Seymour take one planned for Continuum 93 [PROGRESS THREAD]

Alright, 24 days left on my deadline. This is going to be tight as a cork in a wine bottle, but I think, doable.

Implemented a decent procedural background generator.

https://youtu.be/_z0d9AZcDcY

Moved off to figuring out how to display tiles and on which layers. Quickly wrote a texture packer and now in the process of drawing the rooms with correct layering.

This is what a packed texture looks like.

Steps I need to continue with after this:

- Resolve collision to enable Seymour interracting with the environment;
- Items and interraction with them;
- Interracting with characters/objects;
- Speech bubbles and room description text;
- Health/lives and how to affect them;
- The infamous video recording feature at the end;
- Scrolling texts for intro/outro (a bit in progress already).
- details...

@enthusiastguy All looking good. :tup:  

I'm curious to know what some of the remaining sprites would look like - Like the train and Faye the actress who you tie to the railway track.

@enthusiastguy All looking good. :tup:  

I'm curious to know what some of the remaining sprites would look like - Like the train and Faye the actress who you tie to the railway track.

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Well, I think I have most of them ready. Will actually see what I'm missing when I will start assembling the scenes. This tileset actually has some extra items that I won't use, they were there for test, but I left them there. Will remove and refine later, but for now you can also see the tiles you mentioned. :)

... now that's a bit of a mess since the packer does that. Maybe the individual tiles are more suited.

I just had to fix the train... Couldn't keep my distance, it seems. Started with the wheel. What's turning 2 frames into 6? Nothing, I said.

Then I had to redo the piston animation for all that which quadrupled my work...

Well, at least it's smoother than the original.

Please ignore the front wheel, that's yet another separate tile I forgot to include in this 24 frame animation.

Aside from this, I managed to set-up the drawing sequence, at least on paper, so that's most efficient. Also set-up the tile data as an .asm file I will be using, so that's going to cut some corners.

Merry Christmas folks!

Unfortunately I was not able to continue working on this at the rate I wished for, so this deadline proved to be a bit over-enthusiastic having quite a few things in parallel I had to take care of. However, progress has been made in graphics, actual engine and the emulator itself (which now supports also hardware rotation to 22.5 degrees increments).

So, pushing this to February.

Enjoy the holidays folks! Don't think I'll be posting anything until the half of January.

Well, thank you for sharing your progress so far.

The graphics sets look really impressive too. {yolkfolk}:clap:  

Happy new year folks. Here's something in a joke preview. :D

https://youtu.be/dB-YXpN-1XQ?si=mmwwaqNOlVJC0nxo

Hey there!

Still somewhat in "vacation", but I took some time to try and remaster the original audio of Seymour. What do you guys think?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BD_9ClnnDyk

Nice. :tup:  

Hey folks!

I realized I'm not going to do this in assembly after several tries. Not that it would not be possible, but the time involved warrants the actual creation of a compiler instead. So this is what I am doing right now, a compiler that takes a flavor of BASIC and compiles to native code.

Good news on that is that the source code will be far easier to tinker with. Bad news is time. As always. But I am getting there.

Any news on this project?

Any news on this project?

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Hey there.

Sorry for not catching this earlier, seems the website was down for a bit of time.

Well, yes and no. There is no further development on the visuals/media as I think they are complete. I started coding this in assembly then realized it's quite a bit of undertaking and paused it.

However.

Since myself and others have had difficulties coding this in assembly (remember, this is a Continuum 93 exclusive remake) I decided to implement a higher level language called MOSAIC that I'll use to create the game with. MOSAIC resembles BASIC and C#, but much more simplified. It allows the developer to handle sprites as variables as well. The plot twist is that MOSAIC is more than an interpreter, it's a compiler, so it produces native assembly code, making anything written with it blazing fast.

So, some time-frames and progress status:

- The instruction support for MOSAIC is already implemented as of this week, but not released. The release will happen before the end of July.

- The MOSAIC compiler itself is written and after adaptation it too will be available to Continuum one month after the end of July.

- Work on Seymour will start at the end of August and hopefully will take no more than 2 months.

So that makes the actual release of the game and its sourcecode at the beginning of November.

Alright, started proper development on this. Right now implementing statics such as speech dialogues.

Very alpha, but nearly all that's needed is there. Plus a solid map editor that can handle up to 256 x 256 rooms. Not that anyone will ever get to that limit. Quite buggy now.

https://youtu.be/X_Tv57trTaI

The devil is in the details, they said. Yep, I can confirm it.

However, closing in.

https://youtu.be/0kV_DQ-rmUo

Coming along nicely I see. {yolkfolk}:clap:  

Yes, I am happy of how things are progressing. If anyone wants to play around with this here is the current version (you might need .NET redistributable installed): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1J1tZR8HWZ7sPEPIM3LpVEPrr7cqmOJ77/view?usp=sharing

It will be obsolete soon, but maybe just to play around. I am mostly aware of bugs and limitations, some of them will be all addressed in due time.

Quick crash course:

Tab toggles the map editor, I toggles between different editor mode sections that do things in some ways. It might look chaotic at first, so you might want to stick to the tile editor for now. Also look at the readme.md, it explains EVERYTHING in how the editor works.

Layer 1 is the far backend, I suggest drawing background elements there.
Layer 2 is the collision layer. Anything drawn here has collision
Layer 3 is the layer where the items are placed and seymour is drawn on.
Layer 4 is the UI layer, I also suggest drawing water pools here.

Switch the active layer in tile mode with numeric 1-4 keys.

Gamepad support is available, though it's kind of messy for the editor, use it only for the actual game for now.

The combination of TV+gamepad is highly recommended.

Have fun! I'll probably have a more substantial hopefully final update at the end of the next week.

Nothing gives you a better feedback than trying out your own editor to build a room. I already have a list full of things to improve. :)

Meanwhile, this is advancing. I have cloud walking, better UI, better entities, better triggers/actions, presentations, demo room with Seymour being able to jump around and lots and lots of new features. Used them together now to assemble the intro part, which is fully editable itself with the editor.

Download link to this alpha version in the description.

https://youtu.be/uPE4tGggjgg

@enthusiastguy This looks fantastic. {yolkfolk}:clap:  

I've had a quick go, and there's one minor thing.
When I stay on the title screen, the game doesn't respond to the Space button until the music finishes playing.

Actually, I think there are two things:

1. When the film reel strip is rolling down, you cannot skip.

2. Sometimes when you start the game neither the action button nor the jump button skips the intro.

Noticed this happens usually when the game starts not focused, but there could be other triggers. That thing needs more debugging, but don't worry, both issues are on my list.

A workaround is to simply start the game again, wait for the "Code masters presents" and press space. This usually works.

TAB puts you in the editor.

Nothing much to do on the map yet. Though you could open up the editor, press the arrows until you navigate to room zero and press tab again.

That will teleport you to a very unfinished demo room.