Crimson Twilight Trilogy [CRPG]

Moloch · 2010-03-20 18:00:15

Crimson Twilight Trilogy by Arkanix Labs

Remember playing Legacy of the Ancients? The Legend of Blacksilver? Questron I & II? Add in a dash of the Ultimas, Demon's Winter, Wrath of Denethenor, and a story line created through twenty plus years of table-top pencil and paper role-playing, and you've got the core of the Crimson Twilight Trilogy.

A non-playable preview was released at ECCC 2009 and can be downloaded from CSDb.

Moloch · 2010-03-20 21:42:57

Todays update includes a 50% screenshot of one of your towns, Narkare.

Town: Narkare (144x128 - landlocked)

Narkare is in the northwestern part of Murkasada and is the middle ground for the trade lines between the north and south coasts.

Lying between the towns of Serdosia to the north and Ellowira to the south, Narkare is a stopping point for trade caravans and travelers a like. A few days travel to the north one can find the old religion temple Umdosia and the Bethict Lighthouse on the coastline.

Rumors abound about a crypt, the end place of the dark wizard Rakoch, within a few days travel distance of Narkare. Only the foolish dare to find such a place and those fools certainly never leave the crypt once found.

Merchants: healer, alchemist, blacksmith/weaponsmith, inn/tavern, bank

Narkare

Pinacolada · 2010-03-21 09:49:55

Moloch wrote:

Todays update includes a 50% screenshot of one of your towns, Narkare.

That is a very cool map! I'm still getting the hang of Cartograph PC. Not that there's anything wrong with the native C= version of Cartograph. I just like the bigger area that's available to scroll around in, I guess.

*listens to Ultima music just 'cause* smile

adamantyr · 2010-03-21 16:18:24

Very nice!

Wow, that is a big map... If each tile uses a byte for storage, that map is around 18k uncompressed.

Are you using compression? RLE will get you some reduction, although it tends to break down when maps have a lot of distinct tiles. Is the entire map stored in memory while in town, or do you load sections at a time?

Adamantyr

Pinacolada · 2010-03-21 16:53:28

adamantyr wrote:

Is the entire map stored in memory while in town, or do you load sections at a time?

I was wondering that too. Although I know the C64 version of Cartograph can optionally save RLE-compressed maps...

Moloch · 2010-03-21 19:47:41

adamantyr wrote:

Very nice!
Wow, that is a big map... If each tile uses a byte for storage, that map is around 18k uncompressed.
Are you using compression? RLE will get you some reduction, although it tends to break down when maps have a lot of distinct tiles. Is the entire map stored in memory while in town, or do you load sections at a time?

That map is the largest size we'll support in the game - 144x128 characters. All wilderness areas are 128x128 chunks of the large world map. Plenty of smaller towns/villages that are 75x75, so it's not totally overwhelming.

At the moment we're not using compression, but the end product will use RLE compression. The entire map is loaded into memory. Haven't really figured much into transitions for wilderness, but have a few ideas churning.

Great to see you Adamantyr!

Moloch · 2010-06-22 17:06:24

This update was originally posted at the Lemon64 forums, but why just keep it there? wink

Any updates on Crimson Twilight?

Things are going slowly, partly because our devtools need to mature a bit and the rest can be put straight onto "real life" getting in the way of the hobby our team loves.

Here are a few updates to hold you over until the next preview is released, which should be sometime this summer.

We've taken on a new member since the first preview release, Andy Vaisey has joined our ranks and his graphic talents are a great fit into our team! He is working on everything from the title screen, in-game portraits, player sprites, monster sprites, etc. Here are two previews of his work:

The first player sprite, the final game will have eight to pick from at character creation. Multicolor with hires overlay

A selection of recently completed monster portraits. For an idea of the size of the portraits, they require nine multicolor sprites to display fully on screen.

