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Current Projects: Americana Engine (Game Engine Development)
Showing posts with label Americana Dawn. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Americana Dawn. Show all posts

Friday, September 2, 2016

Americana Dawn: (Old) Official Soundtrack

The old Americana Dawn soundtrack used in the RPGMaker/C++ engine era has now been recently released on Soundcloud, with commentary and the cover art for each of the songs from screenshots spanning between the two eras (including songs that didn't make it between the transition). However, what's more interesting is the backstory regarding the release of these tracks.

The soundtrack descriptions might reveal spoilers and important plot points about the game, though it may not be relevant anymore considering the fact that AD may be headed into a new direction. Notably, this includes Cadence; despite her appearing in various pieces of concept art in 2013, her character bio included in the soundtrack was never publicly released.

It is worth noting that as the result of this music no longer being used in the game, none of the original assets as seen in the original (2012) Kickstarter trailer will be part of the final product.

None of the official game pages have made mention of this album release.

Thursday, December 24, 2015

Americana Dawn @ Co-Optional Podcast

There was a mention on Americana Dawn in Dec 24th's Co-Optional podcast in the section 'What games did you Kick-start this year?', where KiteTales mentions AD (considering she provided the narration for the Kickstarter portion of the trailer), while opinions were mainly based on the Greenlight page, which was updated a year ago. I looked this up after finding a post about this on twitter.

I will not say anything more about this, other than the fact that it actually ended last year, unless she was referring to a new Kickstarter already launched this year (in which case I have not seen or heard anything about it) and the official websites have moved while the social media page links (on FB, YT, etc) were not updated to point to them.

Sunday, May 24, 2015

WIP: Americana Engine Beta


Project page styled with a (modified) legacy AD template

With a growing amount of software development jobs favoring a portfolio of prior work over just a resume, I have proceeded to showcase a few pieces of work of my own.

Summary

The Americana Engine is a ongoing game engine project started in 2013 running under Windows. It was originally developed for Americana Dawn to get past a lot of the limitations that RPGMaker had (which the game was originally developed in), adding a higher resolution, finer sprite control (not having to rely on parallax mapping), map portability, and adding native functionality for the large-scale battle system.

The Lead Programmer's version of the game engine (including the editor used to make maps) is now available to the general public, adding a number of enhancements and fixes complete with development notes and custom maps, and is being actively maintained. More information on this can be found on its project page.

Brief Notes: (at the time of writing)

  • The engine is currently in active development, and may contain bugs or unfinished features. You are free to discuss it or report any problems, questions, feature requests, etc. at forums.bitbonton.com for now. If you want to directly contribute to the codebase, send a email to me directly.
  • Scripting documentation and tutorials will be provided in the near future.
  • No assets will be included except for those used for in-game GUIs.
  • The engine can run maps from Americana Dawn with limited support, however you will need to provide those maps. Maps previously available to beta testers are included in this zip file (for demonstrating the engine as a portfolio piece), with a number of improvements.

Thursday, March 5, 2015

Battle Simulator, Beta 2

Four months have passed since the Battle Simulator in Americana Dawn was made open to beta testers, and a number of modifications and special rulesets were added to simulate a variety of real-world scenarios.

The initial wave of feedback shaped what GUI elements to include or optimize. In Beta 2, there are a number of visual and game mechanic changes, one of them including 'circles' underneath enemy units, which give a representation as to how soon they will strike and makes it easier to indicate where they are on the timeline as well.

A full list of changes made in Beta 2 is available here.

Thursday, November 20, 2014

Americana Dawn: Kickstarter

Brief Summary:

Americana Dawn is a role playing game that takes place in Colonial America inspired from the Suikoden series of games. It emphasizes more on tactics (instead of level grinding), exploration, and a variety of large scale battles.

Almost after two years of developing a custom game engine for Americana Dawn, the Kickstarter is ready to go.

Although the Kickstarter has ended unsuccessfully, it has been Greenlit on Steam so there's a good chance it will be made available there in the near future.

Notes:

  • The battle scenes are part of the battle simulator, which generates random encounters as well as showcasing new battle features. It is undergoing testing and will be released at some point in the future when the demo is out. As this is a dev created map, expect a lot of references in it.
  • The World map is explorable, though where you can go is quite limited at the moment. This region expands as we go along.
  • There will be a later post covering the various features the game engine can do in battles as there were a few things that I wanted to demonstrate, but might not be utilized to their fullest potential in the beta / demo versions.

