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Re: Zodiac, the Side-Quest
Ah, very cool. You got some enemy formations that sort of remind me of galaga! I died twice on the first level before I realised that you really should be picking up all those life powerups the enemies drop. Not really sure where to go next however.
edit: I put in a warp code, ended up in the underwater corridor, and got my ass handed to me by fishes. ..And you tell me that my levels are hard. ;) ...I'm guessing I need better equipment or life upgrades.
editmore; How did you get the enemy bomb explosions to be expanding circles? ..I'm sure the answer to this is gonna be a one liner...
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Re: Zodiac, the Side-Quest
Yeah... I had to use invincibility to get through the flying part, then when I got on foot I was totally lost. =\
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Re: Zodiac, the Side-Quest
Exploding Circles
To answer Gleeok's question: The Mine enemy changes to an Exploding Mine enemy (which has a blank graphic) when it runs out of hit points or gets close enough to the player. The exploding mine counts down for about 30 tics and then dies. Each tic, the exploding mine draws a transparent circle with radius equal to 10 times it's remaining life or something like that. Then it draws a random circle somewhere in the radius.
Damage is handled by an invisible enemy created when the Exploding Mine is created. The enemy is either offscreen or on top of the Exploding Mine, i forget which. When the player gets too close, the enemy is moved on top of the player for that frame.
Where do I go next?
To answer concerns about being lost: Yes. Eventually, most doors will have computer terminals the Guardian can use to hack into the enemy's network and get tips on her next location. Without it, your first goal is to travel right and down, then left through a water location, defeat several bosses, and get the Impact Saber and a few upgrades for your sidearm.
Then climb to the far northeast corner of Aquarius and travel left, using the Saber, to get Lev. 1 Missile Launcher.
Then travel left, going directly South of the starting location to open the door there, and across the forest, going to the treetops to open the door there. Finally, go south along the far left border of Aquarius to find Scorpio. You can pick up three or four missile packs on the way.
Of course, the result of all of this is that you earn the Bombs in Scorpio, which the quest starts you with. So you could skip all this and straight to the southwest region of Aquarius, get the Armor upgrade, then go 3 screens south of the starting location and left, taking you to Aries. In Aries, the high-jump is in the far lower left corner.
Once you have the high-jump, you can get to your second flying level in the far upper left of Aries, and the third level, below a destructible floor about seven or eight screens right of the starting location in Cancer.
And... so on like that.
It's too hard!
The initial flying level requires you to be on your toes, but it's not really too hard once you get the hang of your abilities. Obviously you want to memorize the attack patterns so you can kill as many baddies as possible without taking hits in return. Collecting health on the fly is vital because you WILL get hit occasionally.
The biggest key to SHUMP levels in Zodiac is to use your Bomb attack wisely. Holding "L" will fire a massive beam that tears up enemies caught in it for as long as you hold the button. But it uses up your energy, so you only can stockpile about two second's worth of the bomb. That's enough to clear all the enemies nearby. You can use it as your panic button when things get hairy, but the better use is to fire it up whenever you can nail five or more enemies at once. Your odds of one of them dropping an energy upgrade are pretty good, and once you refill your energy, you can fire the Bomb again.
The first boss should be easy once you get how to defeat it. The boss fires spreads of bullets that you can dodge by nudging through. But the four yellow crystals on it's wings fire more powerful seeker bullets, and occasionally fire cigar-shaped heat seekers that will track you until you destroy them. Enter the boss battle with full energy and focus your Bomb attack and shots on one side of the wing or the other until you destroy the yellow crystals. Then do the same on the other side, though you might be out of energy by then. Once you get rid of the crystals, the boss is a piece of cake - just nudge carefully through his bullet patterns.
And yea, you shouldn't be surprised that the enemies crush you if you skip ahead a few dozen levels without getting all the intervening upgrades!
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Re: Zodiac, the Side-Quest
Yeah, I figured you just did something clever like that. At first I thought you changed the enemy super bomb animation somehow because of the knockback.
