Eternity 6: The Waterphoenix

[Trip]

I didn't mind the old bricks but the new one's do seem to suit the level more.
Nice

 

[fischju2000]

This looks amazing. Having not played the games you reference in the original post I must ask, is this the kind of beat 'em up where the character can move vertically aswell?

 

[darien]

This looks amazing. Having not played the games you reference in the original post I must ask, is this the kind of beat 'em up where the character can move vertically aswell?

Yeah, that's why the road with the broken edge is there at all. You should try those games. I think with the exception of maybe Altered Beast, they still hold up as decent side scrollers. I don't know if I'll be making levels 'memorable' though, which was the secret to beating them back in the day. Conforming to a pattern and whatnot.

 

[Tempel]

The game is the 6th chapter spin-off of a fantasy action series I've been working on for nearly 13+ years now

I'm not too fond of beat-em-ups, but this line intrigues me. Are the previous five chapters available somewhere? Or have you been designing the whole series for 13 years, with chapter 6 being the first implemented? I'm a sucker for big multi-part stories.

 

[darien]

Misnomer on my part. The main storyline is Eternity 3: WiseMoon, everything else is built around it. There's also Eternity 2: The Phoenix Pattern and Eternity 3: The Phoenix Passion (direct prequel to WiseMoon).

An Eternity represents a sort of instance of existence in the background mythos. Up through the second Eternity, each existence ends because a great creator consumes it to survive, however in the Third Eternity, one character ascends up to the Waters of Creation and finds a way to usurp the ultimate creator to allow the Third Eternity to exist indefinitely. These Eternities are like membranes outside of the Waters of Creation. Following those three chapters, the 4th Eternity is the DarkMoon saga where the reincarnation of the same character is sort of the bad guy by circumstances and meddling of the original creator and actually destroys his own Eternity, inadvertently preventing the previous creator from consuming/recharging and taking back the Waters of Creation from WiseMoon. The 5th Eternity involves an existence which exists in limbo, sort of something the previous creator made but never booted up. WiseMoon boots it up and places DarkMoon in it so he can restart his mortal life.

Eternity 6 is the last Eternity and is really just a pseudo existence created in the firmament from the memories of the dead from the Waters of Creation (which is sort of where all people go where they die, an infinite playground). It partially represents the real world as we know it, but of course is fictional. There is a veil that prevents people from using any powers which should be available to everyone as they are projected parts of the Waters of Creation. The idea is this veil is weakening and several thought forms begin to populate the world, one of them being zombies, which infects several people whether or not the powers they developed were useful to them at all. Of course the 4th advent incarnation of our hero is able to use the elemental power of water, as he was in previous Eternities (which is why he was able to control the Waters of Creation.) It explains that he is actually reincarnated every 260 years in the same existence and there have been several versions of him where beings were able to control or manipulate water around the world. He was Moses once. It also explains the existence of 8-9 other elemental beings or the Phoenix/Dragons (Fire, Metal, Wind, Earth, Space, Time, etc...), one of which ascended from the first Eternity to become the ultimate creator that began creating the membranes and consuming them. As the WaterPhoenix you will eventually defeat him after absorbing the powers of the Fire, Metal, Wind, and Earth Phoenix guys.

Of course all this is just the top-top level mythos wrapping around everything. Much of this isn't revealed to the hero until the very end as he has his own epic conflicts to deal with, so that's why I can tell all this without spoiling anything.

 

[Mr.Confuzed]

Wow, your a regular Hideo Kojima. I don't see any theme / moral in there though, unless I just lived up to my name.

I'm not sure you answered the question though; are the previous games available?

 

[darien]

Wow, your a regular Hideo Kojima. I don't see any theme / moral in there though, unless I just lived up to my name.

I'm not sure you answered the question though; are the previous games available?

I guess the answer is no at the moment.

Games: Eternity 6 & Eternity 5
The only games planned are this one and I've always hoped to eventually make Eternity 5: God's Playground into a game, but the scope of that is way too large to be done justice by me alone. It's sort of an open world sandbox game where downloadable addons dynamically change the genre of the game, whether it be horror survival, skateboarding, counter-terrorism, etc... Yeah way too far out there. It's basically based on adolescent fantasizing.

