Status Report

Hello guys!

Sorry for not posting recently. Work takes my all time, I wake up early and arrive home late. When I'm tired I can't sit down and force my mind on coding... But I try to add a little to the code at weekends. I'm also doing some stuff in Second Life and it also takes time from my free time.

So...

The project is not dead it only sleeps. If you have any questions regarding the game or anything else don't hesitate to contact me or leave a comment. Keep it up!

Progress, but no demo for this time.

Hey!

It's going pretty well I can say. I'm sorry I disappoint you but no new version for the public, however I uploaded a new version to test it online but I won't publish the URL.

The first character I could light up in fire was the innocent as I call it. What he can only do is run if he sees Caleb. The next monster I added was the butcher. He can attack with close quarter axe hit, axe throwing and vomiting. I didn't add any sounds to the enemies yet. After this I rearranged some stuff in the game. I placed Caleb's movieClip within the enemy movieClip so I can use the same functions to cast projectiles, move them in space and search collisions. This means everyone who can be blasted (even the barrels) will take place in the enemy movieClip. This caused some collision problems with the _x coordinates but I fixed it in no time. I also added something that is called targe (since the keyword target is used in Flash). You could pronounce it as it was French :) So every enemy has a certain target. In the innocent guy's case the target is the person whom he's afraid of and tries to flee. If he sees his target he tries to escape the opposite way. I added a function that checks if the person can really see the target and it's not blocked by a wall or some other object. And here comes the tricky part! I also added that when I spawn an enemy the function returns with the name of the instance. This makes available to make one instance as a target to another instance. And even more! All enemies have a type and all projectiles have a variable that keeps record of who shot it and what was the type of the owner of that shot. This makes available to change the target of the person. If some of them is shot by a different type creature the creature becomes it's target by it's identifier. Also this keeps the same type of monster of killing each other but can cause pretty funny monster in-fights. :) You could say they are in teams, teammates don't hit each other but let's say for example if there's a zombie in the way and the priests start to shoot at Caleb, they will certainly hit the zombie then the pissed off zombie will go on killing the priests. One of the tests involved a TNT barrel, an innocent guy and a butcher. The innocent feared the barrel, the butcher was searching for me. I tried to make the butcher hit the innocent with a vomit and after that the innocent was fleeing from the butcher and wasn't afraid of me. So I think this whole stuff will be pretty fun.

After I'm done adding controls to all enemies I will fine-tune them. At the moment some of the weapons hit too hard, sometimes the easiest enemy dies after only 3 full shots of shotgun secondary shots.

I'll try to add some graphics to the blog in the future and not only URLs to the testruns of the game. Add some pictures of the development and make the site prettier. I'm not familiar with this blog editor but I'll try to do my best.

Keep up the hope because school is over and I'm very excited about making the controls for the enemies :)

-Tom

I live... AGAIN!

Hey guys!

It's me, Tom! I would like to let you know I'm still alive. I successfully finished the school so now I have a diploma, now I'm a professional engineer of computer technology. Or something like that. But I haven't forget the project, I was still working on some animation and stuff. The next version of the preview will hopefully contain some enemies that you can shoot-blast-fry-shock to death. Keep up, check back some time, subscribe to RSS or donate as you feel.

Thank you for the support!

-Tom

Monsters!

Hello guys!

Another phase done! I'm happy to announce that all of the monsters from Blood are complete. In a previous post I stated that I might add some more creatures from Blood 2 but not all. You might comment which creature is your favourite and I might consider drawing some of them. Until that enjoy the finished graphics here

And the first release of monster gfx are here (duplicate link, nothing new)

So the next phase is to animate all of the monsters and maybe make them killable as I progress or after all the animations are done I don't know it yet... The animations are partially done for some of the creatures as you could see.

To SWIM!

Hello guys!

I've got some good news! As I explained in a comment at the previous post I continued the game. I decided to make Caleb swim. And after two days of hard work it's done. It was tricky in some way with the weapons and projectiles but it's okay now.

In addition I added the red screen when Caleb suffers pain and it runs well on my 2 Ghz Intel Core2 Duo MacBook. Plus when you're underwater you need oxygen, right? There's no real oxygen meter but you can see as the screen goes darker just like in the game. I will use the same for the gripping hand as the hand's choking Caleb.

Talking about hand and enemies. I did some drawings lately and I added a new preview for the creatures. The site where I used to upload my stuff is going to end the free service for FTP so I'm moving to an older and a bit slower site of mine but at least it works and it's free. The one I'm leaving is bullshit.extra.hu I used to like this because it has a funny name. But now I'm back to tomflash.uw.hu (uw stands for UltraWeb). I edited all the previous posts so all the links are redirected to tomflash instead of bullshit.

So here are the links, have fun and please comment! I'm doing this for all the Blood fans and fans of my works.

The fifth engine demo is here
To control Caleb underwater use C to swim down, SPACE to swim up.

The new monster arts are here
I added the gargoyle, the rat (burning and burnt versions), bloated butcher and the hell hound. I need to draw the bone eel, the gill beast and the spider is half way done.

If you feel to support my project, you can donate by paypal. Please note that the game will be free for anyone to play online.

To swim or not to swim

Hello guys!

I'm getting closer to the end of drawing the enemies. The next big question is that:

Should Caleb swim?

If yes, then I must draw 2 more monsters, the bone eel and the gill beast. Plus I have to make Caleb able to swim and draw his animation while swimming.

Maybe the bone leech and some bigger Blood 2 monsters will appear too...

After all this stuff I can start to work on the "ai" of enemies. Ai is a bit harsh, rather say "mindlessly attack" with different types of attacks. Then I can draw the levels and reveal the story in depth. Oh, I can't wait to shoot the sh*t out of them... So I'm gonna let you decide by commenting:

Do you want Caleb to be able to swim?

Shogo and Blood 2 music on XP

I just had a feeling I'd like to play some good Shogo. You all might know that Blood 2 and Shogo is powered by the same engine so they both suffer from the same problem on windows XP. I dig up some info on the problem and found a site which explains how to solve this problem. The guy used some debugging environment and found out that the game must call a different dll on XP than on win98. I can't find the article and I don't want to explain how to solve the Shogo/Blood 2 music problem just give you a link for download:

Get it from fileplanet

I hope this will be helpful for some of you. Any questions into comments.