What are you working on right now?

asiekierka · Post by **asiekierka** » Fri Sep 11, 2009 12:04 pm

C-C-CCCOMBO BREAKER!

Also i'm not using zzt atm
i prefer the C64
because it has :blazkowicz:

(no, not blazkowicz)

Microwave · Post by **Microwave** » Fri Sep 11, 2009 5:01 pm

More added to the game. Working at a VERY slow rate. It's hard to get motivated enough to even open ZZT, but I just tell myself, "Do a little at a time, it will add up, then eventually you'll have enough of a foundation for it to flow."

Microwave · Post by **Microwave** » Fri Sep 11, 2009 8:57 pm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNzGjOvr_8U

A little video showing the gameplay. It really is an early demo but might as well show it since it's convenient to.

RobertP · Post by **RobertP** » Sat Sep 12, 2009 5:19 pm

Do you make combos by repeatedly punching enemies in the face? Looks good.

Good luck on all your projects, people.

Microwave · Post by **Microwave** » Sun Sep 13, 2009 12:08 am

Yeah, there's a moment where you can't hit the same enemy twice and it backs off from you, so you need multiple enemies to keep it going. Each additional hit in the combo gives you a higher amount of score, so you want to try and keep it going.

Microwave · Post by **Microwave** » Sat Sep 19, 2009 4:39 pm

I made a house board. I was never too good with graphics but I try. How this is going to fit in a beat 'em up set in a city is anyone's guess, if it even will.

Commodore · Post by **Commodore** » Sun Sep 20, 2009 1:54 am

some windows with some line wall text would fill out the house.

Post by **Zenith Nadir** » Sun Sep 20, 2009 9:28 am

what you need is COMPOSITION!

don't just shove the house in the top left corner! consider the focal point of the board (the house, in this case), and think about how the player's eye will register it; place it dead centre if you want immediacy, a corner if you want less immediacy. people generally read a zzt board like a page in a book, only more quickly; a glance at the centre before looking at the top left and "reading" left to right to the bottom right.

what's with that grass at the bottom? it's just an empty space and it's boring. remember "creative contours". worse than that, it's a dithered blob of dark green and brown and those are terrible colours to combine.

consider player's size in relation to the size of the house. by current measures the player's bedroom is actually a ballroom.

don't forget small details! where's the bathroom? where are the windows? matter of fact, where's the rest of the town? if your guy lives in the country there's more out there than just grass. a little world building is important.

also you'd be better off with horizontal lines shading the sky than a kevedit random fill. i don't like random fills

i'm nadir

Post by **Zenith Nadir** » Sun Sep 20, 2009 9:30 am

Nadir's Graphical Secrets

Post by **Zenith Nadir** » Sun Sep 20, 2009 9:31 am

OMG Nadir u r a GOD!!!

d00d I f**king swear I have the zombies from their eyes blood ooze DEAR GOD!

Post by **Zenith Nadir** » Sun Sep 20, 2009 9:53 am

oh and before anyone tries to call me out re: random fills, all my zzt game random fills were handmade so stuff it

i'm really talking cg fills here. you know what i mean.

Commodore · Post by **Commodore** » Sun Sep 20, 2009 1:25 pm

what's a zzt game without a toilet?

Microwave · Post by **Microwave** » Sun Sep 20, 2009 8:39 pm

Thanks for the advice, and sadly I did the fills by hand, not with Kevedit.

BossOfTheLightning · Post by **BossOfTheLightning** » Sun Sep 20, 2009 9:36 pm

Hey everybody!

Got back to work recently on an older game I started a while ago called Cecil the Space Knight (Hmmm I'll have to change that title). I was pretty surprised to see that my game file Cecil.zzt was last modified on 27/04/2001. Where does the time go? Anyways I might end up finishing the game or just release the engine by itself.

Its a side-scroller using Six Silver Gems and Joe the Adventurer as a reference (Thanks to t0ucan and Claudio Leite for providing a starting point for my own game.) with a few of my own additions. About 12 types of abilities the player can use ranging from ricochet shields to spawning centipedes that can act as a moving platform or to trigger otherwise impossible to reach switches. Small fighting game button combos like Shift+Up/Up/Left to perform uppercuts and sliding attacks. You can also use these combo attacks to juggle an enemy midair to gain extra experience points. There is also a day and night cycle along the lines of Castlevania II.

The object that acts as the side-scrolling character can also enter and exit each board at different places and the game will be non-linear. The engine uses quite a few flags at once though so there is not too much left over for the levels themselves.

I'd hate to just leave the game unfinished but it is hard to find the time to work on it!

Post by **Zenith Nadir** » Sun Sep 20, 2009 10:01 pm

Microwave wrote:Thanks for the advice, and sadly I did the fills by hand, not with Kevedit.

well, in that case what you need to do is 1. consider where the light's coming from (obvious but worth stating: lighter colours denote direct light source!), 2. don't be afraid to let the colours "breathe". right now that blend looks claustrophobic, for lack of a better word, all different pixels all scrunched together. don't fear having two alike pixels next to one another.

oh and also it's a good idea to have a proper horizon line somewhere. just pick a row and slap a horizontal line down there. perspective is super-easy to do in zzt if you know how because it's all grid-based.

BossOfTheLightning wrote:Hey everybody!

Got back to work recently on an older game I started a while ago called Cecil the Space Knight (Hmmm I'll have to change that title). I was pretty surprised to see that my game file Cecil.zzt was last modified on 27/04/2001. Where does the time go? Anyways I might end up finishing the game or just release the engine by itself.

Its a side-scroller using Six Silver Gems and Joe the Adventurer as a reference (Thanks to t0ucan and Claudio Leite for providing a starting point for my own game.) with a few of my own additions. About 12 types of abilities the player can use ranging from ricochet shields to spawning centipedes that can act as a moving platform or to trigger otherwise impossible to reach switches. Small fighting game button combos like Shift+Up/Up/Left to perform uppercuts and sliding attacks. You can also use these combo attacks to juggle an enemy midair to gain extra experience points. There is also a day and night cycle along the lines of Castlevania II.

The object that acts as the side-scrolling character can also enter and exit each board at different places and the game will be non-linear. The engine uses quite a few flags at once though so there is not too much left over for the levels themselves.

I'd hate to just leave the game unfinished but it is hard to find the time to work on it!

wow, that's some oldschool shit you're rockin' right there. you do know there's more recent ("recent" meaning 10 years old rather than 15) platform games out there, right? i recommend taking a look at "treasure hunter zzt", "freak da cat", "forest of zzt" and "rolie polie zzt". there's also a board in "fantasy world dizzy zzt" that i was always quite pleased with which is worth a look if i may say so myself. zzt"

sounds like you've got some nice ideas going there, though. show us some screenshots sometime.