Friday, September 26, 2014

Microbattle System, Pt 2


If Foster barely has enough HP to survive one, I wonder how he can take on two of them. (The Ruffian needs to be nerfed slightly.)

The previous post on this series can be found here.

There were many different design considerations on how the battle system should work, and eventually the second iteration of the battle system was designed, this time in a video format as well, since videos are worth a lot more than words.

The first video is to test 1v1 combat and to see if everything works. The beta next week or so will have more.

A few major changes that are in this system that wasn't present in the first:

  • Most battles have their own separate battle screen, but some (like this one) do not for added effect, particularly if those battles involve interactions with the environment. Battles in this manner may only allow equipment to be brought in, focusing more on tactics and gear setup than potion spamming.
  • Your two (or three) weapons that you bring in also determine what skills you can use in that battle, so choose carefully.
  • Attacks that interrupt no longer cancel their attack and push them back at the same time. Sure it might stun them for a bit and take longer for them to execute that one attack, but it's more of a 'what do I need to do to reduce the effectiveness of that attack' rather than a single move to cancel them all.
  • Willpower is actually a one hit point reserve after they're out of HP (down) where they can get up after a while with a bit of health. If they're all down, then pardon will work. This was needed because attacks take off considerable portions of the life bar and it's hard to get it under 20% or something without accidentally KOing them.
  • All characters regen to full after each battle so something else needs to be done to decide how various items otherwise used for healing will be used, to avoid having only one/two types of consumables in the game.

Note on Unlisted: There's a lot of internal debate about whether to keep videos unlisted or not. They have been made unlisted due to a request from KY, however I will keep them here to show proof that the game is progressing quickly towards a playable demo. (As of November 5, a battle simulator has been released to beta testers.)

Thursday, July 3, 2014

Shop GUI v2


GTG's shop in AD: Foundations Tech Demo, design board. Jelly returns.

Almost a year after the menu pages were added, they were revamped in order to take advantage of the higher resolution of the game. The shop GUI was modified to look a bit more 'colorful', and to actually show an item description instead of requiring a keypress to switch between your inventory / compare screens. The former is used for selling items, and there's now a separate tab for that. Only things now on the right is item information, what characters can use that item, and how many is in their inventory, as well as their carrying capacity.

There has been debate between the team regarding item information; the one used in the base game only shows charge / recoil with three speed values, apparently damage is irrelevant on their end because I don't know. Might be informative enough for action RPGs when you're sending so many attacks their way you don't need to know exact values, but in a turn-based RPG, each of your moves count, and a couple of mistakes almost certainly ends with a party wipe, sending you back to your last save (although I've heard the game would be a bit more forgiving than this).

For the latter, the comparison feature was removed. In other RPG games a simple up/down was used since the only main feature of weapons and armor is increased attack / defense later in the game. But there's really no way to determine if certain effects are better or not, since average damage does not increase significantly over the course of the game. It's the player's job to determine those tradeoffs.

Inventory space is not really an issue anymore, since it is set to an arbitrarily high value (such as 1000), and item usage in battle is limited to what your party can hold, so you can only bring a handful of items with you into battle.

Item Description: Four lines should be enough to display stuff about the item. Maybe not enough for witty humor, however. (The description itself may change since it breaks the fourth wall and makes a reference to the fact that Jelly could be bought in only two colors when it was listed in the Etsy store seven months ago, despite screenshots showing them in other colors. I attempted to buy them via other means, without success.)

Friday, April 25, 2014

Americana Dawn: Microbattles


A Staresque Ring on Foster could've brought him back up, but they're quite expensive early on.

A Microbattle in AD is the game's battle system and the main way to resolve conflicts. From a distance and from screenshots, just like ordinary battles you see in other JRPGs: Turn based combat, characters using skills and items on the field, etc.

Beyond that, the similarities end here. Other than a few functions which handle battle related units (such as stats, learned skills, and equipment), what exactly occurs in the battle is based on map implementation. Want to have a simple skirmish vs a few soldiers? That works. But for those who demand more creativity (like me) I focus on a few other mechanics it can have:

  • Units have both HP / willpower. Your characters (including enemies) will regenerate their HP once they're down or in cover, but further attacks on them when incapacitated will drain their willpower, which doesn't come back on its own and increases the amount of damage they take in combat.
  • Each character has carrying capacity, which limits the amount of items they can carry at one time.
  • Pardoning. Because killing enemies isn't the only way to resolve a conflict. Some events in the game may change based on your decisions.
  • Passive environmental effects, meaning some weapons can be less effective in an area.
  • Interactable objects. Sometimes the method to defeat them isn't as direct as it seems.

