LN2 tech demo

[Marcuz]

urk! bow to the common good. only figuratively speaking.

[gimbal]

Dev update because I am a pompous prick and I believe someone cares

Copy pasted from the project page:

* Fixed punching and kicking. Replaced one frame of animation that made the ninja look like a dork, changed one punch frame of animation that made the ninja look like he was scratching his back (both problems of the original game). Also when you would punch or kick, the position of the ninja would shift for the duration of the animation because it wasn't properly centered. That was a bug in my own implementation and has been fixed.

* Implemented projectiles, meaning that ninja stars work. They work a little differently from the original game: if they hit space they cannot penetrate (any space you cannot walk through), the projectile disappears. If a star hits an enemy, it instantly kills him. If a star hits the ninja, he loses 25% of his maximum health.

* Ninja health bar now functions like in the original game, filling up or lowering over time as the energy amount changes. Ninja death cycle has also been implemented (ninja dying on screen, curtain dropping and rising, showing how many lives you have left, curtain dropping, game continues).

* Moving diagonally has been fixed. You move under a smaller angle now, like the original game.

* Fixed diagonal jumping. Also, you can now backjump by walking backwards and pressing the regular jump button. You can also jump diagonally backwards. Note: however on my keyboard if I use the regular cursor keys, the keyboard screws up and the space never triggers a signal if I press two cursor keys at once. I have to use the numeric keypad to be able to jump diagonally.

* Fixed a bug with climbing, after climbing the first time, any subsequent climbs would make the ninja behave as if he was blocked by a wall when jumping at the end, making him jump straight up in stead of forward.

* damage model has been implemented. This version of the game does damage more equal to the C64 version (which is more damage than the Amiga version). Enemies have less energy and so they die a lot quicker, but there will be more enemies in the game to fight, including multiple on one screen.

* The health bar of enemies will now be displayed much like Final Fight, above the game screen. Enemies now also have a unique name. This was necessary because the old energy bar is now used for karma (see below) and multiple enemies can exist on the same screen, so multiple energy bars must also be shown.

* Added ninja's 'karma'. This is similar to LN3, but it has its own purpose in this game. The energy bar that was used for enemies in the original game now holds the karma for the ninja. If you do honorable attacks, it fills up. If you do dishonorable attacks, it lowers again. An honorable attack is where you use your fists, or a weapon of weaker or equal strength as the enemy. When your karma bar fills up completely, it empties again and you get 25% of your maximum health back as a reward for fighting with honor. If you use a ninja star to kill someone, the karma bar completely empties as there is absolutely no honor in that.

* Fixed yet another depth sorting problem. It occured in the screen with the hamburger, it would appear on top of the ninja.

* Implemented a data structure for partitioning space in the screens, which allows more efficient lookups of items for purposes of collision detection. Previously when taking a step simply all collision boxes in the screen were checked for a collision, now only the boxes close to the actor in question are checked, which is of course far more CPU efficient.

* Implemented image packing to reduce the file size. Level 1 wasn't even complete yet and the data was already over a megabyte. By packing the images to a more efficient format than PNG (color indexed with a single shared external palette), they compress a whole lot better now. The size went down to 300k. It will never be as efficient as the original game though (which fits with all 6 levels int 800k).

* Added the word 'remix' to the last ninja 2 logo. The remix graphic was taken from Last Ninja Remix, the remix version of Last Ninja 1 for the Amiga. (and in case people didn't realize, the voice you hear at the very beginning of the game is from Last Ninja 3).

* graphics for the first enemy have been ripped, now only to make him move.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by gimbal

Dev update because I am a pompous prick and I believe someone cares

I do, really I read all that stuff Nice to hear about the progress. Guess it will be pretty fun to play Tech Demo 2
The image compression sounds pretty interesting. So you store the palette information only once for all pictures? I think the last game that did that was Quake. Very neat idea
All the best with the coding

[gimbal]

So you store the palette information only once for all pictures?

Yep. I did the same thing for my previous attempts at games really, I don't even know why I didn't do this from the start. Now I had to hack it in (it works very neatly though, I even integrated the generation of the packed files into the build and clean process of the game project). The compression part is because the data is now paletted, it zips so much better


Oh and one point I failed to mention is that of course a *lot* of code has been cleaned up Still far too many TODOs in there though