You know what's left for us to script though, right? Yep; Splines.
So far that's the thing nobody has even attempted in zquest. I've made a few enemies where you could think that's how they were made, but nope. Haven't done it yet. That's gonna be the key for creating complex movement patterns, smooth motion vectors, and jaw dropping enemy formations, not to mention the boss attacks one could create.
Whadya say? I could use some help, to be honest.
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Re: Zodiac, the Side-Quest
Well, this doesn't sound very hard. Just define your movement pattern precisely in advance. Like, get some grid paper and a graphing calculator. Then you're going to make some parametric equations that script out the path. So say you want the enemy to come in from the top left edge (t = 0, x = 0, y = 0), proceed towards the middle of the screen (perhaps by function t = x, t = y). Then when it's at x = 120, which is also t = 120, have it switch to move in a figure-eight (I forget the parametric equation) or whatever.
If you've mapped it out in advance, I don't see any reason why you can't just do everything using parametrics.
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Re: Zodiac, the Side-Quest
Got splines working using arrays and a few workarounds! :D
I'm getting a weird behavior with some items in the shmup levels, well not really weird but more like sometimes even if you're directly over the power up item it still won't allow you to get it. It looks like it goes right underneath the ship. Not sure why...
EDIT; Gah, the powerups will also move down too fast before you can get to them. I do have a suggestion: Howabout changing the border tiles to only be half-unwalkable?
Otherwise, good job on the levels. It's good that you did the background graphics it seems too, it fits in with the rest of the game much better
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Re: Zodiac, the Side-Quest
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Gleeok
I'm getting a weird behavior with some items in the shmup levels, well not really weird but more like sometimes even if you're directly over the power up item it still won't allow you to get it. It looks like it goes right underneath the ship. Not sure why...
I've noticed this, too. I think it's a factor of Z3 movement combined with the fact that enemies drop items wherever they are killed, which is not necessarily on the normal 8x8 grid. I don't think we can control the collision detection of items, though, so I can't do much about it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Gleeok
EDIT; Gah, the powerups will also move down too fast before you can get to them. I do have a suggestion: Howabout changing the border tiles to only be half-unwalkable?
Remember, there are speed upgrades. As you get quicker, it's easier to pick up items.
This gives me an idea for another upgrade, though. Perhaps an item magnet that yanks items to the player when the player is close enough? Trouble is, this would check every item on the screen and lead to serious slowdown with lots of items.
In other news
I'm just about done with the general game. Soon I'll start working on plot and plot-centered areas. That means I'm going to be closing the public portion of quest development. I'd rather the plot was kept under wraps until it's totally done. I'll probably start working on this in September. At that point, I'll need some beta testers to work with me on debugging portions of the game as it's meant to be played. I particularly want Gleeok and other scripters to help out, but anyone else is welcome. If anyone is interested, let me know so I can get an e-mail list going by mid September.
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Re: Zodiac, the Side-Quest
I don't really have to post that I'm interested, do I? :P
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Re: Zodiac, the Side-Quest
Well, I've been interested in this game since last winter, and have enjoyed it. I'd be glad to help you beta test it.
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Re: Zodiac, the Side-Quest
I would definitely be interested in testing this. I am not sure how much time I will have once school starts back, but I will help out as much as I can.
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Re: Zodiac, the Side-Quest
If the game's likely to become less difficult then I'm willing to help out bug-testing.
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Re: Zodiac, the Side-Quest
Like I say, the eventual goal is that it will be hard but you can grind for awhile to make it easy if you need to. Sort of like leveling up in a role-playing game.
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Re: Zodiac, the Side-Quest
Quote:
Originally Posted by
C-Dawg
Like I say, the eventual goal is that it will be hard but you can grind for awhile to make it easy if you need to. Sort of like leveling up in a role-playing game.
That's cool, but it would be nice if the opening level wasn't so difficult.
