Eternity Fragment II Worklog

[NayusDante]

Eternity Fragment II Progress Report

• Story/Plot - ~90% (won't know for sure until it's done)
  Dialog 0%
  Maps - 98% (Rough Versions)
  Map Detail - 10%
  Sprites - 0%
  Tiles - 0%
  Backgrounds - 0%
  Menu Graphics - 0%
  Music - 5%
  Sound Effects - 0%
  Scripts - 0%
  Monsters - 0%
  Items - 0%
  Equipment - 0%
  Encounter Definitions - 0%
  Shops - 0%
  Treasure Boxes - 0%

Team:
Myself - Maps, Plot, Scripting
Gamephreak5 - Graphics, Music

Far away, on the world of Tefra...

Long ago, the force known as "magic" was thought to be the ultimate resource. However, evil minds used it to bring forth chaos and destruction. It was only after the fall of civilization that the remaining few sealed these powers away, in the hopes that none would rediscover that which had brought such pain. Regretfully, the hearts of men seldom change, and one kingdom has revived the cursed art.

At this point, the idea is to keep the game within traditional 8-bit limits. I haven't decided whether I'm going to hold it to the 16-color limit, or just limit it to the NES or MSX palette. I'll be posting my progress updates here, but I don't want to give too much away before it's finished.


Here's the overworld, with most of the locations marked (location names aren't decided yet). Of course, things may change with time, and there are a few locations that aren't accessed through the overworld. Also, all of the graphics I'm using right now are placeholders until I can get some original tiles.

[Baconlabs]

Aw man, I thought the Magic City and Magic Fortress would have been friendly locations! I guess I'm too used to magic being a good thing in fantasy settings. Maybe it's still a good thing? Right off the bat, I'm imagining that your antagonists aren't the standard Evil Overlords and more along the lines of people that thought magic would establish a new golden age or something.
I guess I can't really assume anything until I know more about this world's magic and whoever rediscovered it.

[NayusDante]

I wanted to avoid having the heroes fight an evil wizard with the same magic he uses, so I'm making magic a clearly evil force. At one time, it was thought of as good, but it's not like that anymore in the time period of the game. That's about all I want to say right now.


Today was productive. I got a bunch of maps done, bringing the estimate to 61% done. Once I finish the initial set of maps, I can start writing the script and putting the story together. None of the maps are truly "final" yet, they're just basic designs with no details. When my friend starts working on the original tileset, I'll go through and polish everything, adding in the little rocks on the dungeon floors and furniture in the castles. I'm working from the outside in, building the big-picture first and detailing later. As such, I probably won't release any kind of demo.



I'm going to try to have something visual every time I post an update.

Here's one of the towns, still using placeholder graphics. Ignore the magic shop, that won't be there in the final version. This project is a rewrite of an older concept I had started on, so a few maps are recycled and modified (mainly towns).




Tomorrow's goal is to finish the rest of the maps up to the final dungeon. I've yet to do the airship interior, southern ruins, and three more areas before the magic fortress.

[Sh4d0ws]

I'm sorry, but that town is horribly unimaginative and uninteresting. The buildings are all pretty much exactly the same, with no particular features aside from the signs. Everything clustered into just one screen, which makes navigating boring and exploration impossible. The layout and placement of things is just painfully bland. There's absolutely nothing interesting about that map.

It's a very good idea to keep on with placeholder graphics and even maps, but I hope the final version of that map, and any other, isn't so terrible.

That aside, I love NES-styled RPGs, and your story sounds interesting enough. Hope things turn out fine.

[JSH357]

My only issue is that it's clearly a rip of FF1 at this point. For an NES-style game, that town structure looks fine to me.

[NayusDante]

That town certainly isn't one screen. It's 37x29, so that's about 2x3 screens. The towns really aren't meant for exploring though, they're mainly there for function. Exploration is reserved for dungeons and the overworld.

I'm REALLY limiting my tile diversity right now, so it's bound to look uninteresting. I'm limiting the game to one tileset, so I have 160 tiles to work with. Once I have all the preliminary map designs, I can use the remaining tiles for detail. Right now, after optimizing a bit, I'm at 97 tiles, leaving me with 63 more to work with. I might need 30 more to finish the remaining maps, so I should have plenty of room for extra detail tiles at the end. For an 8-bit RPG, I think that's enough.


