Let’s begin with a couple pictures of the game in action, just to make this update look somewhat interesting:

Wondering what this means? Mainly two things:

• I’ve got an actual entity format implemented. This format so far includes graphics, palettes, animations, and frame data. In order to get this big piece of the game in I had to reorganize better how the memory is allocated. First of all, video memory is managed like in this picture by using some tables that dynamically put  graphics and palettes for entities in the areas where they belong to. Frame and animation data doesn’t really need any allocation because it’s all supposed to be always in memory, most of the times stored statically inside map data (same trick was used in Symphony of the Night). Like I said a few months ago, I was having problems defining an animation format, and part of the problem still exists, even tho it’s only related to the way animations are linked together. I’ve got a plan on how to fix this;
• The engine manages and displays entities other than the player. All the elements moving on screen are entities, if you were asking yourself what an “entity” is. This definition covers the player (including weapons and spells), 64 enemies (including some elements of the environment, like chandeliers), 32 projectiles, and other miscellaneous elements like blood effects.

There’s another little detail that may be understood from the pictures, but I’ll make it explicit: we can import entities from the DS Castlevanias, so there’s no need for those pre-assembled sprite sheet that are really useless when you’re programming a game for a limited hardware. At the moment the conversion isn’t complete and doesn’t include animations (need to reverse  remaining bits of the format), but textures, palettes, and frame assembly are properly interpreted and converted to Red Moon’s format. This process supports Symphony of the Night too, with the difference that it’s a bit more complicated to do (the format is truly anal), BUT we’re already able to make full dumps of frame+animation data, which is truly fantastic and works like a charm in game.

A little video about the player entity in action and the entity debugging module:

For the next trick I will need an Italian, a Spanish, a France, and a German. What for? A multi 5 translation!


As you may have noticed from the pictures, it’s only multi 4 for now (en, it, de, es). French is missing entirely because I can’t seem to find a translator for working on like 50 very short messages. It will probably change in the future, but nothing is sure yet. I might actually drop entirely whatever doesn’t make it, including ghost languages.
Anyway, what I really wanted to show you with those pictures is the renewed TITLE module, that is a series of menus containing a title screen, load/rename/delete selection, item exchange, and other neat stuff that I won’t reveal yet. For now there’s only one almost complete, that is the SELECT DATA screen you can see above, completely cloned from the one in Order of Ecclesia (will change in the future to something a bit different). The icons you see there are only a part of the 64 icon set I have already implemented. Unlike SOTN, the icons will not be random, but selected by the players when they start a new game or rename the file. The initial set will be only 16 icons, but you will be able to unlock more as you play and defeat bosses. The screens are also there to tell you that Memory Card I/O is complete and ready to go!

Back to the real game (aka the FIELD module), there are a few other news that I had to communicate for a couple months, but I’m a procrastinator. At this very moment I’m working on a real 3D support with rotation, scaling,  and light effects calculated in real time by the GTE (Geometry Transformation Engine). I’m not sure about the model format to use, but I might end up using the standard one Sony made (TMD) and just forget about custom implementation.
Other than hardware features, there are four more things to say about FIELD. The first is that sin is working on many custom tiles for the 3 first areas of the game (trial cave, town, black forest), and he’s done a really neat job so far.  He is also working on more characters to implement in game, but that will be discussed better in the next update.
Second, I’m done with a color reduction algorithm used to convert true color images into a series of 16 color 16×16 tiles to be used by the game for rendering the scene. The effect is totally invisible to the human eye, especially on a CTR TV, but it doesn’t look too bad even on pixel perfect displays (the effect is lovely on a PSP).
Third, files are now managed in a completely different way by using archives to store all the data in a better and more ordinate manner. There is actually another reason to do this, that is in part Sony’s fault, but it’s also something to reduce CD seek. The official function to read from disc (CdSearchFile) is bugged and can’t locate files when the structure of a folder gets too big (about 30 files, but it’s variable). By implementing an archive system the game now uses CdSearchFile only to locate the archives on disk, and then stores in memory all the data about file allocation. With CdSearchFile out of the window there’s no need to seek around the disk like an idiot every time I need to locate a file, plus it removes any file count limit. It’s not really a big thing as most Playstation games already do this, but it was fun to program.
And for the last: the game now works totally fine on a Playstation! I was having some weird glitches until a few weeks ago because emulators don’t get this correctly (for a change). Now there’s only one thing to fix about XA music not restarting from where it stopped, even if it plays and loops just fine on pSX. I’m afraid I’ll have to rely a bit more on ePSXe for this kind of sound tests. :/

