Triple Triad Possible?


basically, yes. the idea going around my head at the moment is:

you start off as some dude (or dudette, its a simple matter to allow you to choose your own sprite) with a basic set of cards. You'll have a level of sorts which will obviously start out as 1. Now there will be a shop where you can buy cards and new game boards. The shops content will depend on your level, the higher you are (so more games you've won) the more impressive the cards are availiable to buy. However, the level 9-10 character cards I dont think will ever appear in the shop and instead you will have to find the right NPC's who already own them and win them off that npc instead. Stops you leveling up on munchkin easy npc's then buying a ton of level 10 cards and waltzing through the game.

You'll be able to walk around and challenge people to a game of triple triad. Every game you win will earn you a certain amount of points, I will probably base the points earned off your level versus their level. Points you will be able to spend in the shop on cards and boards, but also they may as well be your exp so I will level your character when hes earned a certain amount. Further you wander into the game the higher level oposition you should find.

It wont be anything TOO grand, just what I said on its simplest level. The reason for going to the trouble of doing this is triple triad was just never DESIGNED to be played by one person on his own. Half the fun of triple triad in the original was earned your cards in game and then taking your cards to pan people but OH THE STRESS if you just lost your best level 10 card to an AI player and are now frantically trying to get it back off him in another game! If i just gave everyone random cards and said here just play this forever it would be boring.

Other fan renditions of this game get around this by being online based, you win your cards off other people that way. As theres no easy way to hook a gp2x up to your net connection I needed to find a suitable way one player could enjoy playing triple triad X without it just being another monotonus card game where you get dealt a random hand.

All this obviously means the project will take alot longer than just playing triple triad (which if i sat down right now and said "okay lets put the rest of the rules in now" could be finished in 1 day, 2 at most) but I hope the finished result more than makes up for that and its a game people will want to play more than once, especially to try and hunt down that last level 10 card they are missing ;)
 
snake, can you draw? high quality pixel art? if so email me. that goes for anyone else looking to contribute :) I'm going to be in dire need of some good tilesets to build worlds out of. As I said before im just using some other games tile set atm whilst i build and test the engine, but thats no good for actually "releasing". Also anyone who fancies making any full card decks get in contact with me ;) I will provide specifications, know how and a card data editor to those who wish to make decks.

Okay, tonights update

screenshot

it may not look much different to the other one, but that little dude (its squall! xD) in the top left represents ALOT of work. He's an npc. He was defined in an ini file and is storing data about chat text, ability to play triple triad, is he a shop etc etc. He has all the "data" he needs, tomorrow I will be writing code to act on that data.

Hopfully by tomorrow you will be able to walk up to him, talk, start a game of triple triad and whatnot. If I succeed in doing that then truely it is down hill from there, the engine would basically be complete and its just a case of adding more rules to the game and adding LOTS of 2d media to spice it up.

Anyone will be able to add npc's to the game. Each of the game maps is stored in its own folder and inside that folder is another one called Npcs - in that you will find .npc files which are structured exactally like a .ini. Inside those you can setup chat text, npc behaviour and what not. Good if you are "modding" the engine and want to add some special npc's to a map where you can give them special cards you made for people to win off them.

Anyway, im going to watch a little tv and then sleep for tonight :) I'll try to update again tomorrow.
 
it'd be quite cool to have level upgrades as a buyable item instead fo auto levelling.. the levels could be on a simple *2 scaling (lvl 1 1 point, lvl 2 2 points, lvl 3 4 points, lvl 4 8 points, lvl 5 16 points, lvl 6 32 points, lvl 7 64 points, lvl 8 128 points) and be buyable from certain shops maybe?
 
Please note I think i once noticed a card capture fail that SHOULDNT of failed. This could be a bug in code OR i could of made an error when creating the data in the .deck file meaning what the card image says and what the game thinks it says may not match. If you notice a card capture that didnt work then please screenshot immediatly and either post it online or send it to dave AT melted.com - ta
Click to expand...

