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The Castlevania Dungeon Forums => Fan Stuff => Topic started by: Dracula9 on April 01, 2011, 07:39:00 AM

Title: Another fangame-Adagio of Decay
Post by: Dracula9 on April 01, 2011, 07:39:00 AM
Project I've had going for about three years now. Spoiler tags because of lots of screenshots.
I'm not really sure what else I should say. :/

(click to show/hide)
Title: Re: Another fangame-Adagio of Decay
Post by: TheouAegis on April 01, 2011, 04:26:37 PM
Graphics look nice. Is this in Game Maker or some other program? Are your stairs NES style or SOTN style? If you want NES style stairs, I created working ones for Game Maker.
Title: Re: Another fangame-Adagio of Decay
Post by: X on April 01, 2011, 05:52:09 PM
Sweet! Love the screens! What exactly is the game about?

-X
Title: Re: Another fangame-Adagio of Decay
Post by: thernz on April 01, 2011, 07:05:13 PM
What happened to Richter-san?
Title: Re: Another fangame-Adagio of Decay
Post by: Dracula9 on April 01, 2011, 07:55:20 PM
I had to remake the engine, thernz. Chris is just placeholder. I'll probably use Chronicles Simon or a customized edit of him.

The storyline's that of Alec_Morris' abandoned "Chapel-wide" fangame, which is Dracula being betrayed by Death to awaken the Devil God Ahriman. I'm making some changes, but it's something along that line.
Title: Re: Another fangame-Adagio of Decay
Post by: Vampire Killer on April 02, 2011, 02:02:47 AM
Quote from: Dracula9 on April 01, 2011, 07:55:20 PM
I had to remake the engine, thernz. Chris is just placeholder. I'll probably use Chronicles Simon or a customized edit of him.

The storyline's that of Alec_Morris' abandoned "Chapel-wide" fangame, which is Dracula being betrayed by Death to awaken the Devil God Ahriman. I'm making some changes, but it's something along that line.

So are you going to be playing as Dracula?

Game looks awesome btw. Is Game Maker easy to work with?
Title: Re: Another fangame-Adagio of Decay
Post by: Aridale on April 02, 2011, 10:14:31 AM
Quote from: Vampire Killer on April 02, 2011, 02:02:47 AM
Is Game Maker easy to work with?

Not really. lol Its not bad tho. But if youve never used it before skip the drag and drop options entirely and go straight into learning and using the scripting language. Its quite good for 2d then and the extensions you can use with a pro version are helpful too
Title: Re: Another fangame-Adagio of Decay
Post by: Vampire Killer on April 02, 2011, 02:15:12 PM
Would if someone would make a program made for creating 2D games alone, but technically required no programing.  Just allowed you to set variables, make animations, set collisions and hit boxes, ect...
Title: Re: Another fangame-Adagio of Decay
Post by: Jorge D. Fuentes on April 02, 2011, 02:15:50 PM
That sounds like GameMaker to me.
Title: Re: Another fangame-Adagio of Decay
Post by: Kale on April 02, 2011, 03:25:11 PM
http://www.scirra.com/ (http://www.scirra.com/)

Construct is a drag and drop gm app. Though I think you can add in scripts as well, if you need. Seems like they're making a retail version. But the base version is free and open source.
Title: Re: Another fangame-Adagio of Decay
Post by: thernz on April 02, 2011, 03:37:55 PM
yeah Game Maker and Construct would both be considered really easy if compared relatively to other game development tools so I would go with those if you're interested.
Title: Re: Another fangame-Adagio of Decay
Post by: Dracula9 on April 08, 2011, 02:56:55 PM
New test video up. Cemetery stage, first block.

Adagio of Decay Updated Trailer (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mvEm46_snk#)
Title: Re: Another fangame-Adagio of Decay
Post by: X on April 08, 2011, 07:40:48 PM
Very nice demo. The only detail that doesn't seem right is that the flame whip power-up doesn't last all that long like it does in the other games. To me it's like ReBirth rather then Adventure, Belmonts revenge or even Legends.

-X
Title: Re: Another fangame-Adagio of Decay
Post by: Profbeanburrito on April 10, 2011, 11:06:32 AM
This looks great. One of the best fan games ive seen and I love the use of the Christopher Belmont sprite. Can't wait to see the finished product
Title: Re: Another fangame-Adagio of Decay
Post by: Viper on April 10, 2011, 07:07:30 PM
It's funny to see, how every fan castlevania game, including my own, uses the very same Demon's Crest backgrounds.  ;D
Title: Re: Another fangame-Adagio of Decay
Post by: X on April 10, 2011, 09:52:25 PM
they have those Demon crest backgrounds at the spriter's resource. They are very impressive to look at.

-X
Title: Re: Another fangame-Adagio of Decay
Post by: Dracula9 on April 11, 2011, 06:00:43 AM
This is quite true. But I use ZSNES's wonderful layer-removal and screenshot functions to get them.
Quote from: X on April 08, 2011, 07:40:48 PM
Very nice demo. The only detail that doesn't seem right is that the flame whip power-up doesn't last all that long like it does in the other games. To me it's like ReBirth rather then Adventure, Belmonts revenge or even Legends.

