer Cheers guys!
@iTzCallumUK
That's true about 8 quarters = 16 rocks, but the problem is getting 8 quarters to all fit together nicely. Even halves were a little tricky. Next, world data a is buffer that is written to a file. There is also a ds_map that holds lots of the special details as partially explained below. Thanks for the comment!
PSA: DON'T USE PHOTOBUCKET FOR AN IMAGE HOST. They want money now so many of the images in this thread are messed up... Sorry about that.
ART TIME
Many of the older house/interior sprites were brown and pretty bland. Since much of the art will be re-used I need a lot of variety and details to keep each house interesting and somewhat unique. The old style was so boring there wasn't any visual appeal to exploring houses. Here is an old vs new:
My aim was to make houses look more cozy and lived in.
TECH TIME
Please direct your gaze at the image below and notice there are now actually 4 layers on some tiles.
The 4 layers are needed for all the extra details in the houses. All of the details (Minus ground tile) gets crammed into a single ds_map value. Here is how the binary parsing looks:
That means the max value can be 68,719,476,735 (2^36 - 1). Be aware that numbers that large make the decimals disappear.Code:var detail1 = (map_val & 4095); var fore_val = (map_val >> 12)&1; //single bit var roof_val = (map_val >> 13)&1023; var detail2 = (map_val >> 23)&2047; var zone_val = (map_val >> 34)&123; //for roofs var anim_val = (map_val >> 35)&1; //singly bit
Just an FYI, The maximum stable INTEGER in native GM numbers is 18,014,398,509,481,983 (2^54 - 1). If you go any higher than that the math gets really weird. Like if you add 10 it will only add 8 in reality. Just to be safe I wouldn't go higher than 2^52 without using int64(). But I still have some leeway if I need more digits
Finally, here is a failed experiment.
I thought I could save a ton of time using the draw_sprite_color() functions and use a single gray-scale image for a dozen colors. Like instead of needing a red, blue, and green floor tile, I could just make a white tile and save the color overlay into the tile data. Like this:
So I made this cool demo thing that lets you highlight portions of an image and color it however you want.
And then I realized something. Colorized images don't look as good as actually drawing the image in color yourself. They look dyed and artificial. So that was a waste of time.
If anyone wants the stupid color dying thingy I can send it to you. It's very easy to use with any images you have laying around and it would make me feel better for wasting a few hours.
Thanks again for your comments!
LMAO, ing what???Is this game still under development? If not, how much would it cost to pay for the code, to work on in my time, and have you in the credits? I'm willing to pay upwards of $300
Maybe because games take time to make? Or they has other obligations outside of just this project?Especially seeing as the latest update was over a year ago.