---

We recently reached revision number five for our tomb and town tilesets, using up nearly every character cell of each tileset. Here are a few newer maps made with the new tileset revisions:

The lawless outpost of Jolak, the only port town on the southern continent and the home to one of the darker organizations in the game. Size: 144x128 tiles

The Jolak Underground, the base of operations for the thieves guild. Size: 75x75 tiles

The town of Narkare is a trading stop along the north/south trade route of western Murkasada. This crypt is housed somewhere under the town. Size: 64x64 tiles (the white X are from the map size template)

---

We've also had a few very surprising and awesome things happen since the release of our first preview in September 2009.

Originally, the music for the game was going to be composed by one of our own guys, Fuzz. He made up a few test tunes, all of them perfectly fit for the completed game - good stuff. But Fuzz is helping on so many other fronts it really was stretching him thin. Out of the blue we had an offer from some well known composers to make the entire album for the game! The composers are Jeff/Crest, Linus/Crest, and Aumtron/FunkScientist Productions. Of course we accepted! The talent of those three is outstanding and certainly will make the audio part of our game massive and help to push the entire project to higher peaks!

Round the same time an email came in from another talented guy, this time a graphician. Releasing the preview certainly was generating some good buzz for us! The email was from the talented individual Zeldin/Cascade and he was offering to make a loader screen for the game! In fact, he was so interested that he already took an older unused screen and worked on it before emailing! It was already complete and ready to send over on a disk image! Of course, again, we instantly accepted the offer and thanked Markos for his hard work and promised him a copy of the completed game. Markos took a picture originally painted by Mel Grant titled "Sword of the Gael" and pixeled (not wired) it to the C64 some years in the past and it was never used. He added a nicely down Crimson Twilight logo to the left side of the screen and it was complete! Here is a smaller image of the original Mel Grant painting:

That image would be perfect for cover artwork for our box, I'm thinking of contacting Mel Grant again to see if he'd be willing to help out a hobby project with artwork.

Lastly, a recent internal preview with the player sprite in the game marching around the town of Narkare. The screen might look blurry, but that is simply the "PAL emulation" option in WinVICE in action with a Pepto palette in place.

Well, I hope that is a big enough update to cover your interest for the time until the next preview is released. We're currently scheduled to release the next preview in July, but that date might slip back to August due to some recent medical issues on my part. I'm ready to get back to the code now and look forward to releasing something soon.

Please post any and all feedback - positive or negative - here. Feedback is a really good helper for large projects, especially when you get to certain "climbing the mountain" points that need an extra shot!

BTW - We'll have CartographPC V1.5 shortly and about a month later V2.0 should be shot out. After that the Cartograph tools are mainly finished and we can all get focused back on finishing this chapter of Crimson Twilight - Forgotten Chamber of the Seers!

Moloch · 2010-07-25 00:34:01

A smaller update than the previous, but we're in the middle of working on the next preview to be released.

This time around we'll show you an assortment of monsters you'll encounter during your travels in Murkasada. All of these sprites are composed of one multicolor sprite and a hires sprite overlay to bring out more details. The colors displayed aren't the final choices, these are just work-in-progress screenshots.

This first batch was created by our graphician Andy Vaisey.

ghost / haunt / skeletal phantom

lich - not someone you want to meet up with in a dark alley

mummy - best friends with the lich and certainly not yours

giant snake - ssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss

giant rat - someone flushed it down the toilet and now it is back!

yeti - everyones favorite snowman

sasquatch - walking through the forest? better watch your back!

The final three sprites in this preview are the work of Saehn/Style.

beholder - the eyes, the eyes!

bugbear - will this big teddy bear hug you or flatten you?

ankheg - a very large bug that bites people into pieces, beware

Next month we'll have a little something different to check out, stay tuned.

Moloch · 2010-09-17 11:03:59

This weekend is ECCC 2010 and Fuzz and Warlock from our crew are there having a good time. They're also demonstrating some of our projects, including a bit of Crimson Twilight. Here are a few screenshots from the preview available:

Hmm, is there something behind this bookcase?

Nobody in the alchemist shop, where is everyone?

Yep, everything on my character sheet looks fine.