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Re: Zodiac, the Side-Quest
What makes you think I dont plan on having grindables BEFORE that opening level?
Probably the fact I didn't tell you, I guess.
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Re: Zodiac, the Side-Quest
Quote:
Originally Posted by
C-Dawg
Probably the fact I didn't tell you, I guess.
Yeah, I think that was it. >.>
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Re: Zodiac, the Side-Quest
September you say? Judging from the size of this thing I'm reading that as October or later. ;) At least that's when I'll have some free time to test. Also what about build specific bugs? It could get somewhat annoying going through the newest alpha each time and having a possibility of having to refix stuff that worked fine before. Or do you plan on settling on a beta that seems to be particularly non-buggy and sticking with that?
Any rate, I hate grinding. In rpgs I'm always under leveled because I refuse to walk in circles and mash buttons for an hour. :rolleyes: If It makes the game harder but not absolutely Impossible, that's no problemo. :) As long as testing time doesn't get exhausted by some kind of aimless wandering or powerleveling....and I'm babbling now....that's my queue to get some sleep.
Look forward to it.
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Re: Zodiac, the Side-Quest
Right you are, Gleeok sir. I'm having a son next month, so things have taken a turn against having time to work. I'll have a month of pregancy leave though (paternaty leave FTW!) and I'll be continuing work on Zodiac then. The artwork should be pretty easy to hammer out while taking care of baby.
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Re: Zodiac, the Side-Quest
Congratulations C-Dawg! I'm glad to hear you'll be having a son!
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Re: Zodiac, the Side-Quest
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Re: Zodiac, the Side-Quest
Congrats C-. Awesome news! That's some good work right there. :P
Thought of any names for the baby?
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Re: Zodiac, the Side-Quest
I was thinking that C-Dawg probably had a good reason to not be around. That is a pretty good reason.
Congratulations!
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Re: Zodiac, the Side-Quest
Huh, did you just edit an hour ago? Could that mean that there are new features? Hope so, I really want to see this quest finished... even if there's not any features, though, how are you doing on it?
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Re: Zodiac, the Side-Quest
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Din
Huh, did you just edit an hour ago? Could that mean that there are new features? Hope so, I really want to see this quest finished... even if there's not any features, though, how are you doing on it?
I just cleaned up a few things about features that are now completed, thats all.
As far as progress, well, it's slow. I'm still full of spit and verve, but I'm low on time and sleep. Once baby starts sleeping through the night, that should help.
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Hi there.
Guess what I did today? I updated the scripts for this thing so it runs in latest beta. I don't have easy hosting at the moment, but if anyone wants a working file, I can provide it.
Who knows? Maybe I'll be motivated to continue working on this thing.
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Hey waddayuno, it's C-Dawg back from the abyss of real life. How's it hanging?
If you still need hosting you can just throw up the most recent version on here for now: http://filesmelt.com/simple/basic_upload (that's usually what I do.Just don't expect it will be there for an indefinite length of time.) It'd be interesting to see how the newbies fare against this vertical/side scroller, heh. Because of the *completion* of ZC 2.5 nobody does the "use beta version xxx" anymore, and rightfully so. I'm not even sure how many of them are still available for download.
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Well, like I said, it now works fine in the latest public version of 2.5. I'm working on it again, and I'm logging my progress over at PureZC for the most part. I might take you up on your idea for hosting. On a short term basis it at least lets people offer suggestions, check bugs, and take scripts if they want.
Also, have you updated that Ikaruga clone you were working on for 2.5? It wasn't as hard as I thought to do Zodiac. The only big changes were to DrawTile and Step. Each DrawTile command needed an additional variable added, since they broke scale into xscale and yscale, and each Step (you know, how fast a projectile is moving) needed to be increased by 100. I don't know why Step changed so much. Maybe to give people finer control over the speed of things? Your shooter was far superior to my shooting levels, so I'd hate to see that just fade away.