In the context of an 8-bit game, which works better, square dungeons with uniform size and multiple floors, or sprawling one-map labyrinths? I've been leaning toward the latter, but I'm not sure if that's the most interesting way to do it. I like the non-linearity of it, since you have to actually explore, but I'm worried about making them too complex. This mainly applies to caves, not so much man-made structures.

[Baconlabs]

I'm REALLY limiting my tile diversity right now; I'm limiting the game to one tileset, so I have 160 tiles to work with.

Ooh, this sounds interesting. With this rule in place, you won't spend too much time on tile graphics and can focus on other points of interest.
I hope you use these precious 160 tiles to their full potential.

(PROTIP: Use NPCs for animated graphics)

As to the dungeon layout, use both of your ideas, and don't stop there; if you can't make a dungeon interesting visually, try to put some creativity in the layout and puzzles. I'd recommend studying dungeons from the Legend of Zelda series instead of the Final Fantasy or Dragon Warrior series in this case. One thing I highly discourage is a sprawling labyrinth with random battles the whole way through.

[Feenicks]

It really depends on the feel of the game you're making. If you're going for a true-blooded 8-bit styled game, I feel like the former choice would work better, as it would better replicate having to use different spaces for each part of the dungeon in the memory, so not all the dungeon has to be loaded at once.
Although it really depends on how big you intend for these one-map labyrinths to be. FF1's location maps [that is, everything that isn't the overworld map] can all go up to 64x64, so I don't know.
I would personally lean towards multiple maps, if only because of how few locations you have even in relation to the first Final Fantasy.
[Plus of course the above, in terms of making interesting layouts].

[NayusDante]

As far as using NPCs for animated tiles, I'm only doing that if I have to. if I absolutely can't fit all the frames I want in the 160, I'll do it, but I can't think of many animated tiles except the campfire, water on the overworld, and maybe some torches in the dungeons.

For the sake of organization, I'm not limiting myself on map count. Instead of fitting two or more maps on one 64x64 memory space, I might limit myself to 48x48 per floor.


I'm also a bit torn on the dungeon tileset. Right now, I'm using three main tiles, being a floor, lower wall, and upper wall. The upper wall tile is also used as a border around everything. I like how FF1 does it, which looks a little cleaner:

http://achurch.org/cgi-bin/getmap.cgi?l ... le=1&gif=1

I could keep the three-tile system, but without a bunch of random detail tiles it might feel too empty. The FF1 maps have one-tile edges all around, but there's more variety. I think I'm going to switch to that...

[NayusDante]

The map completion percentage is going to be a little off until it's done. I was originally counting areas, but now I'm counting actual map files. Where the figure used to be about 20, it's now at 91, and should reach about 100 by the time I finish those last few areas. The reason for the jump is all of the houses, shops, and rooms in the dungeons. About 90% of the area maps are done, but all of those little maps kill the statistic.

Here's a map from some ruins later in the game. These ruins are going to use a "tech" tileset, as opposed to the crumbling stone walls of the earlier dungeons. You'll see the ancient technology a little bit in those dungeons, but this one is going to be a still-intact facility. Still using FF1 tiles for the most part. At the moment, this is the most interesting/visually-complex dungeon in the game, but once I get around to filling up the 160 tiles, the others should even out.



Limiting the game to 160 tiles is NOT going to be challenging. I only have three more major areas in the game to map and I'm only using 110 tiles. At the very least, I can palette swap a few dungeons that use the same tiles.

Right now, I have two design choices that really bother me. Firstly, I have an area that could either mirror the overworld, or just use a section of it. Doing another full 160x160 map would probably violate the FF1 limit, but it might also be too big for what I want it to be. My other hard decision is whether to do an airship interior or not. You get it about 60% into the game and I'm not sure if I want it to replace the need for inns and towns or not, but maybe I can do some kind of upgrade system that uses the airship as a hub. Is that too complex for an 8-bit RPG, or would that be cool?

I'm trying to figure out the CHR ROM size to limit myself to. By my calculations, a 128kb CHR ROM is 256x2048 in resolution. One 8x8 sprite is 16 bytes, and 128kb is 131,072 bytes. That's 8,192 8x8 sprites. Each sprite is 64 pixels, so 8,192x64=524,288 pixels in the whole CHR ROM. But OHR uses 20x20 tiles, which don't divide nicely into 8x8 chunks. Still, tile data will probably be 1/4 of my total graphics limit.

