Nexus City Fridays, 10th Dec

Posted in nexus city

Didn’t do a whole lot of work on Nexus City this week; I’ve mostly been busy finishing up a small project I worked on at last weekend’s Everybody Draw Game Jam. Hopefully that’ll finally be finished by the end of this week!

Following on from suggestions last week, though, I doubled the basic resolution of the game so I could use a larger font, and free up the textboxes so that they appeared beside the character that’s speaking. This is a WIP screenshot – I don’t really know what the textboxes are going to look like yet – but I think the concept is basically working!

The big advantage of doing textboxes this way is that it makes cutscene choreography a hell of a lot easier for me – i.e. it’s now always clear who’s talking, which up to now has been a real problem (which I mostly solved by having people constantly turning or stepping forward, Final Fantasy VI style).

5 Comments

Nexus City Fridays, 3rd Dec

Posted in nexus city

This game is really starting to come together! Pretty much everything I’m adding to the game at this point requires me to do something new with code or scripting, so progress up till now has been a bit slow. Once I’m finished this first area, though, I think I should be able to quickly catch up with Jonas’ script.

Given the sheer amount of text in the game, I’m thinking of mixing resolutions and using a higher resolution font for the textboxes. What do you think? Good idea or not?

I’m off to London this weekend for a super cool game jam, and with any luck I should have a new small game for the sidebar when I get back. (If you’re around London and have the weekend free, why not join us? There are still some places left!)

6 Comments

Nexus City Fridays, 26th Nov

Posted in nexus city

Didn’t expect to be posting another editor shot this week, but a cold left me out of action for a few days, so it’s pretty much all I got done. On Wednesday I probably should have moved on to finally mapping out Coal Mine Canyon, but I got a little carried away with editor coding (I miss Allegro!), and added a bunch of little things to make my life easier. Particularly happy with the mouse wheel controlled selector on the left of the screen!

Ok, ok; I should have something more interesting next Friday.

7 Comments

The Infinite Ocean Awaits

I first played The Infinite Ocean in college, and loved it for its moody atmosphere and clever writing. Jonas Kyratzes originally released it way back in 2003 as a downloadable game – but just yesterday, he re-released it as a browser game, significantly reworked.

I’m collaborating with Jonas on Nexus City. If you’re not familiar with his games and wanna get a feel for his style, this is a good place to start!

9 Comments

Nexus City Fridays

Posted in nexus city

My main project right now is Nexus City, an RPG I’m working on with Jonas Kyratzes. Originally planned as a week long minirpg for an RPGDX contest, we’ve now been working on it on and off for months, and this week I started full production of it. My plan is to work on it five days a week, with weekends kept for other things (like this, this and this!).

For my own motivation, I’m gonna try posting new screenshots of it on a weekly basis! This week I’ve got a screenshot of the map editor, which is what I spent most of the week working on.

The game’s built in a little flash RPG engine I put together for a short abandoned RPG I worked on over the summer, and as a result isn’t anywhere nearly flexible enough for something as big as this game’s shaping up to be. So, this week I mostly worked on improving the engine, which isn’t work I particularly like doing, but had to be done. Lots of little things that I used to have to do manually are now handled for me by the engine – maps are named instead of numbered, and I can link them together in the editor. Scripts are now human readable instead of looking like assembly language. I don’t have to manually break up textboxes anymore.

Normally I try to do as little engine coding as I can get away with, but doing all this should hopefully make actually developing the game a lot faster (and more pleasant).

13 Comments

News from Nexus City

Posted in nexus city

I ended up being really busy in September with non-game making stuff, but I’m still working on Nexus City!

Next week I’m taking a few days off to attend Indiecade! When I get back, though, this project is going to be my main focus until it’s finished. My other projects (the Ludum Dare RPG and TIGSource compo game), I’m putting on hold for a while.

Jonas and I only meant to spend about a week on this, but I guess we weren’t really taking the whole “it’s an RPG” thing into account. It is a relatively small project, though. Hopefully it won’t take too long before we can share it with you.

7 Comments

Take me down to Nexus City

Here’s a few screenshots of the current game I’m working on. For the moment, we’re calling it Nexus City. The game’s an RPG set in an alternate Arizona, and I’ve been working on it for the last 10 days or so with Jonas Kyratzes for RPGDX’s just finished Alternate History Challenge. (Jonas is the creator of Phenomenon 32, an amazing exploration platformer that far more people should play.)

We didn’t finish it for the deadline, being an RPG and all, but we have made some pretty amazing progress on it. We’re hoping to have it finished in a couple of weeks!

Before that, though, I’m taking this weekend off to make something for Ludum Dare 18! If you’re within travelling distance of Cambridge, why don’t you join us? You can find out more in this TIGSource thread.

9 Comments