EDIT:
I took Gleeok's advice, and now there's a download link.
http://filesmelt.com...date5-26-14.qst
I'll update OP too.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by
C-Dawg
Well, like I said, it now works fine in the latest public version of 2.5. I'm working on it again, and I'm logging my progress over at PureZC for the most part. I might take you up on your idea for hosting. On a short term basis it at least lets people offer suggestions, check bugs, and take scripts if they want.
Also, have you updated that Ikaruga clone you were working on for 2.5? It wasn't as hard as I thought to do Zodiac. The only big changes were to DrawTile and Step. Each DrawTile command needed an additional variable added, since they broke scale into xscale and yscale, and each Step (you know, how fast a projectile is moving) needed to be increased by 100. I don't know why Step changed so much. Maybe to give people finer control over the speed of things? Your shooter was far superior to my shooting levels, so I'd hate to see that just fade away.
EDIT:
I took Gleeok's advice, and now there's a download link.
http://filesmelt.com...date5-26-14.qst
I'll update OP too.
Hey! Look who's not dead! I'll have to check out what you've got here. I missed a lot of ZC gold between a century ago and yesterday.
Here you go: http://armageddongames.net/showthrea...l=1#post898386
EDIT: Well I tried but... Protip: the ... in the url should only go in the link name not the actual link. ;D
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Quote:
Originally Posted by
SUCCESSOR
EDIT: Well I tried but... Protip: the ... in the url should only go in the link name not the actual link. ;D
Fair enough. Here you go.
http://filesmelt.com/dl/ZodiacUpdate5-29-14.qst
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I always loved the artwork in this quest. SNES-esque Lifeforce meets Earthworm Jim meets Metroid.
There's also been a lot of improvements to scripting. Not so much the base engine or AST, but the exposed functionality and the utility libraries and functions. I wouldn't say you won't need workarounds for new behaviors anymore, but it's much easier now, in general, than it was way back then.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
C-Dawg
Also, have you updated that Ikaruga clone you were working on for 2.5? It wasn't as hard as I thought to do Zodiac. The only big changes were to DrawTile and Step. Each DrawTile command needed an additional variable added, since they broke scale into xscale and yscale, and each Step (you know, how fast a projectile is moving) needed to be increased by 100. I don't know why Step changed so much. Maybe to give people finer control over the speed of things? Your shooter was far superior to my shooting levels, so I'd hate to see that just fade away.
Last year I actually got around to doing just that. The quest can be found here: http://www.purezc.net/index.php?page=quests&id=429 It really needs another update though, since there is a pretty bad bug in it. What happens is if you die on the 1st Crystal Boss (After level 3) You continue at the last boss and skip Lv.4-5. I doubt anyone is good enough to beat it on the first try. :P So if you play it you'd need the password to see the later stuff.
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File updated again. Using a different host, because Filesmelt is crapping out on me.
http://www.solidfiles.com/d/992f059a...te(6-1-14).qst
EDIT: New update.
http://www.solidfile...b8/ZodiacUpdate(6-4-14).qst
EDIT: New update.
http://www.solidfiles.com/d/17c79d62...e_(6-8-14).qst
EDIT: New update.
http://www.solidfiles.com/d/4c6a2679..._(6-21-14).qst
Also, at my current rate of progress, I should have a finished version of this quest by August. Probably will be a bit of a rough draft, but it's nice to see the end of the tunnel.
(Note: Distractions associated with my eldest child dealing with public school slammed the breaks on as I entered the final stretch. Will get back around to it eventually)
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For anyone still watching this thread, the Quest Project (and newer downloads) are now available here:
http://www.purezc.net/index.php?page=projects&id=224
I didn't quite make the August deadline -- real life interfered -- but we're getting very close to complete now. Depending on schedule, a first draft could realistically be done in a few weeks.
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Another update: the game is now playable from start to finish. There are still lots of bug testing to do, and I have to do the ending cinematic. Otherwise, though, its complete. Basically it's in the same shape Dreams of Yesterday was when I left it behind. This time, however, I'm going to stamp out the bugs and tweak the game myself before calling it quits.
