WIP: Unbreakable Fates: Guidance of Illusion

Hello Everyone! Though I was holding off until I had more work done, I decided to at least share some light on what it is that I am working on.

The project's name at the moment is, "Unbreakable Fates." It was mainly suppose to be an RPG but from what I was told is that does RPG elements aren't implemented just yet in terms of not needing to code. All though it is possible but an actual coder. So until those options are added I will just make it to an Action RPG. So of course certain characters won't be added the way I want them to be now but that will not stop me from putting them in. As of right now I am just designing the world how I see fit through the writing I have done in the pass for my character(s) story which I won't get into just yet.

I am going through the tutorials slowly and designing at the same time. Call me crazy for doing that but I just learns hands on faster than just to watch them all and then forget how to do it when its time to put things together. But I know it has its draw backs. I had to redesign a lot of things for many reasons and one of them is the radius NES allows you to have and restrictions as well. But those mistakes is what has been teaching me to design smarter. I tend to over complicate or over design things that might kick me in the face later... let us hope that's not the case in the long run.

The World will have a Day and Night cycle but as of right now the main focus is to assemble things together. Now that I have the first Area about 95% done. I will run it through to see how it steams together. Though I am not sure just how loading the areas work whether its using the underworld to for rooms or you have to use the over world. I am sure once I go through more of the tutorials I will know in though time because I also have to see how the triggered animated tiles will work. If you see the basement screen shots after you activate the corresponding orb it will stay with its color. I am just not sure if that will work.

A0VHpT3.png


The World will have a Day and Night cycle but as of right now the main focus is to assemble things together. Now that I have the first Area about 95% done. I will run it through to see how it steams together. Though I am not sure just how loading the areas work whether its using the underworld to for rooms or you have to use the over world. I am sure once I go through more of the tutorials I will know in though time because I also have to see how the triggered animated tiles will work. If you see the basement screen shots after you activate the corresponding orb it will stay with its color. I am just not sure if that will work. The orbs had a better design but I had to adjust it for the NES limitation. And no, I don't plan things on paper :|


bTjjpSF.png

hfFoV9u.png
 
dale_coop said:
fjamesfernandez, those screens are beautiful. I love the basement, so creepy <3

Whats funny is that I didnt even think of the room to be that way. I know I wanted it to be dark and to have the star with the orbs around it. At first when I designed it, it took too much tile space. So then I had to adjust it. The tiles you see on the wall was suppose to be a tile set I made for the floor. But I realized that it was too busy and it took away from the orbs. The one thing I don't ever do when making tiles I dont delete those layers. instead I have another folder with anything I made that didnt work. Why? You never know if you can use it for something else. And now look, its a wall tile. Its like they say, you have to roll with the punches.

Right now I am making back up plans on the player's character attacks. I am still learning and notice that my original plan for a sword may not work out. even with the palette change on the sword and not the hero, it may interfere with the frames unless that sword layer goes on top of the hero positioned for the animation which I know this will not work. There for even though I will work on those animations I am making a new weapon for him that shouldn't mess with the hero's frames.
 
So, It's been a while since I last updated. It was easier for me to get to being that I had a very bad ankle sprain. In that time of healing which was a week, I made sure to get some work done. Because of the known limitations I was force to redesign a lot of the stages. Getting paths to come out right for my style took me a hours to get. Many of you dont like using paths because of it take away from what ever it is that you are doing but for the type of game I am developing is necessary in my opinion. I had to tweak everything so tiles arent fighting among each other.

I still havent went through all the tutorials because I like going hands on while watching them. Without enough tiles for me to use, I feel that I will be wasting my time watching them. I am a hands on person and if I dont do it along with the video I will forger lol Once I get at least 50% of the map done I will start to dig in. Maybe a little less. but I will know when its time when I get there. Hopefully I will be able to show a video or two soon.

With that said, Does anyone know what part of assests is for Chest? Is it the stages, character, mob?

