[codeugly]

OK, at one point I had a joint project loosely prepared for this, but my friend is pretty busy and we haven't been able to connect, so I threw something together this morning. It is pretty lengthy, I just started writing and at this point I like it enough to go with. And this project is going to look pretty bad and is mac only at this time. :( I am trying to build an engine/api, and I haven't had a lot of time.

The goal is to eventually capture a bit of the feel of Interplay's old Lord of the Rings, while trying to fuse some Wiz7 and RTS elements in with it. Will it come up short? Absolutely, but it should be fun to try.

I will post the stories in a second and third post, but alternate history is based around stone hinge, and what alternately happened there that has shaped this present reality.
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[codeugly]

The Gateway Circle

Of all the underground witch trials in England, only one young girl ever floated the pond in chains. She was an outsider who the villagers grew suspicious of, and without ever learning her name they through her before the mob and demanded justice. The weary self proclaimed judge demanded she be immediately chained and thrown into the pond. But to even his own amazement, this girl did not sink, and the waters began to shimmer. Minutes passed like seconds as everyone watched in amazement, until and unfamiliar shout "burn the witch" , was shrieked from the crowd. The still bewildered judge no longer bearing the hate in his heart was still too fearful not to feed the monster he had created. So to appease the mob, he ordered her burning.

As the men were retrieving the strange woman from the pond, a man cloaked darkly in a druids robes raised his voice and addressed the now attentive crowd. "You have witnessed the power of this witch. Would you then burn her in you own village, releasing this evil among you? Come with me, the druids have a place to dispose of such things, there we will burn her, and her evil will be banished from this world." The people agreed, and for two days they trekked the countryside until they came to a peculiar stone circle where other druids were awaiting their arrival.

I was already late in the evening, the druids took the woman to the center of the circle and tied her to a stake that appeared to be placed squarely atop an alter covered with fire wood and reeked of pitch. One of the druids took a ceremonial dagger and cut her deeply on one leg well above the knee. They waited as her shimmering blood slowly found its way down her leg, onto the wood, and finally landing on the altar. Still standing in the wood, the druid holding the dagger gave a nod, and the druids through their in. The pitch spread the fire quickly, and shrieks from both the druid and the woman filled the air for far longer than seemed natural.

An uneasy fear was growing on the crowd. The wailing had ended,and through the heated haze it was hard to determine, but it looked like they were staring at each other. Then the burnt ropes that had held her to the stake snapped, and the two leapt at each other. All but a few in the mob ran, leaving the judge and a few other watching this spectacle. And as the two in the flames battled the druids began chanting what sounded like a prophesy. "Even in the fire she guards the gate, but the guilt from judgement lingers. The fire fades away her unnatural age, and there he can lay his fingers."

For what seemed hours they fought, but she seemed to be growing weaker. A forceful blow came from the druid landing her on her back. She tried to get up but the druid straddled her chest and began choking her. She weakly struggled against him but soon her body went limp, and the victor arose and watched as she quickly faded to a shimmering ash that was scattered to the wind.

Then the ground began to shake violently and pillars of light began to radiate all around. Several odd beings stepped forward from these lights and surrounded the mob. The druid who fought in the fire now turned his attention to the judge. "I thank you my friend for finding her, I have been searching for a very, very long time." The judge gathered his wits and pleaded, "please sir, allow us to be on our way." The druid replied "fear not good judge, I have use for you all." "You my friend, will be my eyes and ears in this world, and I will repay your service with immortality. But as for your 7 friends here, they are no use to me alive."

With that the villagers were dragged and bound to the seven surrounding altars in the circle. The druid walked back to the judge where two others were making sure he did not leave. "They call me Arakai, and you might be?" The judge replied weakly, "Merin." The druid motioned for the strange beings to back away then spoke, "Merin, I am going to rule this world and you will be by my side." "And I am going to give you power you couldn't even imagine, as well as your own army." He pulled out the dagger that he had cut the woman with and placed it in Merin's hand. "Your army and your power lie on these seven alters, now go claim what is yours."

Drunk with a new lust for power, yet sickened by it all Merin moved to the first altar, dagger in hand. He knew this man, their children played together and their wives talked often, funny they had rarely spoken at all. His screams sounded like they were a mile away in a bucket, echoing through his head as he plunged the dagger into his heart almost throwing up. The next thing Merin remembers is stepping back from the 7th he had killed, as if some sort of trance had overtaken him.
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[codeugly]

The Overtaking

The earth shook violently for hours killing hundreds. Through the dust they would see torchlight and shadows as Merins Army swept the land. Merin, now a powerful immortal with 7 warlocks as his elite felt little in the way of resistance. They would fight brutally until surrender and enslave those who chose life. Strange creatures would chain them and scatter them abroad where work was needed.