On another note... Shockingly little activity on these forums anymore, huh? I wonder if anyone is still around.
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Wow, you finished it! This was the quest that made me want to learn how to script, so this is really exciting.
Yeah, AGN is still recovering from its crash; we were overrun with spambots for a while and it's been difficult to regain the confidence of the community. But we're trying and that's all we can do.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by
CJC
Wow, you finished it! This was the quest that made me want to learn how to script, so this is really exciting.
It's only "finished" in the gameplay sense. You'll keep seeing updates over at my project site on PureZC until the ending is done and the bugs are gone.
Quote:
Yeah, AGN is still recovering from its crash; we were overrun with spambots for a while and it's been difficult to regain the confidence of the community. But we're trying and that's all we can do.
Well, keep doing your best. I can say that PureZC's system for allowing users to store and update quest projects is amazing, and really adds to the appeal of using that site. AGN is a little broader than just ZC, I can see, but it would be a great feature.
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Those who have not checked out Zodiac in awhile should go examine the latest downloads. I've replaced just about every LOZ enemy the game with a completely scripted new enemy. I need people to play the game and give me feedback on them; are they too easy, too hard, too durable, etc. Check it out!
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It has been quite a while since I tried this out. I really admire your dedication. Scripting that many enemies really shows your drive. I don't play quests often but this has now jumped to the top of my list.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by
SUCCESSOR
It has been quite a while since I tried this out. I really admire your dedication. Scripting that many enemies really shows your drive. I don't play quests often but this has now jumped to the top of my list.
Thanks! Yeah, I really want to make sure this game stands on its own and is not a glorified tech demo the way Dreams of Yesterday ended up. I don't want to have to call in ShadowTiger to revamp the quest to fix every bug in it. Plus, I'm using this as a kind of training grounds, as I want to move into Allegro after I'm done and make my own projects from scratch.
Before you play: READ THE INSTRUCTIONS. Some people don't understand they need to configure the A, B, L and R buttons correctly and they have a bad time right away.
As far as the custom enemy scripting goes, it's actually a pretty tame part of the whole project. Once I got the generic outline done, many of the enemies are formulaic:
1. Fire up MSPaint and draw some enemy sprites.
2. Import sprites.
3. Do some math to set up the draw_creature function to display the sprites correctly. It's virtually a copy-paste job if it's the same size and has the same amount of animation as a pre-existing enemy.
4. Script a few states of behavior for the enemy and plug that into the existing shell.
This sounds like a lot, but for simple enemies without complex behavior I can crank one out in twenty minutes. Palette swaps that are stronger/faster/better/harder versions of existing enemies can be done in like five minutes.
No, the enemies are just one tiny fraction of the massive work going into this. We're at about 95,000 lines of script at the moment, and we'll break 100,000 before being done. That's not much as far as games go, but it's hella big for Zelda Classic. At this point, the ZClassic engine itself is being used almost only as a data structure, the secret flag system, and FFCs as game sprite objects. Very little else remains, and that which does is often more of a limitation than a benefit.
It's been a big learning experience, however, and without ZClassic's pre-existing structure, it would have been impossible to keep interest going. The ability to see results instantly and make playable games even before all of the code is written is huge.
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I don't know if anyone still reads these forums who does not also read PureZC, but just in case...
I'm in the final stages of bugfixes and polishing for a final beta. I'm doing my own playthrough and taking notes, and after that, I plan on maybe one more beta release before I add some additional content and call the game complete. So, if people want to offer feedback, now is the best time to do it!
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Polished beta is out, and I'm busy at work adding the additional/optional content. Go forth and prosper:
http://www.purezc.net/index.php?page...wnloads&id=557
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For those who would rather watch the game than play it yourself, MeleeWizard is working on a Let's Play of the final beta of Zodiac. Check 'er out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-R1...VM6oYn6aW4YALT