How about having the card BG image on it's own as data, then when the file is read, draw the numbers at runtime onto the card surface? Then the numbers on the card will always match the numbers in the deck data
 
I can do pixel art! I'd be happy to help with the little sprites if you want me to ^^. It all depends on what colour depth/style you want. I could probably do it however you liked. I'll need some help doing very large pictures, like character portraits, but maptiles and characters and items? I'm available and willing =3 *waves hands* Will work for peanuts! o.o
 
I would see if I can be anyhow helpfull as soon as you release the exact specs of the content you need
 
Okay, requested content:

Most desirable:
tilesets (this is the biggest want!)
brand new decks (the more the merrier, details on how to make below)

Wanted but not as important:
gameboards
player characters


Specifications:

TileSets:
these make up the building blocks of the RPG world. Any style accepted as long as it not all sketchy. a tile set (or tile sheet) contains tiles for building the world and the items inside, ie it can contain grass and trees and a park bench for example. Each individual tile must be 16x16 pixels big but the sheet as a whole can be any width and height as long as its divisiable by 16.

For example, a sheet with 4 tiles only could be 16 high and 64 wide with each of the 4 tiles in a line. it could also be 64 high and 16 wide if you wanted to store the tiles in a collum. or it could be 32x32 if you wanted the 4 tiles in a square image formation.

The tile editor lets you place tiles on 3 different layers with the third layer being drawn over the second, second over the first, etc. So if you want to add doodads like a park bench or whatever thats fine - Magenta (rgb value 255, 0, 255) is the transparent colour so any magenta pixels will NOT be drawn. Usful if you want to make a fence or something.

Decks:
The most time consuming job, but some people enjoy it. A deck can contain as many cards as you personally choose, but for refrence the original FF8 deck contained 110 cards (220 if you count red and blue versions as seperate).

A single card must have a background, a main image, a frame, 4 numbers and an optional element. However, all of these things can be in any style you choose. You can design your own frames, number fonts and backgrounds. All i ask is that all cards in a deck follow the same theme and that the backgrounds you use, which CAN have some sort of design to them, must be primarilly blue and red. You need two of each card, one with a blue background (player1) and one with a red background (player2).

The Triple Triad Advance website (a webbased version of triple triad) has a nice tutorial for making your own cards here:

TTA Tutorial

About the frames - use one of the first FOUR on that page (they are original ff8 frames, do NOT use the 5th, thats one of their custom frames and not to be stolen) but remember when making cards you should be splitting them up according to level. Cards can be any level, from 1 to 10, 1 being the weakest and 10 being the most powerful. The level of the card is reflected by the frame on the image. Looking at the frames on that tutorial, it works like this:

first frame (gray) card level 1-5
second (gold) card level 6-7
third (gold with corner decoration) card level 8-9
fourth (gold, better decoration) card level 10

if you wish to make your own frames for a deck then please make 4 which get grander.

Any images can be used for cards as long as its not forbidden copyright etc. Just try and keep things in perspective to their level. Example, if i wanted to make an anime deck based off day.. Tenchi Muyo, then the main characters like Ryoko, Aeyka, Tenchi etc would all be level 10 cards, sub characters like Misao, whatever, level 9, level 1 cards would be moderatly related things like a Carrot (you would have to know tenchi to understand that xD) etc etc etc. Deck making is a big job, but if thats your thing go for it. You dont have to draw the images from scratch which is a plus.

When you have a completed deck contact me and i will create a .deck file for it or get you a version of the deck editor.

IMPORTANT: triple triad X uses different sized cards to all the other versions of triple triad due to the small size of the gp2x screen. Cards must be 45x55px and please save them as .png files (same for tilesets now i think about it, the png bit that is)

Game Boards:

this is a fun simple thing for anyone wanting to contribute without spending a week creating content. As far as the game engine is concerned it doesnt even know what a gameboard is, its just an image drawn behind the cards - so you can make one in whatever form you like.

here is the default board:
Classic Board

Use it as a template. As long as the image size stays the same you can draw whatever you like on it - might be nice to chop it up into card shaped grid cells just for clarity when playing the game.

again using TTA as example:
TTA

if you scroll down a bit you can see how they have various boards. Dont steal them, its just an example, though i have to admit i really like the FFX one ;)


Player Characters:

Okay, when you start a new profile on triple triad X its going to give you a chance to change your player sprite. It has absolutly no effect on the game, it just changes what you look like. A character image file must contain a sprite of the character facing in all 4 directions and must contain 3 frames of animation for each direction. Each sprite can be upto 24x32 in height, each cell MUST be that big (the sprite doesnt have to fill it all), it must be a png, the transparent colour is magenta again and the sprites must be stored in this order: Facing Right, Facing Down, Facing Up, Facing Left.

