Topic: CASTLEVANIA BRAWLER

[X]

What about using the Beats of Rage engine? I've played many a good home brew beat 'em ups with that.

[Lelygax]

I've lready said about that too, some people aready did CV in openBOR, I never tried to use it but I have seen great games that have been made with it. The bad part is that it doesnt support online.

And thanks for the help uzo, if I return to this project someday it will be useful to me.

[TheCruelAngel]

Oh, you guys were talking about hacking an existing engine and using it as the base for a brawler?

I'm so used to the idea of building game engines from scratch now that the idea hadn't crossed my mind to use an existing engine.  Well then! That's a bit of a relief and kind of a let down at the same time. Regardless of all that, I think Lelygax is right thinking online/LAN support would be nice (since we all could play together!) for something like this project. I think XNA has easy libraries that can be used to implement online/LAN support (I don't really know for sure since I've never used XNA, but I hear good things).

[Lelygax]

I know that MMF and GM can make online games, Adobe Flash and Java can do it too (see Dofus and RuneScape), also this new thing called Unity can even do 3D online games.

[uzo]

Honestly the typical Castlevania sprites wouldn't be well suited for this. If you really want a proper and well designed adaptation, you'd need to have completely new sprites with combos for the whip and such.

That said, you could be pretty diversified. Take Castlevania The Arcade for example. Have different types of characters. One Belmont type, one mage type, one perhaps traditional hunter (like Vincent from CV64), one firearms hunter (depending on the time period), one pirate hunter, Alucard style hunter, etc.

I would recommend 3 characters total. 4 at most. You could even do a Dracula's Curse adaptation, given it's diverse array of characters. I think some original characters would be nice though.

[TheCruelAngel]

Yeah, I was thinking a lot would have to be built from scratch, and at that point, why not the engine too?

I think initially starting with 4 unique characters (as in doesn't exist in previous CV iterations) is a way to take things with unlockable throwbacks to other CV characters (I imagine Cornell would be fun, mandatory Simon, and probably Alucard). However, the most at the same time would be 4 players on screen (easier to balance difficulty, scale, etc.).

I mean, we could do a CVIII adaption, but that seems too easy (come on, let's challenge ourselves here peeps!) and limits what characters we can use and the environments (face it, fans here would rip us apart if we were 100% faithful to the original source material).

With a unique time period, unique setting and unique characters we'll be able to express ourselves, ideas and creativity more easily without being chased down by angry mobs. Thoughts?

Oh, and definitely need a Belmont type character (hell we can explore that 400 year span between LoI and CVIII and use a real Belmont no one's heard of yet), and vampires! 

[uzo]

I didn't endorsed nor scorned the use of an existing engine. I always promote doing them yourselves really. However, I realize no one here is capable of it, so I didn't bother harping on it.

A basic one could be done in MMF, but as far as a really good or unique one, you'll need to go it alone and make your own engine.