Uh oh, maybe I shouldn't have went down the ladder behind the bookcase?

Who is entombed here? It is a bit warm here, maybe that lava river is the cause?

Originally we wanted to release our next preview at ECCC 2010, but the deadline came and passed without a release candidate. We do plan to release Beta08 within the next few weeks, probably in the first week of October.

adamantyr · 2010-09-20 14:13:28

Looking good! Is it a single player game, or a party-based game? I imagine you'd probably still have just the "leader" on screen with a party; it's not worth burning the sprites to have a train of them.

Nice to see someone else is sick and tired of "gold" as the common currency in CRPG's. Gold is RARE! A small sack of gold coins was, literally, a king's ransom in the Middle Ages!

I noticed that when your stat screen was up, the background went "gray". A very nice effect! On the TI, I could do something like it, but it's not really worth the hassle... I'd have to blast out about 2 kilobytes of color data, and then restore the colors from disk afterward. Not really worth it.

Adamantyr

Moloch · 2010-09-23 20:39:36

adamantyr wrote:

Looking good! Is it a single player game, or a party-based game? I imagine you'd probably still have just the "leader" on screen with a party; it's not worth burning the sprites to have a train of them.

Single character game. My favorite CRPGs (Questron series, Legacy of the Ancients, Legend of Blacksilver) played the same and the style stuck with me.

adamantyr wrote:

Nice to see someone else is sick and tired of "gold" as the common currency in CRPG's. Gold is RARE! A small sack of gold coins was, literally, a king's ransom in the Middle Ages!

Yes, gold shouldn't be as common in RPGs. I didn't go overboard with the idea and create "steel pieces" (Dragonlance) or some other overly common metal, just trying to tone down the use of gold so a treasure handed out as "golden chalice" actually is something more than "another 200gp".

adamantyr wrote:

I noticed that when your stat screen was up, the background went "gray". A very nice effect! On the TI, I could do something like it, but it's not really worth the hassle... I'd have to blast out about 2 kilobytes of color data, and then restore the colors from disk afterward. Not really worth it.

Yep, using some memory for this. Had to setup a buffer area in memory, quite expensive on it's own. So I've multi-purposed the area to include code modules (combat, merchant, etc.) which aren't always needed in memory. The disk load times for a few blocks of code shouldn't be noticable.

Pinacolada · 2011-03-12 12:35:04

Just thought I'd poke my head in here and see whether there are any new updates. smile

Moloch · 2011-11-19 19:55:10

We're getting closer to releasing a new payable preview. Some of the recent changes include a new mapping style (less isometric and more top down), lots of updates to the tilesets, and finally a proper rulebook for the gamesystem.

Here are two preview images directly from CartographPC using the newest tilesets. One of these images is bigger than the forum will display, to see it properly you will have to view it in a new window.

Jolak

Jolak Underground

aNdy · 2011-11-20 08:33:01

Looking nice!

Moloch · 2012-08-18 15:24:12

A pile of cloth maps in various sizes and different manufacturers! We've finally decided on the material used and sizes of the cloth map for Crimson Twilight. That's right, we'll have two different sizes; one for a basic version of the game and the bigger size for the special edition. More details coming soon, everything about the different editions is basically ironed out now.

If you look closely, you'll notice differences in some of the maps. The maps with the white border are the final versions.

Moloch · 2012-10-05 01:49:36

Some talk lately about what options should be available for the eventually joystick control. Originally my idea was simply movement and button for toggling walk/run but it looks like the feedback wants more control via joystick if possible.

Besides movement, some of the ideas include searching by joystick, opening doors, long button press and a pop-up menu of options, various commands used by pressing button and pushing in one of the four directions.

If you've got some ideas/feedback, post away here and we'll see what options can be included in the game.

redback · 2012-10-05 02:38:53

Moloch wrote:

Feedback wants more control via joystick

I agree

Moloch wrote:

Searching by joystick, opening doors, long button press and a pop-up menu of options, various commands used by pressing button and pushing in one of the four directions.

