Topic: NES-Style Castlevania Belmont Engine for GameMaker! (Version 0.3 UPDATE!)

[OdenAndEvil]

way to go! Coming out a castlevania 4 homebrew for nes?

[Inccubus]

That would essentially be a demake of a remake. LOL ^__^
I'm sorta doing that with my "Castlevania: The Demon Castle" retro game, but I'm combining all the stage elements from all 4 distinct remakes of CV1. And, yes, I'm planning on including the features of the games too which really just amounts to adding those from SCV4 + sub-weapons from the other games. It'll get done way faster with TheouAegis' engine under the hood too. ^__^

Although, I imagine all sorts of interesting things could come out of this engine once it's done. I always wanted to make a version of CV2 with a standard CV1/CV3 engine. I suppose I could have just hacked CV3, but I didn't ever feel like dealing with ASM. A remake of Castlevania Quest with a more retro feel might be nice. Not to mention a version of Dracula's Shadow with better graphics would be nice. no offense to the creator of said game, but the Belmonts in it look like they were put through the devil's meat grinder along with a box of ugly sticks after having been beaten to death with same said sticks. Hell, I'd even want to make an upgrade to CV3 with all the censored content and a better Alucard and a magic system. The possibilities are endless, though. Brand new retro style CV titles could be made just as easily as de-makes of existing games. Could you imagine a kick ass retro/-ish 1999 game made by us, the fans? Or how about de-make of SotN with classic Alucard?

[TheouAegis]

Jorges, do you have GM8?
Although it shouldn't matter cuz the first room in the demo only has a room_goto or whatever. ... Which I don't think uses any code new to GM8. I'll check on it.

[Inccubus]

I'm using GM8 and I had no issues.

[Jorge D. Fuentes]

I have Game Maker 8, yes.

[TheouAegis]

If at first you don't succeed, try try try again? Don't know what else to say.

My creativity is waning this week. Having issues programming quickly and well. For some reason the code for my bat was causing serious bugs. I think controllers are object-based, so I'm going to build it as such. As in, if the controller object is within the view, create a bat or Medusa head at the edge of the screen. And then I get sleepy and put the whole project on hold for the day. 

[Inccubus]

That sounds about right. I think I'm gonna start tinkering with creating enemies for your engine. If you'd like I can send their resource files to you as I go along.

Edit: Found another bug. Rapid button presses seem to launch up to 2 of the current weapon during one animation sequence.

[TheouAegis]

I'll look into that. ... Just how rapid?

There were actually quite a few attack bugs in that which i've been trying to work out. And this week had some weird bug where if the visual fx was miscoded in whip by improperly tagging a variable, rather than getting an uninitialized variable error, the entire conditional would be ignored regardless if there was any other code inside the conditional. Once I gave the variable the proper address, everything went back to normal. Well, almost everything. I did something to the enemy parent to stop the skeleton from pacing properly (I think I added a faulty conditional).

And I think I still have a bug where getting hit inside a ledge causes Trevor to get stuck inside the ledge (he can jump out, but that shouldn't be happening at all), which to date has been my biggest headache. I resized Trevor's bounding box back down to his eyes to prevent him from being hit by enemies above him. However, such collisions did in fact occur in CV3 with some enemies, so I will need to definitely solve the in-ledge collision bug.

Wait until I release v0.02 tonight (probably around 9pm Pacific Standard Time), since the enemy parent has been coded and has much more control over enemies than in my first release. ... You'll also see how slow I've been to code lately. It has a few major bug fixes, a nearly-complete Bat and Bat Controller (untested), an incomplete Medusa Head and Medusa Head Controller (both untested), and a few miscellaneous fixes such as some conditional branching to hopefully ease off on memory requirements. Oh, and the chain whip works now too.

[Inccubus]

Sounds like you've been busy. The sub-weapon things seems to happen if you tap the key pretty fast.
I just upgraded to GM8.1, is that what you're using or do you still have 8.0?

[TheouAegis]

I'm using 8.0. I've read there are some issues with 8.1 that I don't want to deal with.

I fixed the relic attack bug. At first i thought it was item_multi doing what it was supposed to, but then I set item_multi=0 (was originally 2) and the bug was still there, so I tweaked the code to prevent that and to also slow down the rate between throwing and whipping, since in the initial release you could throw a dagger then immediately whip (now there is a slight delay based on Trevor's sprite, didn't waste any alarms).

Fixed a couple other bugs, that's why it hasn't been released by 9pm like I said. I had added an extra function to line_collide() but forgot to use it, so Trevor getting hit caused lots of bugs. Fixed that, though. And now for some damn reason, I had fixed enemies not dying by whip, but once again they don't die by whip and now the whip hit effect is executed twice. I'm glad I caught that double-hit bug now, since that will be important when I get to making armored knights and bosses, but I don't know why enemies won't die by whip anymore. The code is nearly identical to relic collision code and that works just fine. So it will be a couple more hours until I release it. When I finally do, take a look through the prt_enemy object, since all non-boss enemies will use that, ideally.

[Inccubus]

Sounds like a plan. I'll be waiting to check it out.

[darkmanx_429]

Does anyone have a thread for experience with Multimedia Fusion 2?

[Aridale]

I tried messin with MMF once... it looked more like it was for power point than makin games. Dunno how ppl have managed to make full games with it

[TheouAegis]

Version 0.02 has been uploaded. The link has been updated in the first post, but here it is also:

Castlevania Engine 0.02a

Bats and Medusa heads work pretty much as they're supposed to. I still have to work out the deactivation area for the controllers. There is an empty parent object prt_enemy_pacer, which simply calls prt_enemy, so I may remove it in later versions depending on how I decide to handle deactivations. I have to do some more measurements of the source material. No significant changes are planned for prt_enemy object, but some variables may become obsolete in later versions, but if that happens it will be easy to compensate for the missing variables, so don't worry too much about that.

You'll also notice that I started using fractional movement in the timelines. The thing to remember is the smaller step goes first. So for example, if an enemy moves: [2,2,1,2,2,2,1,2,1,1,2], the correct translation would be [2,2,7/4,3/2,4/3] ... I think. You'd have to test it in slow motion. I try to avoid counting more than 3 steps.

[Jorge D. Fuentes]

I still only get a rectangular box, with no gameplay to speak of.
See enclosed pic.