Note on Commands: Attack / Defend are not simple one-off commands, since characters usually have more than one attack type available. Example: If Foster has a musket, he can either fire (at reduced accuracy) or engage in close quarters combat and use it as a melee weapon.

Monday, February 24, 2014

Americana Dawn: Macrobattles and a Dynamic World


Foster's team defends against a infantry rush.*

The distinguishing feature of Americana Dawn is the focus on large scale battles, also known as macrobattles. These battles are similar to most turn-based tactical games, such as Advance Wars and army battles in Suikoden 2. Although most large battles are based on historical battles, there are some minor skirmishes using this system that can take place during the game during missions and side quests.

Players control a variety of units, historical figures and officers known as 'Elites', who are both customizable and have a diverse set of skills to handle various situations on the battlefield. Units fall under eight general unit classes, each with their own strengths and weaknesses:

  • Brave: Melee warriors that can deal additional damage when flanking an enemy
  • Infantry: Ranged gunman that can control cannons and utilize buildings and towers to their fullest
  • Cannoneer: Artillery with large area of effect attacks and is best used for taking out fortifications
  • Calvary: High movement/evade and excels in hit and run tactics
  • Ranger: High sight range, and can detect units in cover or in buildings
  • Rifleman: Sniper units that can pick off calvary and lone units with ease.
  • Sapper: Can construct defensive structures on the field
  • Commander: Can boost nearby soldiers' morale.

The key element in these large wars is using the environment or the enemy's weaknesses to your advantage, whether it is ambushing cannoneers and using infantry to steal their artillery, or using cover to recon and find a weak spot in the enemy's defenses. There is no 'right' way to win a battle, but you have a limited number of troops at your disposal.

All skirmishes take place on the world map, and decisions from battles are persistent; Your choices on the field determines how the story unfolds. Any elite character killed in battle is permanent and may affect dialogue and future missions. Similarly, collateral damage can directly harm towns and establishments for the duration of the game, so if a shop is destroyed when retaking a city, you deny yourself the goods and any sidequests it has to offer.

Thursday, February 13, 2014

Animations

The animation loop generated in Americana Dawn while trying to script the Braddock Scene. It's done with a custom scripting system in the game, particularly since I didn't want to put the effort into using another preset scripting language (such as lua) and getting it to work properly with what's already in the game, including how it's stored when the script is saved into a map file.

I've decided to change the way things are displayed on the blog; sometimes a picture isn't enough to describe things, so a short video clip (without sound) might be used instead if the browser supports HTML5. If not, it will load a still image instead.

Cutscene Update: The finished cutscene was rebuilt a month later with a slightly different tileset and is viewable here.

Thursday, December 19, 2013

Americana Dawn: Title Screen


The title screen for AD in the beta, and a portion of the script used to create it. (Resolution at 1920x1080)

Some things, such as title screens, are difficult to program, especially if it is animated. Thankfully, the game uses a scripting system in order to handle maps, and it can handle the menu quite nicely as well.

Only four options exist on the menu right now:

  • Start - allows you to start a new game, or load one of your saved games. The game will have another option 'Continue' once you played through the game a bit.

    Although the game was designed for only three save slots, I allow a bit more than that since it's a PC, and some decisions in the game are not reversible (one you go a certain path, the other may not be available entirely). Savegame sharing is allowed but some achievements cannot be gained if you do this.

    AD may have a New Game+ because of it's open-ended nature when exploring the colonies through the various time periods. Your stats, learned abilities, and various non-quest items from previous playthroughs are saved, but they're all stored in a separate chest at your ranch once you get access to it, and you can grab them at your leisure.

  • Options - Allows you to change some minor game settings, like key bindings (does not affect some keys in minigames), and language settings.
  • Extras - Some other features that were cut out of the game, like Multiplayer. I hear that pledgers who get a grave in the game (which is the $300 tier) will get noted because of their contributions... by helping to shape the in-game world in new, creative ways.
  • Quit - does exactly what it does.

Note on the Title: The game natively runs at 720p, which means it won't have the black border around it during normal play.

(Updated 12/21)

Friday, September 13, 2013

Americana Dawn: Shop GUI


The aforementioned shop from the previous post.

There was some progress in developing a shop GUI, but my team was not available at the moment, so I had to design one. Note the above screen is not final. But it has everything it needs to show right now: The buy/sell prices (note that not all vendors will sell at the same price and/or buy your stuff), shop names (person's name if it's a street vendor), item description, and your cash.

