Heh, forgot to sign up at oga. Done now ;-)

Loved that (collateral effect) green mustache! =^D

Althought mmo games aren't for my taste, good luck in the contest!

I'm pretty excited to see this one! Keep up the good work!

Thanks, we'll for sure keep working on this. Sadly, not much done today - just some sprites added and some trying to figure out how to use all the new tiles ;-)

We also have some concept Ablu drawed for the spawn, but it's probably pretty useless for you since it's quite unreadable and completely in german (as everyone of us except bjorn is german). Well, nevertheless, here it is:

Little translation: Starting point is some kind of casern. There the player will get a very short introduction to the basics of the game. This concept is a rough sketch of a possible structure of the casern - a little bit symmetrical for now as it's just a sketch.
Background info: Second big fraction besides the army in our game will be the rebels - uncontent with the increasing demand for soldiers and food for a war that is fought far away. At least that's what they say.

More 2 come - I'm going to sleep now. Also, if anybody has a clue how to properly use the castle exterior tileset of the base assets, please show us a little example :-)

Woohoo!

Go guys :D

You are a gentleman for posting those automapping rules, they will save me (and probably others) SO MUCH TIME.

I think I love you ;)

We currently only have a few rules also they might have issues (at least the ones i did). Have fun using it anyway ;)

a

Well, I'm very inexperienced with tiled, so I'm really happy with everything I can get.

I'll happily share my automapping rules (if I manage to make some) with you guys too, would it maybe be helpful for us to have a separate repository somewhere for those types of LPC-wide things?

Basically a 'LPC tiled' repository with TMX rules, the spritesheets cut up and normalized (we'll all have to do that)

I'll be happy to run a TRAC instance with git on tmm.cx for an effort like that?

@Tero
Nice! Though I'd be happy if you could post your progress in a seperate thread to keep this one related to our manasource game. We hope to have a nice development log in the end :-)

I'd love to hear more though, as I'm keen on all the other games produced during the contest.

@TMM: you can try setting it up (though i would prefer github for easier collaboration). Though i do not know if there are too many people using it (and way less contributing). Also Rules need a lot of time to create (which we do not have).

We will probably rather map by hand than spending many hours into automapping rules (or terrain settings).

Time for daily update again :-)

Today we did some progress on the castle tileset. Ablu added some missing tiles to enable us building complete walls including gates (which is what we need - a whole castle would be too much). Little sketch of it (not complete, but should show that it's possible now):

Also, we did some more corrections on base sprites and hairstyle. I wouldn't have expected so much work with simply putting the hairstyles of the styleguide to use. Seems like we used an old version of the base assets that had some faults in it - would have save us quite some work if we had known that before ;-)

Also, we're in some preparations for an official testing server at manasource.org - which would mean, everyone can get the latest mana client and login to see the latest git version of our game, without setting up an own server. Everyone - that includes YOU :-) A little howto will follow when it's done.

That's all for today. For tomorrow, I hope I can serve you a complete map of the spawn - it's a tough aim, but we'll give our best.

Good night everyone! See you tomorrow.

P.S.: For everyone having similar problems as us, you can find the extended castle tilesets (indoor and outdoor) in our repository. But probably we should rather contact the author and ask how the tilesets are supposed to be used properly?

Hey,

The map of the spawn is not complete yet, though quite much is already done - I attached a picture of it.

Not much else to say for today, just the usual hairstyle/tileset correction. Hairstyles are almost done now; Players will then have over 150 different options of hair (17 hairstyle * 10 colors) to choose from, which is (multiplied by genders) way over 300 different base characters that are choosable :-)

Going to bed, good night!

This may be a bit self-seving, (as I'm the one who did this piece of art) but maybe the facial expressions can be used like hair to add another layer of customization? They should be overlayable onto both base sprites' heads just like the hair is. Just a thought.

Keep up the good work! It's looking awesome!

It is already a challange to prevent render order issues with air. facial expressions would be another layer to care of. But we plan to support races in future. Of course different race probably does not only mean different facial expression...

Heh, can't blame me for trying. ;)

Great work you guys. Keep it up!

pennomi, don't be disappointed. Mana has emotion support - I already though about whether we could use your facial expressions as part of that ;-)

Problem is, though, that you can't see them when the character isn't facing south. So I don't know whether it would be worth the work.

"I don't know whether it would be worth the work."

Yeah, I understand that! :) I'm cutting features like crazy just so I can get my game off the ground.

Hey,

I just added the first enemy to the game:

Its a training dummy :-) We plan on using it in our little "tutorial" where a veteran teaches you the very basics of the game. Thanks to wulax for the great sprite he did on our request - the dummy keeps constantly rotating 360°. We're still lacking a death animation, though I'll figure something out. Had things in mind like disappearing in a cloud of smoke... Probably wulax will even make a proper animation for us.

