The Shining Source

Just a quick update today. Things are progressing well, and it’s starting to look more like a game now than just a lot of parts stuck together. There’s still a lot more to do, but it’s getting there.

Anyway, here’s a quick screen of how it looks so far:

So far there’s a scrolling map with front and back layers, transparency and full collision detection. Nothing too amazing, but it works, and that’s the main thing at the moment.

The next step is getting some proper animation going, and then maybe some menus and things to investigate.

bludragn from the Shining Force Central forums posted some information about his new Shining style engine on the PC.

You can read about it on his blog, which includes some videos of it in action. There are plenty of features working already, it has a nice modern take on the SF2 classic style.

There’s also some in-depth discussions about the inner workings of the engine, including a great power point presentation which has some detailed descriptions of the engine and how it works. It’s definitely worth reading if you’re putting your own engine together.

A demo download and and link to he presentation can be found in this “Shining Force PC” post.

Be sure to leave some feedback in the SFC forums!

Source: Shining Force style Game Engine for PC (Videos)

Moogie posted some new videos of Tatakai over at Shining Force Central. They show a good range of gameplay, as well as various features that were implemented. Definitely worth checking out!

You can watch the videos on the Shining Force Central YouTube channel, and drop some feedback in the topic at the SFC forums.

Source: Tatakai – Mascot Force video topic

Whoah, what just happened? One day it’s 2007 and I’m working away on my shining forces style project called “Spark” in C++, and the next day it’s 2010!

Seriously though, I kept working on Spark, but it wasn’t going where I wanted it to. So I scrapped it and started over. This time using actionscript. I’m much happier with how it is progressing now and I’m planning to have a playable game out by the end of this year. Maybe a few more game updates as well.

Let’s get straight to the fun stuff, shall we?

Picture Time!

Below is a very early screen grab of the latest tileset. It’s nothing particularly fancy, but hopefully fits with the Shining Force 2 style.

There are still a lot more transition tiles to do, as well as animating the water and adding little touches to make it more interesting, but it’s getting there.

There are two other maps in the works, but this one is the most colourful and complete at the moment.

Boring Developer Stuff

Yeah, now it’s time for more boring screenshots, but this time of some development tools and engine features.

First up we have a really simple directory listener. It runs in the background and watches a directory for changes. When there’s a change, it broadcasts it to any listening client. Why is this useful?

With a little bit of tweaking, the engine can listen for these messages and then reload resources that have changed on the fly. This makes it much easier to see how tilesets, maps and animations look without having to restart the game.

Next, we have the built in console. If you’ve played Doom, Quake or similar, you’ll know what this is for. Again, it’s about making it easier to see changes without having to restart or recompile.

So far the console is only really useful for listening for debug messages, but in the future there will be commands for checking what objects are currently active, what’s in the database and more.

As with most things, there’s some effort up front, but in the long run it should pay off.