Progress Thread: Cheril the Goddess

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na_th_an
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Progress Thread: Cheril the Goddess

Post by na_th_an »

As my two main entries are finished and tested, awaiting submission, and there's still 20 days to go, I've decided to try to create another entry in the remaining time. It's an extended por of one of our old ZX Spectrum games, Cheril the Goddess. It will be a side scrolling action-adventure game in which you have to deactivate three temples in order to open three gates to reach the Hall of the Gods.

Cheril can jump and run, you know the drill. There will be special altars in which she can refill her might. With a full refill you gain three "blasts" you can use to become a super-heroine for a few seconds (during which you are immune to enemies and can fly) or use a teleporter to the first screen, located at the center of the map, which connects all sections.

In order to deactivate the temples which protect the gates you have to "beat" the altar in there with a special object. There are three temples: the temple of Stone, the temple of Scissors and the temple of Paper. Guess which object you need to beat each ;)

Right away I've planned the engine, set up some data converters, created the map and pixeled some of the graphics.

The map is rather big and I want a flashy opening cutscene. This will be a UNROM game.

This is a minimap you can access pressing SELECT. It shows where you, the temples, and the objects are located. Its looks will improve, this is just a barebones implementation:
image_2017-01-11_23-19-17.png
Those are the WIP graphics. More to come. Enemies are placeholders, I have to redraw most of them.
image_2017-01-11_23-16-22.png
This is how the background looks like (in the map editor)
mapwip.PNG
I'll try to finish in time :) Will keep this thread updated.
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Diskover
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Re: Progress Thread: Cheril the Goddess

Post by Diskover »

I love those development tools.

Are they for download somewhere or are they own?
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Broke Studio
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Re: Progress Thread: Cheril the Goddess

Post by Broke Studio »

Wow 3 games Nathan ! You're on fire !
My first game : Twin Dragons available at Broke Studio.
na_th_an
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Re: Progress Thread: Cheril the Goddess

Post by na_th_an »

Diskover wrote:I love those development tools.

Are they for download somewhere or are they own?
If you mean the ones in the screenshots, they are a rather old version of Photoshop (v7, I think its from 2001 or something like that) and Mappy, which you can find here.
glutock wrote:Wow 3 games Nathan ! You're on fire !
Well, I'll try to make this in time :) It may be my only way to get the games on cart XD
na_th_an
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Re: Progress Thread: Cheril the Goddess

Post by na_th_an »

I had 1 spare hour today and progressed a bit - I like to start by creating the scrolling routines. I've enhaced my previous one (used in another compo entry and the remake of Sir Ababol you could purchase at Verkami last year and which will be released for free soon) and it is now capable of using mapped metatiles, scrolls in both directions, updates a 24 patterns high playing area, and is a wee faster. The grey jitter at the top of the screen is the amount of time the routine takes (appart from the buffered VRAM copy which is done using Neslib).

Next: player basic movement (jump and run, that is) and collision detection with the background.

Background tiles are prone to be heavily modified. I went the easy path and reused quite a lot of stuff from old sets. The map is 4 stacked "floors" of 20 screens (5120 pixels wide). The camera can be confined in sections of the map which is pretty cool.

You can follow the development here https://github.com/mojontwins/GoddessR
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na_th_an
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Re: Progress Thread: Cheril the Goddess

Post by na_th_an »

Made the main character jump and run around. There's no collision on the Lava so you can glitch as much as you like. But you can explore and look around.

There's a small jitter in the joints between "screens" because I'm not checking the collisions properly in some cases, and I need to fix that. Otherwise, level sections are implemented. You can exit a section to the section above or below, or to an adjacent section (but the sprite will do a ugly wrap around I've yet to cope with).

Anyways, progressing nicely :)
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na_th_an
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Re: Progress Thread: Cheril the Goddess

Post by na_th_an »

I fixed the glitches. No ROM today as I'm revamping the graphics in the BG and the map. Some shots as goodies...
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M_Tee
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Re: Progress Thread: Cheril the Goddess

Post by M_Tee »

Looks great as always. Will you need to clothe your character for inclusion in the multicart, though?
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Re: Progress Thread: Cheril the Goddess

Post by Diskover »

It's great, na_th_an

And also the control of the character looks better than that of your previous games.

I'm messing around with a little platform demo, with scroll but very simple (2 nametables) because I'm still not able to do a big scroll.

Also, the issue of collisions is giving me many headaches. I do not finish catching it well.

Luck!
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Re: Progress Thread: Cheril the Goddess

Post by na_th_an »

Progressing nicely. I finished redrawing the whole tileset and placing the new art in the map, placed some nasties for testing, coded the enemies spawner and updater, and modified the spriteset as well in the process.

No collisions. Moving platforms will not catch you, enemies will not harm you. But you can walk around the map.

@M_Tee: I don't see any rules requiring clothed characters, but if this is an issue for many, I will have no problem in adding some dark pixels :)

@diskover: I use several collision points around the sprite and check which tile is there. There's plenty of info about simmilar techniques. I would explain my implementation but right now I have an entry to finish! :) Maybe after the compo. You can check github if you want to take a peek, code is not very complex. Look for player.h.
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tepples
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Re: Progress Thread: Cheril the Goddess

Post by tepples »

From the rules: "Explicit content is not prohibited from the competition, but will most likely not be considered for multicart inclusion." There are a lot of things that gamers with kids and parents of kid gamers will misinterpret.
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Re: Progress Thread: Cheril the Goddess

Post by na_th_an »

I was aware of that rule. But where do we draw the line?