Well, sadly, nothing much else new today; Happened that no one of the team had time today... Though we keep going, I promise^^

Good night everyone!

@Pennomi: Yep, fear of not getting the game done in time is certainly one of my worries... Also, you always don't have that much time for game creating in real life than you want to have. So I'm kinda priorizing.
Just have to remember that hurrying when map-making is the end of high quality maps ;-) (that's a little bit the problem of automapping)

haha nice,

your game seems to be going along well (I can't wait to try it). You are lucky that you have 7 people working on it. Good luck with winning the competition.

Well most people need to study/work/have other things to do. Everybody does as much and what he or she likes to do. The aim is not to win this cup but to do have fun building a game and testing if our server is ready for building games with it. So the number of people does not say anything i guess. I am pretty sure we will see very interesting games that were writting alone or in smaller teams.

Well, my aim is completing the basics of the game before the month ends. Which doesn't exactly seem to be easily achieved... Of course winning would be even better than just getting things done *g*

Well, daily update... I couldn't resist of leaking parts of it in #liberatedpixelcup, though ;-)

First, the neverending story of hairstyles... Ablu did finally make them dyable, which means you can choose the color of your hair at the start of the game. We just need to find some good looking colors now.

We also did some minor changes at the spawn map, added collisions and a spawn zone for the training dummys. I began with the indoor maps of the casern (only basic layout of the storage area done yet) - I also realized that we might have to recolor the walls of the inside tileset; Wouldn't be good if all buildings have blue walls inside, right? :P

Jenalya began creating some npc background stories and dialogs - more info on that tomorrow, 'cause I'll have to take a closer look into that stuff first to tell you what she has done.

Also, wulax brought us great news: He did make a combat dummy death animation for us. Thank you very very much, wulax! For the others, check it out here:

That was all for today. Going to bed, See you tomorrow :-)

P.S.: Attached a screenshot that shows pretty much what we've got so far at the spwawn map.

Good evening everyone,

Ablu pointed me on the high view count of this thread - wow! I'm really stunned about this amount of interest in our project - thank you all! The lpc community is just great :-)

Speaking of great, we did quite some new things today :P
We added wulax dummy death animation ingame (and fixed the AUTHORS file, quite some entries missing...). Also, PjotrOrial started mapping Goldenfields, which happens to be the village this game is settled in. It's not the capitol of the country, just some little small village somewhere in a lesser visited corner. See a WIP preview here:

Also, Ablu did include some sprite definitions using the equipment sprites we have (guess what, again done by wulax) and Jenalya put them together to some example set of npcs. We can change what they are wearing anytime later, also, some of them might get hair, but here it is:

Lastly, Ablu started implementing monster groups (which means, monsters wandering aroung in groups ;-) ). This would enable us to make quests like "ambush that soldier patroul there" for the rebels or "search for rebels in the woods and extinct groups of them". Also, we plan on making these groups quite tough, so that you have to team up with other players to successfully solve these quests :-)

That was all for today. Good night @all!

P.S.: Attached some random bonus screenshot for you :-) Somehow the Mana client gave me that as a screenshot... Seems to be some bug:

Hey,

Can't really show you any work right now - Ablu has added very many lpc assets to our repository for later use, but that also means they're not ingame yet (adding means creating xml files for them etc., so it's not as trivial as you might think).
There are some other minor changes, too, but I don't want to bore you to death with this.

I'll rather give you access to some brand-new sketches and ideas we had concerning UI design! The current UI is quite much what themanaworld is currently, but we want our game to be more action oriented (most tmw players would totally freak out if you'd kill them ingame, if it was allowed - we saw this behaviour quite often in an pvp enabled alternative). So we decided to pick some low resolution for our game and just resize that to something near screen resolution, if necessary - that way, everything isn't so tiny on the screen...

Also, we discussed some alternatives concerning allocation of GUI elements. Were not sure yet which one is best, so I'll just post the top 3 of them here. Maybe you could help us which one is best and why?

What do you think?

Well, I'll sleep over it now. See you!

I'm not completely sure what all the parts of the sketches are supposed to represent, but I think the first one would be easiest to use (for me anyway).

If I would need to click the buttons/tabs on the chat window I can move the cursor to the top left corner of the screen and easily click them by moving the cursor horizontally. Clicking on those buttons/tabs in the other versions would require a more precise movement to not end up in the lower left corner of the screen. Similar rules would probably apply to the other elements of the GUI.

Always try to put clickable things at the corner of the screen, and without stupid unclickable borders like some intefaces use. That doesn't apply if controlling the GUI with the keyboard of course.

Hi wulax,

Yeah, currently it seems like the first one is our favorite, too. Your mouse aiming argumentation is of course perfectly valid. For switching tabs we could probably also have a firefox-like hotkey like Ctrl-Tab and Ctrl-Shift-Tab as alternative for "advanced users" who're able to remember some hotkeys ;-)

Thanks a lot for your feedback.