The same GUI might be used to purchase equipment using war funds to customize your team for large scale macrobattles, but that's to be approved.

The Buy/Sell Items switches between buying and selling items. The Shop Inventory and your inventory will eventually be merged into one box. I liked the left and right side comparison, but it leaves no room to put in the important 'Item Details' box (at least for equipment anyways). It might be a bit empty for things like crafting material, which are essentially two liners, but that will have to do for now.

If you sold something by accident, you can buyback your items from the store at the price you sold it, but it must be done before exiting the shop menu.

The Compare button, when you are buying items and have a piece of equipment selected, allows you to compare that with the weapons the party has equipped, displaying their weapon name, base damage, accuracy, cooldown, and the most prominent special attribute. If you are comparing accessories, your team's currently equipped accessories will be displayed instead.

Keep in mind the game will not suggest whether the accessory you are going to buy will benefit your team as there are many different ways you can build your character. For weapons, there will be a general indicator to tell you whether damage dealt/cooldown/accuracy is better or worse than what they're holding, but not for other attributes, which may or may not be important during a battle. Don't forget you can always switch weapons during a fight to take advantage of the enemy's status (and elemental) weaknesses.

Tuesday, September 10, 2013

Americana Dawn: Status Page


Don't tease Foster because he's carrying around a stuffed animal.

The Status page was somewhat of a direct opposition to Seltaire's thoughts of a rather minimalistic Status screen, containing a combination of stats, weapon mastery, and skills. (Art: finbeard with edits by bchantech)

Stats: Contains an overview of your various core stats, which each should be self-explanatory.

  • STR acts as a multiplier on a melee weapon's Base DMG.
  • DEF determines how much damage is resisted. It has diminishing returns, so you can never get to 100% damage resist.
  • ACC determines the chance to hit and crit, and critical damage for ranged weapons. It plays more of a factor for ranged weapons, where they rely on strong critical hits to deal most of the damage.
  • EVA determines chance to evade an attack. Less effective against ranged attacks.

The Long Goodbye had no less than 11 stats on the status page, in which four seemed important for battle purposes, and the rest I had to consult a GameFAQs guide about what they do, only to find out that no guides were published on the game.


So as a Dragoon - which is better on the field, Agility, Dexterity, or Mettle? Or just go for a STR build?

Weapon Lv: The bonuses varied throughout development.

The first draft was that higher levels reduced the cooldown (time to act again) by 1% per level, up to mastery 15. But KY wanted to give incentives for characters to use a variety of weapons as well as having each weapon being distinct in some way, so their mastery bonuses for each weapon were changed accordingly, and a core stat is increased for every weapon level. Weapons still have a flat damage increase or a crit rate + dmg increase per level. Since it takes a long time to level up at higher masteries, I wanted it to make sure that doing so was worth it instead of mastering another weapon and taking a stat increase instead, so the damage bonus now scales up relative to Weapon XP.

There's now a mastery labeled Endurance, increased by eating food items. I decided to have this bonus simply because there needed to be some way to raise HP, and I didn't want armor to be the only way, other than character-dependent skills. It also makes eating (more costly) food a viable option than simply buying cheap potions to heal.

Weapon XP is independent for each weapon and gained from successful hits and damage done instead of winning battles, although there may be other ways to gain mastery levels instead of fighting.

Other Tabs: Two other tabs not in this image are skills, which tell you what skills were learned (maybe assign an SP cost later to prevent characters from spamming overpowered abilities), and Misc stats.

Gear Names: My rule with creating mockups: When it comes to items, never use them as placeholders. If there's an item showcased in a screenshot, it must appear in the game somewhere. There's like a hundred or so different shops in the game and anything is possible, so there's plenty of room to be creative (and possibly make references at the same time).

A good example above is Jelly Amigurumi, a unique item which is bought at Green Tea Grass for 2500 SH (which is a reference to the Etsy store of the same name). It's supposed to be a decorative item for Foster's house, but you get a minor boost in stats just by holding it.

Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Americana Dawn: Equip Page, Crafting, etc.


With a HP cap of 1000, this allows you to survive most situations.

The inventory screen has been revamped heavily from when it was known as "The Long Goodbye".

The current (and maybe) final version of the equip page. Enough information on this page in the Equip Details and the description on the bottom to know what you're equipping and how effective it will be without consulting a walkthrough. (Finding all the accessories and rare items, however, might be a different story, but it might include a bit of crafting/trading.)