[NayusDante]

I haven't had any time to work on EF, thanks to classes starting. Last night I had a spare hour to get the shops, inns, and houses mapped, but I haven't actually put anything into OHR for a while. I'm just going to finish all the maps in TileStudio then figure out a logical map order so they're easy to work with. I wish you could reorder maps in Custom, maybe that should be my bug bounty.

I have a good bit of work to do this afternoon, but if I can get it done at a decent hour, I'll start working on the final dungeon(s). At this point, the only unmapped areas are the airship (still on the fence about this), the mountain path (road to the final dungeon), and the magic fortress (final dungeon). Once those are mapped, I'll start writing the script and dialogue. My approach is to build the world first, then tell the story in it.


I'm trying to follow a bit of a schedule, but time will tell how well that goes. Here's a time outline of my goals:

Between now and September 30 - Maps complete; story, dialogue, and cutscenes in place. Essentially, everything that doesn't involve stats and data tables.

October 1 to October 31 - Monsters, encounter tables, items, weapons, armor, character stat progression, all of that good stuff.

November 1 to November 31 - Graphics, music, testing.



This isn't one of my recent maps, but in keeping with my goal of having something to show with each update, here's one of the dungeon maps.

[ajguy93]

I'll beta test. that is, like my subject says, if you want. (I screw around instead of makin my game anyway...

[NayusDante]

I've pretty much finished the rough versions of the maps, though the final dungeon is seriously lacking in detail at the moment. I'm not entirely happy with my castle tileset format, and might redo all the castle maps to be more like the town building interior style. The FF1 castle tiles don't lend themselves nicely to anything that isn't extremely boxy.

Now that the maps are essentially put together, I have a list of every map in the game. At the moment, this totals 97 maps (a third are houses, inns, and shops), but that doesn't include any optional dungeons, of which I'm estimating there will be three added after everything else is done. Since all of my maps are in a TileStudio Project file, I need to put them into OHR. Thanks to The Mad Cacti, I have a TileStudio Definition file to output OHR-format maps. I changed the names of all my maps to t00 to t96, set the map output directory to my unlimped project folder, and generated code with the following definition:

Code: Select all

; --------------------------------------------------------
; Tile Studio Definition file for OHRRPGCE maps
; Supports Tile Studio 3.0 only (2.55 does not support binary files)
; See http://tilestudio.sourceforge.net/
;
; Place this .tsd file either in your project directory, or in the
; Tile Studio directory.
;
; You can only create maps with a single tileset. A TS map is exported
; as a 3 layer OHR map (delete any layers you don't want after import).
; Tile rotations, 'Map Codes', and wallmaps/"bounds" are ignored, and tile
; animations are not supported.
; You can create as many maps as you want, with various tilesets,
; just make sure to name each map something different.
;
; Tile Studio has bugs and limitations, to avoid having to scrub your map
; of garbage files after importing it, follow these instructions carefully
; if you want to use more than one layer:
; - tile 0 of your tileset should be completely filled with colour zero
;   (which is normally black)
; - While importing your tileset into TS, click on a patch of colour zero
;   to make that the transparent colour
; - Create a new map, select the Block Fill tool, and set the back, mid,
;   and front tiles to tile 0, then fill the map with it (you won't see
;   any difference). Otherwise "empty" tiles will be filled with garbage
;   when exported.
;
; --------------------------------------------------------

#tileset
#map ""
;#binfile <ProjectName>_<MapIdentifier> 8
#binfile ohrrpgce.<MapIdentifier> 8
<0><0><0><0><0><0><0>
<MapWidth>
<MapHeight>

#mapdata
<TSBackTile>
#end mapdata

#mapdata
<TSMidTile>
#end mapdata

#mapdata
<TSFrontTile>
#end mapdata

#end binfile
#end map
#end tileset

This generates map files with the filename "ohrrpgce" and the file extension of the map's name, which is the file naming format that OHR uses. As long as I made blank maps 00-96, all of my maps will export and update with one click (and about twelve seconds of write time). It doesn't help for wall mapping, but I just figured out how to use default passability so that's easy to deal with.

My next goal is to link all the doors, set default passability, and make a decision on the castle maps. After that, I can write all the dialogue and cutscenes.