Hey all,

Today just a very brief update as I'm really tired right now. Ablu has added support for monster groups/patrols! You can see a patrol of beetles (the new beetle sprite of Redshrike) here:

The patrol is able to walk from waypoint to waypoint via script control. We'll try it out with actual soldiers later :-)

Also, I have bad news for you: Players will most likely not be able to play women in the game, at least not in the version published at the end of lpc coding phase. We realized that there are no female versions of all the assets we wanted to use.
There would be the possibility to make females use other assets, like letting only males be soldiers and females can only support the army as magicians (we have sprites for that) - but that's simply out of scope for this month. It would mean doubled work, so we can't handle this if we want to get a working complete version of the game done till due date.

It will not mean that there are no women ingame, though. You just can't play them. Well, at least it's one different choice less when creating a character, right? ;-)

That's it for today, I'm going to bed now. Good night!

Daily progress update again!

Today, I extended the spawn map a bit and added the area right in front of the baracks entrance. This is merchants area, where they hope to squeeze the last money out of the new recruits in exchange for equipment, alcohol, potions, sex, weapons, etc. - whatever a soldier might need!
Short screen (you can't see any merchants there yet):

Also, I made some in-game screens of the casern, populated with some npcs (thank Jenalya for it!):

That's all you get for today - Hope you are as exited as me to see the final game :-)

Of course I'm still a bit worried about the time constraints - The first third of lpc is already over! Well, but we'll see. Our progress could be far worse than what we have now.

Good night everyone!

Hey all,

Some news again. I'll shortly summarize new things, since it's just so much:
 - ADDED: some new items/equipment
 - ADDED: spike trap for caves (fully functional incl. sound, also triggers on monsters, harhar...)
 - ADDED: a skeleton mage and guards/soldiers as monsters - patrols with soldiers are also already working (non-aggressive, will attack all if one of them is hurt)
 - ADDED: Quest, storage master is now illegally selling stolen army equipment, though you first have to get some hint so he starts selling on you
 - ADDED: Some female npcs (no actual implementation, just combinations of sprites to test look)
 - ADDED: Some of the tutorial logic (getting weapons, equipment, fighting the training dummys, stuff like that)
 - FIXED: attack animation for hair

And now some random screens of the new additions (as we all love neat screenshots :-) ):



Yeah, I know - the patrol soldiers are looking like clones atm ;-) But that will change soon. It was just for the sake of simple testing.

Quite a lot for today :-) See you later!

[23:24:21] <jurkan> Now, what should I write in update?
[23:25:52] <Ablu> jurkan: that we did vacation today *_*
[23:25:58] <jurkan> hehe
[23:26:06] <Ablu> and only did a few half finished scripts and automap rules
[23:26:20] <Ablu> ah and bjorn worked on client
[23:27:04] <jurkan> I could write the story of me taking 1,5 h of getting to university, then realizing that course was cancelled today, and driving home for another hour^^
[23:27:12] <jurkan> Which is why I didn't get anything done today.
[23:27:59] <jurkan> Or I could just paste this IRC log
[23:28:09] <Ablu> heh better not ;)
[23:28:15] <jurkan> Starting with "Now, what should I write in update?"
[23:28:33] <jurkan> I think I'll just do that.
[23:28:37] <Ablu> heh ok

[EDIT] I think this short IRC log will give you a better impression of today's work than any other comment of me will.

Hey all,

Last update was quite brief. Today we did a little bit more. I spent some hours on the cave automapping rules, since I realized we'd have to make 3 tiles wide hallways, because two tiles of it have to be collision -.- I now moved the tiles by 16 px and it feels better now, but without complete automapping rules. Pah! Who needs Automapping? :P

Also, there are some new skeleton monsters, some new npcs's and npc texts and some engine changes that are far to technical to be of interest for you (but very necessary).

We also almost finished the scaling feature of the client! There are only some small issues and we can soon go over to try out a new UI according to our concept above! Some screenshot of the scaled client interface (640x360 base resolution):

Some other news: We have now a testing server running on some VPS - it's lacking automatic updates and a proper spawn location yet, though, so we won't let you know the secret url and get you on it yet :P

Well, I'm going to bed now, it's quite late. More screenshots tomorrow, probably. Or just beg to some of us here or in #liberatedpixelcup ;-)

Good night!

Hey,

Some new updates for you! We finally merged spawn map and goldenfields and will now start mapping the surroundings. Two screenshots for you: Sketch what is planned to be and tiled map what it looks like at the moment:

In the forest at the east, there will be the rebels main hiding spot.