Yup. That's what I'm doing. The thing's too overpowered to have for potentially the entire game. Leather whip has a damage variable of 1, the morning star has 2, and the flame whip has 3 for the whip itself and another 2 for the fireball. So overall, the flame whip has a damage variable of 5. Way too strong to be permanent.
Title: Re: Another fangame-Adagio of Decay
Post by: X on April 11, 2011, 11:57:22 AM
And what's wrong with that? He's a Belmont. He's supposed to be powered to the max in order to kick Drac's @$$. But you know, you could stick in difficulty settings; Say easy mode lets you keep the upgrade while in normal mode it has the aforementioned time limitation. And hard mode you don't get the upgrade at all. Food for thought  :)

-X
Title: Re: Another fangame-Adagio of Decay
Post by: uzo on April 11, 2011, 08:52:59 PM
Can't believe I'm saying this but, that's pretty good. You've come a long way from last year.

Here's some things to improve on:
The backgrounds are a mish mash of different games. I know most people don't do their own backgrounds since it takes work, but it really does stunt the coolness.

Selective highlighting fiasco with the backgrounds; What is selective lighting? Highlighting things to bring the player's attention and infer interactivity types. Example: the floor is highlighted brighter than things you can't stand on. This gives the player a natural visual indicator of "you can land on this". The tops of the gravestones/coffins/whatever in the background that you can stand on, are not highlighted and dont look like you can stand on them. While there is sloped ground you CAN'T stand on in the background, that has the SAME highlight as the dirt background you CAN stand on. Keeping this consistent is the key for fluid and intuitive level design. If you don't fix it, the player will pause to think "can I actually land here or not? Should I risk it?" at times which breaks the flow and confuses the player where he/she should not be confused.

Other than that the mixed sprite styles, but given that Adventure ReBirth reused GBA sprites I can let it go since you're using Chris.

Things I'd like to see:
Dropping off of, and landing onto stairs. CV4 style.

Quote from: X on April 11, 2011, 11:57:22 AM
And hard mode you don't get the upgrade at all.

NO. Removing functionality like that only serves to drag things out and create a more tedious experience.

If you want good difficulty, reduce lags between actions of the AI, speed up some enemies, etc. But never remove a basic function like that completely.

I'm personally in favor of keeping the fire balls until you get hit once.
Title: Re: Another fangame-Adagio of Decay
Post by: thernz on April 11, 2011, 09:41:10 PM
Yeah for difficulty I would aim for different enemy placement or different new enemy patterns, rather than something cheap like stunting a player's own ability and moveset. Plus, yeah your stuff's looking more polished and polished. There still seems to be some irks in level design with those spawning zombies, but it's a lot better than your older stuff.
Title: Re: Another fangame-Adagio of Decay
Post by: Dracula9 on April 12, 2011, 09:33:43 AM
Quote from: uzo
Things I'd like to see:
Dropping off of, and landing onto stairs. CV4 style.

I've been trying to do this for a while. It's coming along rather slowly, but it is coming along.

Quote from: uzo
Selective highlighting fiasco with the backgrounds

Thanks for this, I'll get right on fixing it.

Quote from: uzo
NO. Removing functionality like that only serves to drag things out and create a more tedious experience.

If you want good difficulty, reduce lags between actions of the AI, speed up some enemies, etc. But never remove a basic function like that completely.

This is exactly what the difficulty settings are coded to do. The difficulty variables change the speed and "rate-of-fire" variables in the enemies.

The flame whip is staying as-is. I think it'd be unfair to keep it for near-limitless time. Think about it. Whip at an enemy, normal or boss, it doesn't matter, with just the tip of the whip hitting the enemy, you're hitting them twice for three to five damage per hit. That's anywhere from six to ten hits of damage in one attack. It's cheap and easily spammable if a set distance is kept. It eliminates any chance of a challenge, since all you really have to do is hit the boss three or four times and they're dead.
Title: Re: Another fangame-Adagio of Decay
Post by: darkmanx_429 on May 19, 2011, 07:01:06 PM
Very impressive work seeing how it's only the beginning of the project! The only thing I can suggest is to add seperate parallex to more scenes in background.

Quote from: thernz on April 02, 2011, 03:37:55 PM
yeah Game Maker and Construct would both be considered really easy if compared relatively to other game development tools so I would go with those if you're interested.

Wish I knew about Construct before me an my partner shelled out 80 bucks (student discount) for our full copies of Multimedia Fusion 2 to make our game with! lol

http://castlevaniadungeon.net/forums/index.php?topic=3623.0 (http://castlevaniadungeon.net/forums/index.php?topic=3623.0)
Title: Re: Another fangame-Adagio of Decay
Post by: Dracula9 on May 26, 2011, 06:30:46 AM
It isn't the beginning of the project, I've had this going on and off for about two years or so.  :)
Title: Re: Another fangame-Adagio of Decay
Post by: Inccubus on May 26, 2011, 03:38:09 PM
That's cause Demon's Crest's graphics fit CV so well, it was the closest thing Capcom ever made to a CV title.