When I read the rules, I understood that sexual content was allowed, but not for the cart (to sum it up). I didn't consider this nude to be "explicit material", the same way I don't consider a statue from an ancient greek goddess to be "explicit material". This is not an erotic game.

But again, if I need to add 4 or 5 pixels to each sprite cell for the game to be included in the cart, I will do so.

Anyways, I just added closing blades which make gameplay more interesting.
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Re: Progress Thread: Cheril the Goddess

Post by tepples »

na_th_an wrote: I don't consider a statue from an ancient greek goddess to be "explicit material".
Douglas Crockford, of JavaScript: The Good Parts and JSON and JSLint fame, wrote about changes made to the NES port of Maniac Mansion. Search that page for what happened to a statue inspired by Michelangelo's Dawn. The developers believed the same as you, but standards and practices misinterpreted a shadow between the thighs and crotch as pubic hair.
na_th_an
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Re: Progress Thread: Cheril the Goddess

Post by na_th_an »

I was aware of that - the Nintendo policies almost 30 years ago and all that nonsense about a couple of pixels being considered offensive by some :) .

Anyways, it's not a big deal. I just have to add some pixels et voie la. ;)
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Re: Progress Thread: Cheril the Goddess

Post by FrankenGraphics »

When I read the rules, I understood that sexual content was allowed, but not for the cart (to sum it up). I didn't consider this nude to be "explicit material", the same way I don't consider a statue from an ancient greek goddess to be "explicit material". This is not an erotic game.
Though many, many statues from antique times to present are more or less erotic, (and so are renaissanse paintings. Venus is already mentioned. Check the description of it on this wiki :wink: ) and many were meant to be so. It's just a form of eroticism that's more or less accepted (depending on time, place and context), through the social contract that may come with whatever's considered fine arts, or in the post-modern, just art, and often on the fluctuating term that it doesn't go too far.

With sculptural, physical objects, it is simpler to make erotic aspects generally accepted, since point of view and mode of looking is largely up to the onlooker which is granted an almost completely autonomous role, and the context is largely up to the exhibitor on a case to case basis, compared to many other media.

Examples: media, such as cinema and picture, are more up to the artist than the viewer. Cinema fixates the time dimension; among other things. You cannot control it like you would in a book. Compared to a book yet again, cinema generally hard-codes larger areas within the realm of imagination by not leaving as many blanks to interpret. You (probably) have a narrative, and concrete visuals, and tempo, decided for you.

Picture (itself embedded in cinema and video gaming), fixates what is called a scopic regime. It is hard to describe what a scopic regime is in just a sentence or two, but the outline is this: It is mostly the sum of projection, space distortion, movement/animation, object emphasis, and point of view, and it dictates the framework for how the onlooker scopically and emotionally interacts with a picture by limiting the field of mode of looking while at the same time making an area within that field more preferrable, easy, or rewarding (often to the artists' or producers' ideal picture of the consumer of the work; that is).
More correctly used, a scopic regime was a term originally coined to describe these effects as paradigms that came and went with historical epoques, but nowadays, cultural production doesn't let itself be sliced up and organized as conveniently.

In gross generalization of european art history, this means a baroque painting with skewed projection, highly designed light, movement, and engaging actor objects is more likely to emotionally or bodily engage a viewer than an early renaissanse painting of a perfect symmetrical vanishing point picture of a street with objects that's mostly there to represent themselves in a static or pictographic manner.

Or here's a thought/experience experiment. Let's say we have a painting of a scene with people in it. Maybe the last supper of Jesus or a team of people working together on something. Anything. Let's say we watch it plain and simple, from a few meters. Then, we watch the same scene through a peeping hole cut out from black painted cardboard. It feels different, even when imagining it, right? That's a slice of the emotional and cognitive difference that scopic regimes can achieve. The thing is that no pictoral work of art is entirely transparent or neutral, every work has a scopic regime embedded, consciously or not. It can't be viewed objectively (though a scopic regime can create the illusion of such a perspective and role). In other words, some aspects of the work is preset, and to some extent, determining the experience of the onlooker.

So, it's really not as simple as determining a relationship between something being erotic and being explicit, and it's not as simple as basing expliticity (is that a word) on personal experience and standards. One has to compare the work of art at hand with patterns in cultural production.

Now to some criticism of the validity of your statement: How is the combination of point of view in relation to the object and its emphasis on fetishizing certain parts of a female coded body not erotic? This makes the game experience partly erotic. Nudity is only a small part of it. There's a gaze happening between camera, frame, and object. And there's focus on body aesthetics. And then there's the gender role aspect. I'm not saying this because i think eroticism is automatically bad (i don't, i think there's a spectrum), i'm saying this because i don't share the viewpoint on whether it's erotic or not, and because eroticism meddles with individuals' sense of privacy and intimacy, so it's worth thinking twice about before writing something off as "not erotic (or explicit) according to me".

Wow, this post got way longer than i had hoped to keep it. I hope it doesn't steal too much attention from your project.
Last edited by FrankenGraphics on Sat Jan 21, 2017 1:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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