Lilly's Saga - The Stones of Evergreen

Paladin (747)

05-11-2021, 18:30

Yay! The title for the game is set.

It's been six months since last posting about this game, and even longer since I put out any footage. For along time, a lot of effort has been put into the technical side of things. New stuff + refactoring has been a constant activity. But lately, I'm happy to say that we've been moving more into content production.

Wolf is onboard and is producing some marvellous stuff on the FM-chip. As a techie, I seriously had to twist my head around a couple of times to get it into level design mode. I seriously respect the profession of game design. Making a game fun, can be hard. It is, in the end, what makes a game great/succeed or not, so it shouldn't be taken lightly. But yeah, right now, I'm having so much fun designing levels. I think it will be a fun game

We'll share some footage from the development versions as we go, and here is a glimpse of the first of five different level themes, "Mountain Road": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlXtp_Ug_kI

More to come :-)

Por hamlet

Scribe (4106)

05-11-2021, 18:50

Nice to see your game progresses. Looking forward to see more.

Por santiontanon

Paragon (1805)

05-11-2021, 19:56

Very cool!! I was wondering about how was the game progressing! Looking forward to what you two come up with

Por Bengalack

Paladin (747)

05-11-2021, 21:23

Thank you for the kind words :-)

Well - it's amazing how much work it is to get everything right. But we're getting there, one step at the time. And it is rewarding to see things are taking shape :-)

Por Manuel

Ascended (19461)

05-11-2021, 23:05

Looking great! Tiny nitpick: some things seem a bit rough, e.g. when jumping up to a question-mark box, it doesn't even move a bit... that's what you would expect (But those are all details of course... better do them at the end if at all..)

Por Bengalack

Paladin (747)

06-11-2021, 09:10

Manuel wrote:

Looking great!

Thanks!

Manuel wrote:

Tiny nitpick: some things seem a bit rough, e.g. when jumping up to a question-mark box, it doesn't even move a bit... that's what you would expect (But those are all details of course... better do them at the end if at all..)

It would be cool if it moved. But, well, it isn't Mario, so I have designed it to behave differently (at LOT of things are not like Mario here, of course). Actually I have blocks that moves on bump, coming in another theme, but not the question marks. There might be something I can do to make an effect, not sure at this point. As you know, this is a balance of gameplay and what resources you have available, and right now, the tileset has no available tiles left, and the all sprites are occupied as well. Cpu cycles play a part too. Must run flawlessly in 60Hz.

Appreciate the feedback though. I might have a strong vision for the game, but I can't always know what people expect. And even if I cannot (or possibly, do not want to) make the game as others want it, it's nice to get input along the way. Wolf has certainly come up with some ideas where I've intially said "no, that can't be done" (Note: always due to performance reasons). And then, after a night's sleep, and elegant, non-costly, way of doing it, pops into your head

Por Manuel

Ascended (19461)

06-11-2021, 12:31

Yeah, it's great how that works, isn't it?

Of course it isn't Mario. But it isn't for nothing that they did that moving block when you hit it hard in Mario... It just looks a bit coarse if you hit something from below and something pops out, but there is no movement at all in it. But as I already said: it doesn't matter for the game play, so such things should not end high on the prio list.

Por Bengalack

Paladin (747)

07-11-2021, 16:03

We'll make some more footage soon and I'll likely post those updates in this thread To get a notification, just follow Lilly's Saga on your favorite social media: Twitter, Facebook or Youtube.

Por Manuel

Ascended (19461)

07-11-2021, 18:40

Will do! Thanks!

Por Grauw

Ascended (10767)

07-11-2021, 20:04

Nice parallax background! And nice music too .

Por Bengalack

Paladin (747)

13-11-2021, 10:05

Grauw wrote:

Nice parallax background!

Thanks. In fact, I've shared videos with cloud parallax before, but the affect wasn't too apparent, so Wolf made me re-think, haha I have rewritten the routine totally, so it slows down to half the speed (visually) of what it used to be. Ideally I could like to have it even slower than this - making it even more apparent. -But, the algorithm is based on changing the tile patterns, so there is a limit of how many tiles I can afford to spend on the clouds. Right now it uses 32 tiles, and I can't really use more. If I could (say use 64 tiles), there are some other considerations to make as well, like calling the parallax routine every frame vs every second, and the fact that the bounding box ("real estate") of every cloud would occupy as much as 32x2 tiles in the level. Yeah, so I think we stroke the right balance.

Grauw wrote:

And nice music too .

Totally! In upcoming footage there will be more wolf-magic. We are planning at least one track (and sometimes more) for each theme. Streaming the raw YM-2413-commands directly works well, and is as optimized as you can get it :-) Thanks to the megarom-format I am able to fit all the data into the game... -music data wins the competition when it comes to storage requirements