OfqHq3a.png
 
There will be some time before I am going to implement things through the NESmaker but I wanted to if I would need a tile free to show a shadow cast when jumping or is it drawn in by code? I know some programs make their own default shadows for characters like fighting games and such.
 

dale_coop

Moderator
Staff member
If you implement the jump, you would definitely need a tile for that (in your gameobjectstiles or in the monster tileset...) but don't know yet because because it doesn't exist in 4.1
We'll need to wait until the 5.0 to maybe have it, in the rpg/adventure module.
 
Okay so, I have to laugh this off to retain my sanity and not giving up. There are certain things that I wish was really together so that people or myself dont have to constant because something is a MUST needed in their respective assests. So before I explode I will ask this.

In the character (PLayer) Assest. What tiles are mandatory to have. I am hearing you need a tile for spite zero and a tile for transparency. I understand that weapons need to be in the same assest as the character. What else is suppose to be there? Are Keys, or currency, health and magic items and such suppose to be in the same assests as the player?

Does monster drops correspondence to the player assests? In example, if you kill an monster and it drops a heart, that heart isn't drawn from the monster assest but the heart is being force out of the player assests?

In background/stage assest. I know that Zelda didnt really have any chest from what I can remember. All items where either just on the floor waiting for you to pick up or was dropped from a monster. I wanted to add one tile for chest being closed and when open it remains open as it did in link to the past or any other adventure game. Unless on screen its closed player opens it, it shows the open tile, then disappears and or stays open on screen. Ive seen the option for special tiles. My question is the chest itself has to be on the BG assests or placed some where else? I know of screen tiles but majority of the time I will be using paths on screen tiles.

Here are some examples. One BG file and one none filled file for char and monster. you can take the char files and use a color to fill it whats needed to show the true space for player animation. I hope that makes sense.
 

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Mugi

Member
you can see what "must" be in the player object tiles by looking at the nesmaker UI.

playerobjectilesthingy.png


everything in the hierarchy listed under "Game Objects" is drawn from the playerobjecttiles.
while this behavior CAN be changed per-se, i will just not go into details for that as it involves a rather hefty rewrite of some assemblies, coupled with the fact that you will lose your ability to manage your objects from the UI.
it is coded to be like it is, and with the current version of the nesmaker tool, it's just better to say it cant be changed.

now, you can simply make your pickup objects from the monster tiles too and just define the object values accordingly, but keep in mind that while the playerobject chr and palettes stay static, the monsters do not,
so if you draw an object there, you will have to draw the same object into ALL of yourt monster tilesets, and in addition, you either have to always use a palette for the object, or deal with the fact that your object will change color depending on the
loaded monsters. I draw my sprite HUD into my monster tiles, and it's a huge waste of space, so keep that in mind.

as far as what is actually mandatory in the gameobjectiles.chr file.
like you said, a blank sprite, a solid sprite for sprite zero (if used) and obviously some kind of graphic for the player and the players weapon (sprite based weapon does not need to be in gameobjecttiles, but if its drawn into monster tiles, above applies, it has to be drawn into ALL of them.)

edit:
here's a picture to illustrate just HOW much of a waste it is to draw static things like health pickups into monster tiles (my hud is 6 tiles + 10 tiles for numbers + 7 tiles for alphabets i needed to write pause and heal)
as you can see, this makes me lose 23 tiles from ALL my monster tilesets, instead of losing 23 tiles once from playerobject tiles. You do the math.

(pay no attention to my chr file layout, i've changed the way backgrounds work for my game.)

gassets.png
 

Bucket Mouse

Active member
There's no treasure chest function in NESMaker; it's gotta be coded out.