Over the years some were able to settle into a normal life, but the whims of Arakai were far reaching. And even a being as powerful as he would have to slowly progress over the centuries in overtaking the lands. Over the past 300 years he now controls a portion of land comparable to that of China, and he is preparing his enslaved armies for a massive conquest.
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[tcaudilllg]

Yeah I hope we see this. It sounds awesome.

[codeugly]

Thanks. I hope I can get something done on this in a week. My engine is still very juvenile, and I think I am going to skip adding animations for the moment to save some time.
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[codeugly]

Wow, lots of good games here.

Day 1, and still working on the engine and tools. I don't think I will be working on the actual game until Friday. I am currently trying to makeshift a tile editor into the game to save on time and just hard code the textures in. I do have a shot of my HUD plan designed over a screenshot, and that's about it on the pretty stuff right now.


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[Codexus]

Cool intro story! I hope work on the engine goes well so that you can start turning that story into a game soon :)

[codeugly]

Ending day 2 and not much to report, except the extraction of my head from my ... :)

I really went down the wrong road with my scene file format, and had to back up and do it again, but I think in the end this will have saved me considerable time this week. I also had a brilliant idea of multi-texturing masks to save on the over head blah blah blah what was I thinking.

Anyway, the outlook is much brighter now. :)
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[codeugly]

Day 3 Lamentation. :)

Day 3 was the last and biggest day I had to work on the engine to get it ready for today. I got in a hurry porting my texuture manager out of the "wrapper" and within the first 20 minutes I created my next 2 hours of work, which was tracking down a concurrency issue that was memory leaking due to threads with no "AutoRelease Pool". Crazy right? I didn't read the fine print of these Cocoa callbacks and when I finally realized what was going on it took me 5 minutes to fix it.

After that I just worked on a lot of scene file loading routines, kindof on a serialization type idea, and ended short of getting it all working.

So in total I got 6-8 hours this week to work on it, things just got busy, and this weekend will be very busy as well, though I think I can 12-14 hours out of it. I don't expect to have a game, I do expect to have a work-aroundable engine with a small semi playable scene.

And I am very excited about this idea, and will continue working on this after the comp and see what happens. Maybe in two weeks I will have done what I expected to have done this week and I will post it here.
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[codeugly]

OK, I am way off having a game. I did manage to squeeze in about 6 hours this weekend to work on the game, things just kept coming up. I did manage to get tile animations loading, and get the character to move from tile to tile. Still lots of work to do, and I plan on moving down this path a bit further to see how it works out.

http://www.codeugly.com/files/DeliberateMac.zip

So if you have mac, and are simply bored, you can download this demo and see the water animations and the dude moving on the screen using awsd. The file is called Deliberate because that is what I named the engine project, and it pretty much is just an engine demo right now. I did go through and make sure there weren't any obvious memory leaks, but please don't play this with unsaved data open, as I don't guarantee anything at this stage.

This comp was really cool, lots of cool entries, I really enjoyed everyones entries and look forward to fooling around with some of the games these next few weeks.
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[codeugly]

I am continuing work on this, as I have set the resource bar low enough to justify the time to finish. I got in a hurry with engine building, something I know very little about, and a mess, so I have been slowly cleaning things up and putting them in place. I now have programable tile animations, and am loading from a tile set which simplifies things a lot. The tile editor is also close to working, it should be functional some time this next weekend. Also continuing is story lining, story lines get really hard as social interaction impacts the difficulty of story flow, so here is the next short story (practice run) behind The Gateway Circle. (I would have posted this last night but I was burning Zumba CD's for my wife :)

Maria (1358)

The fog was thick in the air, she could only tell when the mob passed closely by. She had been running and hiding most of the night. Having no business being there with a husband and child at home she was cursing her decision to listen to Agaitha Winerek. “I clearly remember telling her with the trials and all, but ooohh no, she wouldn’t listen. Oh Maria, twill be so much fun, the cider, the stories, and not a soul will be the wiser.” Through the panic Maria blushed red with the realization of how silly her muttering sounded. What started as a night of fun with the cabin fevered mothers turned into a nightmare of deadly proportions. Her mind wouldn’t stop racing around the events that lead to this moment…

Just after dark Maria kissed her husband and child goodbye, grabbed the lantern her husband handed her and left out to meet the girls. They had grown up together, gotten married about the same time, and with Maria’s addition a couple months ago, they all had children. Growing up they had always met in the woods behind the old church, lit a fire, and told stories to see if they could scare each other. It had been years since they had been out there, and they were all as excited as they were cautious. A year ago a homeless woman was seen eating a rat, and was later caught scaring kids with the eyes and tails. What started as a simple case of disturbance soon escalated into a plague of convenience convictions and vigilante justice. They all knew know one was safe, was the nostalgia of it all was far too enticing.