Inventory: Inventory and Equip is handled Disgaea style - the first slot is a weapon and the rest accessories. All your items are shown in the inventory because you only have a finite space to put everything.

Crafting: The shops in major towns usually sell pretty standard stuff, however some trading posts out there are run by people who are specialists in their own right, and will be happy to produce unique accessories, weapon upgrades, or consumables for you - given the materials and the right price. So it's more like trading.

Monday, August 5, 2013

Americana Dawn: Battle System + Mockup


Foster's team taking out a soldier in a microbattle, 3d mockup.

Americana Dawn is after all a Suikoden-inspired game (with the battle system) so it should be fair that battles be in 3d. However this requires a lot more work and sprites so it's a stretch goal instead. But the main points of the battle system are:

  • A cooldown system will replace the ATB system found in RPG games, and is based on weapon or skill used. Although the game is turn-based, how soon a character can make another move is based on equipment, skills, and buffs (or debuffs!).
  • One weapon and three accessories per character. Weapons are divided into eight different types each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Both weapons and accessories are random loot drops to some extent.
  • 15 levels of mastery for each weapon type, the higher your mastery the more effectively you can use it, as well as being able to learn new weapon-related skills. There is no other form of 'leveling up' in this game.
  • You can switch weapons during a battle.
  • When heroes (and some enemies) run out of HP, they are briefly incapacitated and will get up after a while at full health, however they will suffer fatigue penalties (temporary reduction to max HP). Units heal to full after a battle is over, but you will need to rest somewhere to remove fatigue.

3D Battle System unlock conditions: Raise over $120k on the second Americana Dawn Kickstarter.

Wednesday, June 26, 2013

A Brief History of Message Boxes (in Americana Dawn)

The dialogue box appearance in Americana Dawn has changed over the years, and a bit more dramatically in the months after I came in and built a custom engine.

First two panels: The first one was used as a custom message box displayed in the RPGMaker Engine (The Long Goodbye). The other one was probably a photoshopped mockup, but I don't know for sure. (I didn't receive a copy of a build that displayed message boxes)

Panels three and four: First one was the photoshopped mockup that I needed to implement in-game. The closest I could do was in the panel below (this includes recreating the drop shadows, quality reduced since it need to redraw the shadow in realtime up to 60 times per second)

Panels five and six: Panel five is the photoshop mockup version. I recreated it and added a bit of additional features in the next panel. Said colored text are not the exact rgb values in yet another mockup, but I manually adjusted it for readability purposes. Drop shadows are part of the bitmap font. Said font is not monospaced so there were a few tweaks made with letter placement in the bitmap to improve performance while keeping uniform spacing between letters and such.

Complications: The pixel font was implemented as a bitmap since the AddFontResourceEx call fails when trying to read the ttf version of the font (as in it causes the program to hang after the function is called, and I can't stop the program for debugging).

The 'reading Japanese Characters from a file' might prove to be a challenge at this point since I'll have to deal with reading UTF-8 and interpreting the multi-byte input into a character (I cannot use such characters as test strings in the cpp files since they are encoded in ANSI).

I have still a few other pages to implement, but I'll cover the battle screen related stuff next, since people want action related shots and I'm overdue a few months on a functional demo.

Sunday, April 14, 2013

Dialogues


Re: Foster: Not when you're in a room that's going to be removed in the release.

Draft copy of a game screen with dialogue text. Three lines, one character speaking, and an optional portrait. Non-pixel font. Not a mock-up (except for the background). This screen can also be used for various system events like any events occurring in the background.

Need to Add:

  • The ability to color or bold text in dialogue - there is no real way to program this easily when relying on word wrap to do line breaks (triggered with \n).
  • Optimize dialogue to stretch to border when there's no character portrait displayed.
  • Text that fills in like actual dialogue instead of displaying it all at once.
  • Fades. In the event that a different character is speaking in any conversation it will fade smoothly to that character, the box itself won't fade until the convo ends.
  • Add some timed dialogues (no user intervention) - critical when characters are moving during dialogue.

Sunday, March 24, 2013

Americana Dawn: The Menu Screen

Mock up of of the menu screen where it displays your party. Less elegant with the font until I can find the exact font that KY was using for her menu mockups. (I was only given two character windows to test out the menu screen and such.) Although designed for 640x480, it automatically centers and adjusts itself for higher resolutions.

Up to three characters can be controlled at once on the battle screen, the fourth character slot was just in case the game needed one for some reason (like plot events where you temporarily gain a party member) but they won't be participating in battles.