Here's how I'm thinking of doing it:

The open chest graphic is a background tile. The closed chest graphic is a monster sprite. Lay one over the other.
Go to the sprite and push the text button. The sprite is assigned to a text box that says "YOU GOT (insert item here)".
Someone learned how to rig the text box options to do different things. See here:
http://nesmakers.com/viewtopic.php?f=35&p=17988#p17988

In this case the text box would lead to an option that (1) adds the item to your inventory and (2) makes the closed chest monster sprite disappear. It also flips the flag on, which loads the "alternate" version of the room each time you enter it from now on.

I might be over-thinking this. There happens to be code already in NESMaker that changes a solid background tile into a different, walkable one when all monsters are defeated. It might as simple as modifying that instead. There are multiple ways to do anything.
 
Mugi said:
you can see what "must" be in the player object tiles by looking at the nesmaker UI.
everything in the hierarchy listed under "Game Objects" is drawn from the playerobjecttiles.
while this behavior CAN be changed per-se, i will just not go into details for that as it involves a rather hefty rewrite of some assemblies, coupled with the fact that you will lose your ability to manage your objects from the UI.
it is coded to be like it is, and with the current version of the nesmaker tool, it's just better to say it cant be changed.

now, you can simply make your pickup objects from the monster tiles too and just define the object values accordingly, but keep in mind that while the playerobject chr and palettes stay static, the monsters do not,
so if you draw an object there, you will have to draw the same object into ALL of yourt monster tilesets, and in addition, you either have to always use a palette for the object, or deal with the fact that your object will change color depending on the
loaded monsters. I draw my sprite HUD into my monster tiles, and it's a huge waste of space, so keep that in mind.

as far as what is actually mandatory in the gameobjectiles.chr file.
like you said, a blank sprite, a solid sprite for sprite zero (if used) and obviously some kind of graphic for the player and the players weapon (sprite based weapon does not need to be in gameobjecttiles, but if its drawn into monster tiles, above applies, it has to be drawn into ALL of them.)

edit:
here's a picture to illustrate just HOW much of a waste it is to draw static things like health pickups into monster tiles (my hud is 6 tiles + 10 tiles for numbers + 7 tiles for alphabets i needed to write pause and heal)
as you can see, this makes me lose 23 tiles from ALL my monster tilesets, instead of losing 23 tiles once from playerobject tiles. You do the math.

(pay no attention to my chr file layout, i've changed the way backgrounds work for my game.)

That's good to know. You may had wasted space with your monster tiles but if you think about it you did it in a clever way to save the space you needed to make your BG and it shows. Maybe I won't of course make my HUD in the monsters BUT, now you have me thinking of item drops in a different way which does involve monster tiles but, it would take much space.
 
Bucket Mouse said:
There's no treasure chest function in NESMaker; it's gotta be coded out.

Here's how I'm thinking of doing it:

The open chest graphic is a background tile. The closed chest graphic is a monster sprite. Lay one over the other.
Go to the sprite and push the text button. The sprite is assigned to a text box that says "YOU GOT (insert item here)".
Someone learned how to rig the text box options to do different things. See here:
http://nesmakers.com/viewtopic.php?f=35&p=17988#p17988

In this case the text box would lead to an option that (1) adds the item to your inventory and (2) makes the closed chest monster sprite disappear. It also flips the flag on, which loads the "alternate" version of the room each time you enter it from now on.

I might be over-thinking this. There happens to be code already in NESMaker that changes a solid background tile into a different, walkable one when all monsters are defeated. It might as simple as modifying that instead. There are multiple ways to do anything.

That's an interesting way of doing it. Ill give it a try to see how it turns out. Was there anything like that for moving an object on screen? Like moving a block(s) to get to a chest or exit?
 
So, I've been trying to mess around with the "Walk Behind" option of course for more aesthetic movement, but its not working the way it would had lol As you see in the video. It seems to start going behind too early and exit out too late. Of course if it doesn't work I'll just adjust things on a stage that doesn't rely on something like that too much unless its a long path.