Anime: Eternity 2, Eternity 3
Always intended for these to be anime movies, with WiseMoon as the flagship story since it's the one with everything entwined in it and has epic action sequences. These are the only ones with finished scripts, which I keep to myself. The theme of E2: The Phoenix Pattern is about letting go of high standards and giving up on waiting for something good to happen, and instead learning to take action before you've lost everything. E3: The Phoenix Passion is a modern romance about how love should inspire sacrifice versus selfish pursuit, and how the right person can both ground you in success or make mediocrity bearable. It also leads into E3: WiseMoon as the sort of 'reason' the hero has for saving the world. In E3: WiseMoon the theme is about how humans have the innate quality to quantify the unknown, so that when he ascends to the Waters of Creation, some people can't even make sense of what they see there (like a sporadic kaleidoscope), but using the knowledge of human metaphor he is able to buffer his senses and battle against the creator and defeat him using the arsenal of human history and imagination. Of course that's only in the last 10 minutes, the rest of the movie is about ancient aliens coming to Earth, reviving floating technological continents (ex. Atlantis), dragons coming out of dormant sleep beneath the Earth, and waging war across the face of the Earth.

Footnotes: Eternity 4
Only ever referred to from Eternity 5. This is probably the last story I'd flesh out, but not now.

 

[Cpasjuste]

What engine do you plan to use ?

The plan is to create it all from scratch. I'd like to implement the levels in separate packages that can be loaded externally by function, and be able to build them in a proprietary level editor, but who knows. Don't want to make any promises here.

I did start to work on a 2d library for the pandora, there still a lot of work to do but maybe we could work together, maybe it could be a good start for you.

 

[fusion_power]

Sorry, my english is not very good. Did I understood, that there is currently nothing that actualy "moves"? just graphic concepts and 5 other "games" that also don't exist in the meaning of playable content? ^_^
Wow, really long way to go, I hope you can do it darian and finish what You've startet.

 

[darien]

Sorry, my english is not very good. Did I understood, that there is currently nothing that actualy "moves"? just graphic concepts and 5 other "games" that also don't exist in the meaning of playable content? ^_^
Wow, really long way to go, I hope you can do it darian and finish what You've startet.

:lol: Hahaha, no worries, I'm good for it. I mean, I understand that reaction. Totally. I know there are a lot of dreamers. In this case, I'm doing the assets first because when I was programming for the iPhone a few months back, I found most frustrating just getting stopped in the middle of coding where you have to use placebo graphics and have no content and I hate empty boxes. Stopping to do the artwork really made me feel like everything came to a halt, which is a shame because programming is so fast, yet art is difficult to get done right sometimes. Programming is not the obstacle for me, programming is fun and always has an answer. Art direction is where problems come into play because you gotta be really good to live up to your own standards or your product shouldn't be made. My plan this time around was to do things properly in stages: Design Plan, Complete Asset Creation, Programming, and then testing/tweaking. So I'm in the second stages for the demo. I'm focusing primarily on the first level and putting out a demo first to get some feedback and after I'll be doing the whole game. B)

I finish a lot of what I start and have been one-manning things for awhile. More recently, I've gotten to a point where I can say I'm really at the point where I'm ready to put some of my Eternity projects into action. Beforehand, I just wasn't ready, I had to earn my skills and build up to it. It's the hunger to be personally capable for me, which is why I want to do things on my own too. Three months ago, I read 500 pages of Objective-C and the next day I had dice spinning into a bowl on the iPhone with sound. Sometimes you're just suddenly ready. I decided I wasn't going to waste any more time on dice and actually get a real game going, so I've just spent time putting together the game design documents and now I'm in this stage.

I remember several years ago trying to port a Ragnarok Online bot for the PSP in C++, wanting to modify it to work as a mobile client for the MMO, and the network coding confused me so I just wasn't ready at the time. I understand how some projects can be nothing more than ambition, but since then, I've really sat down and gotten the individual skills necessary to put this into action. Before that, I was building lame games with QBasic, RPGMaker, Flash. Programming was never an issue, it was always the art direction and visuals that made the difference. Making 2D frame-by-frame anime is probable the most grueling thing in the world. I was doing this Samurai short and it took 3 months, 15 hours a day just to get an 8 minute animation out where I'd say about 2 minutes of it were actual fluid animation. To this day I know it was a lot of work, but I just didn't live up to my own standards. Of course that was my first time working in After Effects. Since then, I've hunkered down and tried to master it, in HD no less. I still think turning WiseMoon into an anime is sort of the end goal for me and I'm still intimidated by that because it's my life's work and anime is the only appropriate treatment for that. I'm not good enough of an artist to do it justice, so I'm probably going to direct that, but I need a moderate amount of success to start with. I'd say this is the first time I'm even attempting to complete one part of my story, so finger's crossed.

Man I am long winded.

 

[bzar]

... wow.

 

[fusion_power]

... wow.