Current Flowchart:

  • ITEM displays all the items that you have on hand. May contain separate tabs for consumables, equippables, and key items, and you can select a character to use it on from there. Might be renamed to 'Supplies' later.
  • JOURNAL lists all of the journal entries you have unlocked so far. This includes help for the game in general.
  • OPTIONS allows you to change a variety of settings and end game. Note: There is no ability to save from menu, you'll need a separate item (like a camp) to do that, and you'll be presented with an option to save upon using it. It's just to prevent save scumming.
  • Selecting a CHARACTER allows you to see that person's stats and mastery levels, equip items (you'll be shown if what you equip is better or worse, and won't show it if equipping different weapons), and manage their skillpoints.

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Programming Keyboard Movement

After days of figuring out the logic behind mapping key presses to moving backgrounds and sprites, I have a somewhat functional copy of the game engine - so called Banana Slug*. Characters can run using the shift key, although how many characters have running animations is strictly based on budget.

This code is so complex - maybe 150 lines to control basic map and character drawing functions. And we still have a variety of sprite overlays to draw as well as anything menu and dialogue related, as well as reading scripts from an external file. Lots of math involved in manually calculating the draw positions and figuring out an equation for this. Good thing I took those applied math courses.

Keyboard Movement Code

This modifies the dxinput.cpp and dxinput.h file found in the book Beginning Game Programming, 2nd Edition by doing the following:

  • Assigns key_lock[256] as a bool array.
  • Modify Poll_Keyboard() to be the following:
    
    void Poll_Keyboard()
    {
     if (dikeyboard != NULL)
     {
      HRESULT result; 
      result = dikeyboard->GetDeviceState(sizeof(keys), (LPVOID)&keys);
      if(FAILED(result))
      {
       if ((result == DIERR_INPUTLOST) || (result == DIERR_NOTACQUIRED))
       dikeyboard->Acquire();
      }
      else 
      {
       for (int i = 0; i < 256; i++)
       {
        if(!(keys[i] & 0x80) && (key_lock[i]))
         key_lock[i] = false;
       }
      }
     }
    
    }
    
  • Added a Key_Down_Once function:
    bool Key_Down_Once(int key)
    {
     if ((keys[key] & 0x80) && (key_lock[key] == false))
     {key_lock[key] = true; 
     return true;}
     else return false;
    }
    
  • Adding the function prototypes in the header file

When the keyboard is polled, it will check to see if the keyboard is acquired (via GetDeviceState) and if it isn't it will attempt to reacquire it. The keyboard is automatically unacquired when the program loses focus and without this addition, the program will no longer receive input from the keyboard. (Code regarding reacquiring input devices aren't covered in the 2nd edition in the Game Programming book, and although a similar function appears in the code on the CD in the 3rd edition, it isn't explained anywhere in the book.)

If the keyboard is already acquired it will check the state of the keyboard and will disengage the key_lock if it was set and the key was released.

Key_Down_Once will set the respective key to its locked state and register the button press, it will not register that key press again until the key is released. This was needed since the original Key_Down function will keep registering a button press as long as the key is held down (as in triggering it as fast as the program allows) - it doesn't register key presses in the same way or at the same speed as holding down a key on the keyboard (where there is a delay before key presses are repeated). Useful when you have keys toggle certain things.

Saturday, March 2, 2013

Americana Dawn: Mapping it on the Big Screen


Part of the New York map in Americana Dawn rendered at 1280x720, without any upscaling.

Knowing the scale of the game itself, the thought arose about 'what would it look like when seen in high def?' I presented it and the team was distracted for a while scrolling around at its epicness, and that's just on one section. With the game music playing.

While playing it on a huge screen might be nice, it might pose some difficulty for screens with fixed backgrounds, such as battle screens and whatnot. So we have two options here:

  • Upscale graphics - they will look lower res and not be widescreen, but it won't cost additional to get the backgrounds and stuff redrawn to fit larger screens. Or
  • Resize everything and design it for high definition screens - for the more 'epic' feel. Higher quality assets = more costs.

Either way, it's going to cost a lot more to get the game going, especially with more people joining the team (currently at 11, compared to 9 or so when the project was first started). The $4.7k that was raised last year will simply not be enough to cover everything (the original creator was already a few macbooks in debt, and might owe a few more due to giving us programmers actual macbooks in order to port the game over to the Mac OSX and mobile devices in the future.) Time to add some stretch goals?