One by one they showed up around the campfire, each one more giddy than the next. After they all greeted each other and settled down Cynthia Hamlin started things off with a ghost story that had some promise but got way too sappy to hold it’s once haunting edge. Then March Engel stood everyone’s hair up with a story that was way to close home. After a long silence March broke through the eerie silence with her all too common laugh after scaring the fool out of everyone, which always led to a host of laughter. Everyone was slowly quieting down as Agaitha stood to tell her story. Agaitha’s stories always started off slow, with lots of dramatic pauses, probably the only reason escaped. At about the third mouth gaping stare we heard a rustling. We were scared for just a moment, when Cynthia pointed at that March wasn’t in the circle. March was infamous for sneaking out of sight and scaring everyone, with a smile on their face, story time continued as they eagerly awaited the obvious.

Agaitha was nearly finished when they heard a rustling, odd, they usually never heard her coming. March flew out of the woods in a blind run running falling over Cynthia. They all shrieked and fell apart in laughter, it took few seconds for Cynthia to catch her breath and finally speak above noise what she had been frantically mouthing since she arrived. “Run”, she shouted as her finger pointed back toward the church. A light fog was settling in and through it they could see the tint of torchlight. Someone had seen them, they were coming…
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[codeugly]

OK, work is still moving forward. I have been playing with artwork and trying to make tilesets. For the first time in a long time I am having fun with game dev again. I set the bar low, and I can see this project actually working, from content to development.

I did get some Mac platform programming done today, trying to get a few more events firing correctly, and mapping them into the system. I got close to getting tile map editing working, but I have one odd little design flaw that shouldn't be too hard to rework.

So anyway, here is the updated story, this is probably one of my favorite parts of working on this new project, and it really makes it feel like it's going somewhere, even when it isn't.

Maria, Part 2

The ladies took flight, just moments before the mob ascended around the campfire. Little but panic judged their hastened steps and stumbles, and it didn't take long for them to loose track of each other. Maria was barely keeping up with Cynthia when she vanished in a flash right in front of her. Disbelief in what she saw lasted only a moment before she too lost her footing and began tumbling down to the bottom of a large gully where her final bounce and roll landed her squarely atop Cynthia. They both scrambled to their feet, and the two bruised, but determined women picked up where they left off.

They ran for several minutes before coming upon a thicket. They stopped and quickly assessed the situation. The fog was fair, the moon was small, the gully was deep, and the chances of the mob finding them under this growth was very slim. "We should hide here for a few hours, the mob will grow tired and we can sneak back into town before morning." Maria was inclined to agree with her. Both girls were very tired, and Maria's movements were still impaired from giving birth. So they crawled in on their stomaches as deeply as they could into the brush and waited.

After an hour of nothing their hearts were pounding a little less and their wounds were hurting a little more. They began whispering back and forth wondering what happened to the others. They quickly silenced by the glow of firelight through the fog on top of the North ridge. They could barely hear the footsteps and occasional whispers as they slowly passed by. They held their breath as they looked for their friends in the crowd, but they never got close enough to tell. Cynthia leaned in and whispered to Maria, "I've got to get closer, I have to know." Maria sharply whispered "wait" and grabbed her arm, but Cynthia just wiggled free and crawled out.

Maria could barely breath as she watched Cynthia crawl up the hill toward the men above. She felt guilty for staying behind, but she couldn't will herself to move, so she watched. When Cynthia finally reached the top the fire glow was out of site and she was too late. Both disappointed and relieved she motioned down the hill to Maria that it was clear. Maria paused for just a moment, but decided to herself that if not now, then when. So she started to the top of the hill to meet Cynthia and make their way back to town.
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[tcaudilllg]

Looking forward to this.

[codeugly]

1 game to rule them all. That game is soccer, and with three kids attending, a new full time job, and life in general I am lucky to find three or four hours. So I made up a quick unity demo of my skills system. It's pretty neat I think and should make a lot of sense when I get a quick play demo working, hopefully early next year.

The look of the demo kinda sucks right now because my page size threw my images off, but I should be getting my new template fixed in the next few weeks.

http://www.codeugly.com/gateway-circle/
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[codeugly]

This has been a fun last couple of weeks. Here are some shots of what I have at the moment. I have still have a lot of fill in art, but as shown I've gotten the bridge done. The game screen was actually taken Saturday and I will have some better posts up soon.




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