Also, Ablu included the new spell graphics von daneeklu as traps. So you can experience the full fun of getting burned or spiked to death when exploring some cave - or, if you are smart, you can share that fun with the patrol of soldiers following you... :-)

Furthermore, we have some new npcs and npc dialogs, and the first indoor map is finished (the storage building of the barracks):

So were getting closer to where we want to! Still, it's not really as much as it should probably be - half the contest is already over. Well, we keep going and hope that we can finish in time.
Anyways, whether we'll be in time or not, we'll most likely continue the game after lpc.

That's all for today,
good night!

Hi all!

Today we got a bunch of new things again (I love weekend productivity!):

- The casern storage got a new dusty level directly under the roof

- The main map was extended and modified a little bit, some leftover merging work got done

- Exploding bananas!
- WIP indoor map for the barracks (by atheros)

- And lastly: I don't dare to say... Some hairstyle corrections again -.-

Well, probably I have to say a little bit more about that exploding bananas thing. I don't think Ablu intended to leave the item graphic of it as a banana ;-) Essentially it should be a bomb. It can be placed, then after some seconds it will explode and make substancial damage to all beings around it - if you manage to get one off in a patrol of soldiers, this could be decisive for the battle, so the bomb will most likely a relatively rare item.

Also, seem's like we got a new team member - Welcome in the team, atheros! Good that there is no maximum cap for the count of team members in lpc :D

Good night!

Love me some exploding banana, unless I'm eating one. D:

Hey all,

33 commits today (if I didn't miscount) :-)
New things are for example:

- two nice indoor maps (by our great new mapper atheros) for the barracks

- I updated main map (new mountains, yeah!)

- Work in progress sympathy system (there are now different dialogs depending on the sympathy the specific faction has for you)
- and as always, much technical stuff that won't be of any interest for you ;-)

That's all for today -
Good night!

Hey,

Today not as much new things as we had during the weekend. So I'll mainly have two things to show you.

Firstly, Ablu made some new spells and a screencast where you can see him using them. You can find it here.

Secondly, atheros extended the lower level casern map a little bit:

That's all I've got to show for you today! Good night!

Specials are working O.O

Woohoo! Keep it on guys :)

Yes. But the UI of the specials needs some work. And we do not have any shortcut support for them yet :)

Hello :)

Today I am writing the daily update.

There was further work on the interiour of the barrack:

• NPCs were added
• some mapping corrections

And we added some new spells (heal spell and snake bite spell):

And finally we started looking into our UI mockup. We will see what we will manage there...

Good night!

Ablu

Hello again :)

atheros made a cool interiour map for the basement of the casern (first version, some things might change):

Sorry... I put this image on dropbox and since the new one had same filename i accidently overwrote the old image that was here once. The image below is a newer one :/

And I started with finishing the theming of the client using daneeklu's gui entry:

Please ignore the character standing right in the castle ;) It is our broken spawn since the map was resized.

Jurkan also did some changes on our main map. But nothing interesting

Thats it :)

Best regards

Ablu

360

Hello,

Not much viewable happened today...

atheros kept working on the cellar:

And a few items were added:

The rest was only some planning of quests/gameplay. We will post that as soon it becomes ready.

Good night!

Ablu

Hi,

Three new maps:

A candle shadow was added to basement of casern:

And a few new items:

Good night!

Ablu

Hi again,

We got a new map today:

Client got a new font:

Some work was done to add new monsters (not entirely done yet):

And we started working on filling our cave with life (well are skeletons alive?) and making it more "scary".

Here is a screenshot of a triggered trap:

Some work was done on making scripting easier. But no way to show that in screenshots here ;)

Thats it for today.

Good night

Ablu

Look forward to seeing more.

Ok update time again.

The only thing that happened was that Jenalya did a new quest about collecting taxes (do not want to spoiler too much)

I also recorded a small video of random stuff of our world. Youtube broke the quality a bit during upload (my first youtube video). But here it is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtHiYNlYebw

Thats it for today. Not much happened since people learned for exams / enjoyed the nice weather.

Hopefully upcoming updates will be more interesting ;)

Good night

Ablu

Hi,

Jenalya made progress on the scripts.

Some npcs got text:

And a new quest was written:

Good night!

Ablu

I don't know about you, but it feels like this game could have a life after the LPC. ;)

@Bertram: That was the plan ;) But probably with a bit slower development :P

Best regards

Erik

Game has really simplistic, but catchy style. In some way it feels more towards star ocean from snes. But it's of course unique :)

I hope that in after-lpc-life client will get a new interface so it will differ from TMW Clones, (different approach to life bars?) npc dialog boxes could be redesigned in a way that will look more rpgish style, not a football-manager-game style. Maybe certain items (like skills button/smilies) should be unlocked after completing some sort of newbie quests? So new player won't be overloaded with a little bit complicated menu, but will be slowly introduced to game mechanics in a friendly, active way, not asking players or searching information on game wiki.

So far you've made nice progress, can't wait to play it!