+1

Amazong Artwork.
I've just asked because I'm in the Comunity since many years and I've seen many promising projects that were dead before they actualy started. Much hot air and tons of discussions about how the game's name should be or how the title screen should look - even before a single code line or a finished game concept was made :lol:...but we all know the serious "real life"-problem that kills around 50% of all Homebrew projects.

But you seem to know what you want to do, I really wish you all the best. Pandora needs and deserves Quality Software.

I remember several years ago trying to port a Ragnarok Online bot for the PSP in C++, wanting to modify it to work as a mobile client for the MMO, and the network coding confused me so I just wasn't ready at the time.

I've supported my ex-girlfriend whil she was playing RO, for me, it is one of the most boring and non motivating MMORPG's. Leveling is hell, Quests are nearly non-existant and your chara only starts to rule if you reach Level 90+. Brrr...
If you have to much spare time, try to port "Torchlight" or try to make a game like this, Single Player RPG like Diablo 2 (more like Diablo 2.5 in this case)

 

[darien]

Finished the second half of the first level. They'll be stitched together into one (no transitioning). Now going to work on immense amounts of character sprites before going back and populating the background with some moving objects, corpses, smoking fires, and more litter. The area behind the building and truck barricade will basically be zombies shuffling about in the background. Stairs leads to the first boss on the skytrain platform.

Second screen is just messing around. I need more variations of zombies, but looking at this, 4 should probably be enough, plus 2 crawlers/crouching beasts like dogs or spider-man-zombies. 6 enemies with running, attacking, rested shuffling, and pinning positions. Some exploding from behind stuff and grabbing you. Also a test on the secondary character who is just a reskin for the first level (he dies like every ensign who accompanies a real cast member on an away mission).

 

[Trip]

Looking fantastic.
I like the idea of things going on in the background. Stuff like that adds a lot of atmosphere to a game

 

[fusion_power]

Yupp, I can imagine, Enemies breaking through a Window. Very nice Graphics, is everyting 24bpp? I don't know how well the Pandora can handle large graphics so maybe good old 256 Colour 8bpp Tiles to be onto the "Save side"?
And will all the charas have shadows underneeth?

A game like this of course also needs a sexy female Character for 2. Player.

 

[darien]

Yupp, I can imagine, Enemies breaking through a Window. Very nice Graphics, is everyting 24bpp? I don't know how well the Pandora can handle large graphics so maybe good old 256 Colour 8bpp Tiles to be onto the "Save side"?
And will all the charas have shadows underneeth?

A game like this of course also needs a sexy female Character for 2. Player.

There's two female playable companions, the FirePhoenix and the WindPhoenix, which must be divided out for the second player as avatars at the expense of passive and active abilities from the first player. The main character will always be the central focus so the second player will always be restricted to whatever the main character unlocks as the story goes on.

edit:
That's a good point, I won't have crazy shadows, just black shapes under the shoes when their feet lift off the ground. Color, we'll see what I can squeeze out of sdl+opengl. I can always export down. I'm actually more concerned about ambidextrous sprites at the moment since I've made sprites asymmetrical.

 

[Holliefant]

Ok I´m not sure bout these zombies
They are nice but the corpus ist really detailed and the trousers are linke unicolor..
I know thats probably not worth hinting but I wanted to mention anyway
Oh I almost forgot: NICE! This is really nicely done and I am really really looking forward to this game.
I am really gratefull for all the talented guys over here who are willing to spend their free time
just to make games like this one. Thanks again.

 

[darien]

Took a slight detour from the first-level(demo) assets to lay out the avatars of the unlockable companions in the consecutive levels. The main character's costume will also change throughout the game, so his current avatar is pretty much only for the first level+boss. All I gotta say is you'll love replaying just to use these guys' powers, and there will be achievements leading to mode-unlocks that will motivate you to do so.

As for first-level progress, I just need one more (crawler)zombie to design and then I begin creating many many animation frames for the sprites. If you look up a few posts, I updated the previous image to include some more zombies.

edit: Updated. Now for several man hours of animation.

:lol: This would never happen in the game. You'd be outnumbered to a maximum of 18 enemies, and there wouldn't be more than 2 good guys on screen.

 

[amf66]

The animation looks great so far! I can't wait to see the first level in action! B)

 

[darien]

Saw this on the Pandora Press so I guess I'll update the thread.

Updated Hero:Finn Sprite Stuff:

I forgot to add the frames for him getting hit while crouched, but I did make that frame.

Left to do for Finn: Two more consecutive hits in the combo. A crouching stab. Rising from the dead ground position.
And depending on how it looks I might need a different set of walking/shuffling animation for when moving vertically on the screen.
His current running animation is more suited for solely side-scrolling.