YYG Comp06 and new blog!

Well, for now, The Halcyon Days has been paused to make way for a new project which will be entered in Competition 06 of YoYo Games.

The progress of the game along with the shiny new blog can be found here: http://iluvfuz.blogspot.com/

:)

2 hours down the drain.

After spending hours on trying to figure out .INI files for the first time (and with Blijbol's extension), I got it working to the point I can load and save data for:

- Music volume

- Sound effects volume

- Lite mode (preset lightweight mode that takes away the graphically intense features, i.e. lighting system, and stripes and numbers in the background of the menu (shown below.)

- Tac-Map (shows the minimap in-game)

- Fullscreen

Anyways, I perfected my beautiful menu so that there are numbers in the background, a nice synced sound effect, and a sweet OGG playing in the background. +1 for Super Sound System.

Here's me in all my--mostly--inanimate glory:

Here's the menu in all of its animated, musical, laggy glory (menu text, stripes, matrix of numbers, clouds, and airplanes in the background all move.):

Here's the awesome Options screen which gave me much pain to set up the global variables and .ini file for D:

Anyways, I don't know how much patience I'll have to turn my existing menu into a menu usable during the in-game Pause screen. I should keep working on the campaign, but methinks I'll finish the field manual first. :P

Op-op-optimization! And a minimap.

Well, I've decided to scrap the lighting engine...'s shadowing. This might take a minor or major punch out of the graphical aspect of The Halcyon Days, depending who you are, but hopefully this will allow me to use top-down physics along with fully destructible objects.

Along with the scrapping if the shadows, came a big speed burst, hovering at, mostly 30/30 FPS, and occasionally dipping down into 28/30.

So, seeing an opportunity, I added a memory hog minimap. Just because it looks cool. I don't think it's particularly useful, but it looks cool. I'll add a debug feature (and later a global game feature) to remove the minimap, or the tac-map. It'd be faster if I didn't draw the glow and the actual symbols separately, but since I did, the minimap looks that much better (the glow colors don't overlap the pure white.)

I'm also starting work on the first mission--a short gameplay segment following a to-be-made cinematic setting up the story. I'll have to work pretty hard with drawing and Photoshop'ing individual objects so that I can make it the style I want it to look like--a good balance between work and style.

Thanks for reading this update! I don't foresee many updates on The Halcyon Days' work being done in the near future because I'll be doing the grunt labor that neither you nor I care about. Hopefully I can release Chapter 1 and 2 and 3 (the Prologue cinematic, the "Ending the Feud" first mission and cutscene, and "Broken Treaty" second mission) to the public as a teaser demo. But after that, I want to push through and keep THD to myself until it's at its full stage.

Da Halsyon Daiz! Update on the planned campaign.

No, but I'm really excited to work on this game, The Halcyon Days, in my spare time (which, I assure you, is as scarce as it is spare.) I've come up with a decent plot involving an American-Russo-Afghan war, side changing/betrayal, (hopefully) dramatic scenes, and a nice, happy ending. All taking place in the not-too-distant future, 2015-2023. Which is mostly in justification in the modern weapons and my laziness to not want to think of anything futuristic.

[STORY]
After America loses all foreign support for their occupation in Afghanistan, they start an massive invasion to end it. As an economic (as, allegedly, political) ally, Russia will help defend Afghanistan. When the defense looks hopeless on Russia's end, they use two nuclear WMDs, breaking the arms treaty.

After Russia's killing of America's diplomat, war is mutually declared. Though Russia and Afghanistan first appear as the evil side, Russia will be betrayed by the WMD-hungry Afghanistan and be forced into a 1vs.1vs.1 war. The protagonist country will swap between America and Russia a bit, but never to Afghanistan, because, as we all know, those terrorists can never be the good guys D:

Also, the player will be playing as different players--sometimes as the main protagonist (American operative in Russia's Spetsnaz), a typical Russian Ground Force squad leader, or a typical Afghan commander.
[/STORY]

Anyways, I want too have some cool stuff, but in risk of looking too similar to MW2's singleplayer gimmicks, I'll just lessen them down. I want to have about 25% of the campaign as cutscenes, in comic book style--still images moving across a stage with voice narration. Mostly because it looks decent and doesn't take as much work as a B.A. cinematic.



Anyways, just posting to show my excitement to continue working on this now that I feel that my basic engine is done (all weapons: 3 guns, 1 RPG, 1 grenade, 1 knife). I think the longest part of making the campaign will be drawing, scanning, and turning them into little digital characters to move around the screen will be the hardest. And I'd use Vegas or After Effects to make the cutscenes had the high quality .mov or .avi or .mp4 files were not as fat as holy hell.

Updates!

Hi! Some more work has gone into The Halcyon Days. The most noticeable is probably the teammates, which are Roadrunner, Zeus, and Sidewinder. The player's name is currently Switchblade, but that can be changed later, the teammate codenames are pretty solid though.

I've also done some more graphical work. The sprites have been revamped to look incredibly smoother (no strange pixelation at the edges or colors), a new player sprite has been made, and ALL of the guns have their own image now. I personally like the RPG-72's image the most (shown below). If you think the player's too fat, he probably is, but I've had some comments that the previous player's uniform looked skin-tight, rather than loose and baggy as it should be.

Here's a screenshot from The Halcyon Days as it is at this exact moment:

Other than that, no biggish changes have been made. Health is starting to be implemented, but only explosions from grenades, RPGs, and barrels can damage you and your teammates right now.

By the way, Roadrunner has the SKL01 assault rifle, Zeus has a ML9 sniper rifle, and Sidewinder has a B5GT shotgun.

Thanks for reading!