Here is the sprite sheet for squall to use as a template:

squall

if anyone wants a crack at that then be my guest, again the more the merrier :)

Thats it for now. Any contributions are welcome :)

As for progress, player control is in as well as collision between the player and the tile map. Got squall walking around and animating, colliding, etc with the world. Just about to write a GUI lib to allow me to pop up message boxes and what not for interacting witht he npcs - ie gives you the option to talk or play triad etc. Will update before i goto bed as usual :)
 
hmm, deck making - i'll give it a shot, maybe with a nintendo deck? or would the art from that not be nice enough? i'll use the SSBM trophy list for reference.

i'll PM you with updates and such. maybe posting for opinions.. :unsure:

anyway, this looks like being an impressive piece of work, good job!
 
subin, look forward to seeing what you come up with :D Make anything YOU like, not me. At the end of the day any media i dont put in the game by default will go on a website i will make for this for fans to download and install as they please - kinda like pick and choose the game you want :)

Anyway update:

Screen shot

*sniffs*. Nuff said really. I think that has earned me some noodles, which i shall now cook.
 
that looks amazing! I would love to help, but i'm not very artistic..... I might try my hand at a deck using pictures of my favorite videogame characters and whatnot if I get time, but i'm very busy (and tired) at the moment.
 
Sephnroth posted on Jan 24 2006 said:
subin, look forward to seeing what you come up with :D Make anything YOU like, not me. At the end of the day any media i dont put in the game by default will go on a website i will make for this for fans to download and install as they please - kinda like pick and choose the game you want :)

Anyway update:

Screen shot

*sniffs*. Nuff said really. I think that has earned me some noodles, which i shall now cook.
​
Click to expand...
LOL @ screenshot ;D

Though its not on my harddrive anymore and there is no good MPQ extractor for linux I think I will look into a World of Warcraft set... I think their art is really impressive, both 3d and (even more) concpet art looks great... I even own their art book so noone can complain.. as soon as I got a somewhat-looking card I'll post it.

Would it be possible to let an editor not only handle the in-game but also the numbers and the "type" (well then the border too ;D) appearant on the image?
I know thats pretty much, but the idea just came into my mind, you could feed the editor with your styled numbers and sprites for the types and you can be sure it always gets set on the right position (which is a hassle otherwise, thats why I say this ;D)

Just say no impossible and I'll shut up ;D *lol*
 
Last edited by a moderator:
*rubs chin*

well I still have my old card editor that i wrote for my very first triple triad game, its written in Delphi. It lets you choose a card image, select some attack numbers, element and frame and then generates the card image for you. If anyone on win32 wanted to use that they could but it would generate the cards as jpeg and fullsize instead of the gp2x size. So they would have to resize and resave the images it made :)

It also generates data files but in a totally incompatiable format to what triple triad x requires. For one thing each card gets saved with a seperate data file (Whereas triple triad x expects the entire deck's data to be in one file) and to second with my old version makes generalised assumptions like frame one is level "1 to 5" and doesnt allow for levels 2, 3, 4 which this new version requires (part of npc card gathering).

But say the word and I will whack it online. I would try and rewrite it to be fully compatiable with triple triad x but i dont have delphi installed anymore xD Maybe later.

