Old, old prototypes [part 2]

Cauldrons, plants, potions, and a big eyed lady protagonist. The more things change, the more things stay the same. Sometimes I wonder if I will keep on attempting to make the same game again and again for the rest of time.

This was the big project I was working on towards the end of uni (It wasn’t a game degree, so I had to make these in my free time). The game is rendering the sprites using 3d shells with a (near) perfect projection. Using the cutout method and a z-buffer to handle the sorting. This eliminates most of the horrible sort-order conflicts of isometric tiling, but I could never get the projection to be quite stable. A slight but somewhat nauseating shake effect would occur every time the character moved.

In the end I did not have the skills to bring the project to a workable state. My colours were muddy, my art lumpy, my coding subpar (or, at least insufficient for the scope I was aiming for). But part of me cannot help but love the strange mess in all its wonky glory.

Old, old prototypes [part 1]

Last week I was searching my old hard disk for some assets when I stumbled over my Gamedev folder from when I was in university. Seeing how the old drive might not live for much longer, I decided it would be a good time to export some clips and store them in various places on the interwebs. There exists a frightening heap of Game Maker projects which I worked on before these, but the versions of the software that is required to play them no longer works. So those projects might already be lost to time.

Most of my work during uni was isometric, an art-style which I still adore. However, the programming isometric graphics is something I have little love for. It’s one of the reasons almost all of my work for the last few years has featured mostly flat and overhead perspectives. One cannot adequately express in words the sheer fiddliness of isometric tiling when combined with moving objects, fences, and thin walls. But man, it does look gorgeous.