However I'd save holding-FIRE for the most frequently used command (ie: searching or opening doors) as running should done with an easy to remember key like <CTRL> or even <SHIFT-LOCK> - just throwing ideas out there.

If possible using the hold-FIRE button to interact with any object the character is facing to both search or open may be an option. Except that would take the fun out of this keyboard orrientated game. For which I would recommend that the <C=> be used to pop-up a display with the basic keyboard commands.

Personally I'd would like the c64 cursor keys to do movement as well (by default) as many C64 users are used to holding <SHIFT>+<CSR-UP/DOWN> - which I believe are mapped to respective up and down arrows in emulators.

Last edited by redback (2012-10-05 02:55:58)

aNdy · 2012-10-05 11:47:25

Direction and button press to activate search/open doos etc - like the game "Impossible Mission"

Two quick button taps to change walk/run - in the game "Citadel", two quick taps activates a 'grab' cursor, so a similar implementation to that.

Stand still and long button press to activate menu.

Carcass · 2012-10-06 09:35:37

I like the idea of SHIFT LOCK for run/walk.

I'd say make the joystick work like this...

Single click = Popup Action menu... in which, just click does the "intuitive thing" like open a door if you're infront of a door or search if you're facing something searchable etc... and other actions are assigned to up, down, left, right, as Moloch suggested. So like search might be click, click. click + up might be inventory. etc...

redback · 2013-04-24 01:07:29

Why not 128 keys in 64 mode?
Yes! I'm a Commodore 128/D tragic and I even remember typing in those BASIC lines from RUN magazine issue - May 1987 (on page 15) as a kid.

It would be cool, using the 128 arrow keys or the numpad as a movement option in CT tongue

Moloch · 2013-04-24 02:22:18

Certainly something we'll look into, seems simple enough looking at it with my tired eyes.

For joystick I'm leaning toward movement (push direction) and button + direction would be search, open, etc. So a total of nine options via joystick and the rest will be keyboard.

C64Dev Forum

#1 2010-03-20 18:00:15

Crimson Twilight Trilogy [CRPG]

#2 2010-03-20 21:42:57

Re: Crimson Twilight Trilogy [CRPG]

#3 2010-03-21 09:49:55

Re: Crimson Twilight Trilogy [CRPG]

#4 2010-03-21 16:18:24

Re: Crimson Twilight Trilogy [CRPG]

#5 2010-03-21 16:53:28

Re: Crimson Twilight Trilogy [CRPG]

#6 2010-03-21 19:47:41

Re: Crimson Twilight Trilogy [CRPG]

#7 2010-06-22 17:06:24

Re: Crimson Twilight Trilogy [CRPG]

#8 2010-07-25 00:34:01

Re: Crimson Twilight Trilogy [CRPG]

#9 2010-09-17 11:03:59

Re: Crimson Twilight Trilogy [CRPG]

#10 2010-09-20 14:13:28

Re: Crimson Twilight Trilogy [CRPG]

#11 2010-09-23 20:39:36

Re: Crimson Twilight Trilogy [CRPG]

#12 2011-03-12 12:35:04

Re: Crimson Twilight Trilogy [CRPG]

#13 2011-11-19 19:55:10

Re: Crimson Twilight Trilogy [CRPG]

#14 2011-11-20 08:33:01

Re: Crimson Twilight Trilogy [CRPG]

#15 2012-08-18 15:24:12

Re: Crimson Twilight Trilogy [CRPG]

#16 2012-10-05 01:49:36

Re: Crimson Twilight Trilogy [CRPG]

#17 2012-10-05 02:38:53

Re: Crimson Twilight Trilogy [CRPG]

#18 2012-10-05 11:47:25

Re: Crimson Twilight Trilogy [CRPG]

#19 2012-10-06 09:35:37

Re: Crimson Twilight Trilogy [CRPG]

#20 2013-04-24 01:07:29

Re: Crimson Twilight Trilogy [CRPG]

#21 2013-04-24 02:22:18

Re: Crimson Twilight Trilogy [CRPG]

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