A quick note about copyright:

Some people in the gp2x dev irc channel have frowned a little on using ff8 media. Really though its unavoidable. However, what i'm thinking of doing is launching triple triad x with media unrelated to ff8 and having things like the original decks availiable as "fan addons". Truely, if it comes to that, any deck is going to probably have some copyright issues unless I draw every card image by hand from scratch. I do enjoy a little bit of drawing now and then but creating a 110 card deck AND writing an enjoyable engine at the same time is just not possiable unless I take a year out for this project. But the best I can do for you guys is make everything in "packs" and addons so you can pick and choose what you want and dont have to put anything you may feel guilty about on your sd card.

Thoughts on this subject are welcome, is this going to be a common worry amongst users? Even users making their own decks will probably be using images that are not theirs unless everyones going to sit down and draw. I'm pretty sure using some media which is "debatable" is unavoidable, but i'm happy for suggestions and comments on this subject, I want to create a game everyone can enjoy after all.
 
hmm.. I just made a pic but there is some alpha left... and now I spent one hour on figuring this stuff out I can't even upload it cause I dunno how ;/ !!

Damn!

Questions:
I made a sample number in red cause otherwise you can hardly decipher it at this low resolution, or do you have any other suggestions ofr this? 45x55 is pretty small :/.
 
i personally, am not too worried about the legal side of things. if you get media from a website, and the website doesn't copyright its material, then surely you yourself are not to blame.

more importantly though, this is a completely non-profit project. if on the other hand, we were making decks of FF8 cards, printing them and selling them, having ripped the images from the game or from a website, serious eyebrows would be raised. but they probably won't be because this is a small scale, freeware project..

on a completely different topic, roughly how many cards should be in each level? im assuming it's triangular, in that there are a few top level cards, more 2nd level, more 3rd level, etc. it would help to be able to group the cards into groups at this point..

lastly, there is a tutorial on the website sephnroth posted for making the numbers and such, although i agree that it would be pretty time consuming/tedious. at the same time i would rather not use an automated editor, because simply entering in data is even more tedious. :lol:

sorry if this didn't make much sense, i spent all night trying to fit a Thermaltake sonic tower into my crappy motherboard/case (and succeeded :lol:). and i think i just got silica gel in my eye... OW.
 
heyas - yes its a bugger to get a clear picture for something that small. I'm hoping it will be clearer on the gp2x screen than on the high rez pc screens ^^; Make the numbers as clear as you can - i will try to compensate for the smallness in game by printing the numbers of the card currently under your cursor in a corner of the screen or something. Heres a sample card from my ff8 deck:

card

just do your best :)

There are traditionally 110 cards in a deck, 11 per level.

im not too worried about copyright, im not selling this and all the media gets shrunk so its not like people could steal it from my game for normal purposes. But some people might and as im making it for you guys its your opinion that counts :)

racoon - if you can find no way to upload your efforts you may email them to me using the button under one of my posts :)

-current update:

npc interaction completly finished. just tying in the "Triad" option on the talking menu into the actual triple triad game - usually a simple task but im having to write a few helper functions and what not to get this done to make sure i dont hardcode anything and it all stays modular. That means people can easilly add their own npc's, specify which card deck they use, what level cards they have access too, etc etc. Most of the work on this engine has been to make it modular so people can mod the finished thing to their hearts content without having to know how to program or recompile it.

however i must admit something here - today I have allowed myself to be slowed down T_T I should be coding right now.. but im not. I'm afraid my father came up to me and handed me a VHS with the animation of terry prachettes soul music on it. I adore discworld novels and i havnt seen this animation yet so this is going to keep me busy for a few hrs, but hey - i've earned a break right? xD Keep on posting with comments and what not. This animation is split into episodes, between each one i'll be check this thread :)
 
Well i'm done for the night. Selecting "Triad" from the npc menu fires off a game. I'm currently working on the pre-game loader where it lets you select which cards from your availiable decks you want to play with, lists the active game rules and what not. Of course if the Random rule is in play you cant select cards and it will select it for you ;)

Currently looks a little something like this:

Screen Shot

I just knocked up that background in photoshop but it will do for now :) Theres actually a bug there, the rules "same" and "plus" are highlighted but in actual fact they are not active... I even COMMENTED OUT the code that OR's the same and plus flags into the rules and it STILL thinks they are active. Most strange, will try to fiddle that tomorrow :/
 
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