Power to stage one emitters in three...two...one

8-bit is quite a bit of a challenge if one wants to use a 3D engine like Panda3D, one could go mad trying to do that... so I've gone mad before the start just to save myself some time.

The idea I had is to use 3D graphics, just like I would do normally and then use a filter to make it look like in the olden days. Here's a mock-up on how it should work (in GIMP for now, but the shader shouldn't be that difficult to make- even for me):

As far as gameplay goes I decided to do a caveman beat'em-up. I don't know where the idea came from, but when I think of old games I think of titles like Cadillacs and Dinosaurs(not 8-bit but well...) and Prehistorik... the Iron Maiden track 'Quest for Fire' could also be blamed.

The plan for today is:

• Write and test a retro shader
• Make a character with MakeHuman
• Write a loader-setup thing
• Find a retro/pixel font
• Find some music
• Find or make some textures (grass, rock, tree, etc)

I'm seeing predictable phase arrays, stage 2 emitters activating...now.

Yesterday I've managed to write some... well, for lack of better words 'code'. I imagine normal people don't need 3 list, 2 dictionaries, a tuple and 3 'for' loops to read and write some config values, but well, ain't got time to be bothered by such things, especially if it works.

The task for today is to setup the camera, environment scrolling and character movement.

I'm showing a small discrepancy in... well, no, it's well within acceptable bounds again. Sustaining sequence.

So, the game is done, almost all of the things I wanted to do are made, the one big thing lacking is an intro. There could also be a few more animations (like a 'win' animation) but I ain't got the time nor the will to do that. I'm just happy I get to finish this time when it's still bright outside.

I will be uploading the source in a matter of minutes (a 23MB zip file, not so bad), and then a windows installer, a multiplatform .p3d file and binary for mac and linux. If I feel like it I'll make a playthrough video and upload it to the tube.

A big thanks for all the people who run and rated my game, especially those on non-windows systems that Panda3D dislikes. It's a bit funny (and sad) as procrastimancer and I, who both used Panda3D got 12 scores and 36% DNW

Anyway I'm happy with what I've done in a weeks time, even if most people didn't find my game much fun. I'd say it was more fun (for me) then my entry last time and I'll call that a successes.

The innovations as far as gameplay or genre are almost non-existent, it's a beat'em-up game. The only thing is the way the time-pressure works in my game. There is no timer or countdown but the time of the day and lighting changes - it's not that apparent on the default difficulty setting but on 'hard' the level is longer, there are more monsters and they are much tougher - it's hard to get to the fire before nightfall and at night without a fire it is next to impossible to spot and avoid traps... but if someone only played on the 'normal' setting and not long, one might miss that lighting changes at all.

The innovations where on the technical side. It is a modern 3D game that mimics a old 2D games that in turn tried to mimic 3D. The level is also random, or random-ish, composed each time from 7 (or more) out of 11 available tiles.

I feel that the innovation score was lowered because my game had more then 8-bits. For those I can only say - set the color count to 5 and pixel size to 4, if that's still not 8-bit enough you're masochistic.

The easter eggs.

On one of the tiles there's a crashed spaceship from my last entry:

There's also a 'monolith' like in 'Space Odyssey' (it's hard to tell) and Stonehenge.

In the readme I mentioned a 'nude-patch' configuration option... and it actually works if someone was bold enough to set it to '1'. But I'm not gonna post screenshots of that ;)