[media]https://imgur.com/N9XuPox[/media]
 

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Is there no way to add more Elements? I wanted to add an MP section but all though I would be able to add the text I ran out of Elements. It would had been great if the Box option we have under tile I was able to move it rather than using an element for an asset but I am guessing you have to go into the script and set it up. I also wanted to change the "A" and "B" to red but I dont see that option there. I have to go back to the tutorials. I believe to make the weapon pop in the bracket, it comes from the player itself... Or am I wrong?
 

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dale_coop

Moderator
Staff member
You can't add new elements in the HUD element list, becausethose elements are kinda hardcoded in the scripts (when rendered depending of their types)...

For your A / B in red, you'll have to change the color of those letters in the HUDTiles.bmp

About the weapon dispaled on the HUD, it could be done in the Pre-Draw script, the technic is explained in that tutorial video (at 1:18:00):
https://youtu.be/wH6G296onhs?t=4678
 
dale_coop said:
You can't add new elements in the HUD element list, becausethose elements are kinda hardcoded in the scripts (when rendered depending of their types)...

For your A / B in red, you'll have to change the color of those letters in the HUDTiles.bmp

About the weapon dispaled on the HUD, it could be done in the Pre-Draw script, the technic is explained in that tutorial video (at 1:18:00):

Would that change the color when you are using setting up normal txt by NPC and such?

Yeah I remembered that one. I will look through the displayed weapon.
 

dale_coop

Moderator
Staff member
Hmm... yeah, it would change the color for the text as well.
Or another possibility would be to use 2 unused tiles, in your HUD tileset... put your colored "A" and "B" and assigned to a special character that you dont use in your text...
 
dale_coop said:
Hmm... yeah, it would change the color for the text as well.
Or another possibility would be to use 2 unused tiles, in your HUD tileset... put your colored "A" and "B" and assigned to a special character that you dont use in your text...

I saw in one of the demos they where able to do a text box with two different colors of text. I am guessing they colored it through code? If so how?
 
Here is an update of the world thus far. I still have a lot to design in those new grassy area which I will get to as I build. So right now they are a bit empty especially being that I didn't focus on enemies right now though I do have a few already made. Please let me know if you can not see the video and images. I put it on hidden but I am not sure if you can see it through posting directly here rather than a link.

https://imgur.com/thCnyDt

<--Text Box-->

LJPtZlJ.png


I believe I mentioned this on our FB group page (I have to go through it again) I wanted to make the BG tile that is a Road Sign to bring up a text box. I believe I have seen this on Turtle Rescue. I do love how he put the exclamation point in the icon box to indicate you can interact with it. Anyone know how that was set up? Even if its just the text box is fine. I just know how to do it through NPC but not as a BG tile.

<--Kill Count and EXP Count-->

Is it possible to have both Kill and EXP counters in a drop menu? I wanted to try and put this together for certain quest. Sadly I played FFXI for way too long and certain things from FFXI I would like to bring over.

<--Drop Items-->

5n1OG98.png


Currency?! That's too easy. I wanted to make a decent amount of enemies drop items that you will collect to sell for your currency rather than monsters dropping money :D Yet again me making things complicated lol Of course the drop items will come from the monster tiles. I am not worried with the color palette being that each monster would have their own item. Am I crazy to put four monsters in one tile set? HAHA

<--Kill Animation-->

Already as it is what I initially there are things I was prevented from doing due to tile constriction I didn't want the kill animation fro monsters to be in the players tile. I ran into a post that you were able to have the animation play from the monster's tile set through code?

With that said, I don't need to add everything all at once, these are things that I wanted to add as I get to that point. Right now one step at a time. BG tile Text for now would be great. Aye, times like this either way I wished I knew how to code lol
 

dale_coop

Moderator
Staff member
fjamesfernandez said:
Aye, times like this either way I wished I knew how to code lol

And me, I wished I knew how to do graphics!

I suggest you to make individual topic for each request, when you need it. We will try helping you, of course :)
(if/when we have tim, I guess we are all busy, involved in our projects... some of us in several projects at the same time) ;)
 
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