To sum most of these updates, here is a video of language+3D cube test+color reduction+new tiles in action:

Before you ask, yes, what you can listen to for a few seconds is brand new music composed jusf for Red Moon. :D Say hello to Paolo Palazzo, the magnificent composer who has created them.

There’s one last thing I have to add to this update: a new sound format. I can finally say goodbye to the idiotic format created by Sony to gather together a series of audio samples (called VAG, which is not short for VAGina >.>) and call them when necessary, for example for MIDI/MOD/SEQ playback. I call it idiotic because it makes non-musical samples a hell to mess with, especially because you have to setup a ton of crap just to play a simple sound with parameters that make absolutely no sense to a programmer that isn’t interested in music playback. Norio Wakamoto yelling crap in the movie above was done by using the new format which holds a considerably smaller set of information about the samples – contains just what’s really necessary, reducing memory consumption.

Artworks

We finally have a couple artworks, not just b&w sketches. The first one represents the little girl Isidora, one of the vampires in game, while the second one is a prototype of the storyboard that will be part of the introduction. The pencil sketches have been made by Sin, our character designer, and they have been colored later by Ultimecia (who is still working on them, fixing color issues and removing all the rough edges). Other artworks will follow the same style, including portraits using during dialogue scenes. Speaking of b&w sketches, I’d like to show you a few of the newer ones:

In the first three pictures you can see another of the vampires, Jovanka, who will be the “big sis” figure for Isidora. They will be similar to what we’ve seen already with the sisters in Portrait of Ruin, so they will battle alone at first, and then join forces later on. The person in the fourth picture is Dragana, also known as “the lady with the hat”. None of the details about her have been defined yet (not completely at least), but she will be one of the townspeople.
There are other sketches that Sin sent me the other day, but I’m not going to show them (for the moment?). I’m not even sure if the characters in them will make it to the demo (or anything coming right after the embryonic state), but they will probably appear in some art gallery I’m planning to implement later. In other words, you will probably see them all, tho it won’t happen soon. I know, I’m a bastard teaser. :p

Returning enemies

These are just a few examples of old enemies never used again in any newer Castlevania. In the pictures above you can see the Frozen Half from SOTN, the Giant Skull from Rondo, and an eagle from Dracula X68000 (kinda reused in SOTN for the Semler enemies). There are currently a few more in my monster folder, like Skeleton Spear, Sausine (aka Salome), the various floating books from SOTN (including the dummied one), the small Paranoia (rendered a simple demon this time), or Ghost (aka Necromancer) from Dracula XX. If you have any unique monsters that you’d like to see again in this game, even those from the 8 bit era (they will be redrawn for the occasion, of course :p), be sure to drop a comment. I’m open to suggestions.
While I’m at it, I’d like to talk a bit about the bosses in this game. A few months ago, in the days preceding the release of Order of Ecclesia, there was a topic on Gamefaqs talking about the bosses that people would have wanted to see in the game. The good thing about that topic was that there were some really nice ideas, like a gigantic version of the Alraune. I’ve already defined about 13 bosses for this project, but I’d like to bring that number to at least 18. Suggestions are appreciated here too.

Back to the game?

Well, yes, there is something to show from the actual game, not just the planning aspects. Unfortunately for you, it’s nothing about gameplay. :p As you can see from the pictures above (and from this movie, too), it finally has a “Use Item” screen, fully working for the exception of the Magical Ticket (there’s no map town to teleport to yet). I’m also in the process of implementing one of the guide menus, again about items, just like the newest Castlevanias use to do. Both are simple branches of the Equipment menu, ergo they share most of the code, making them a lot easier to program and maintain.
Now it’s time to talk about monsters, AGAIN! Nothing too relevant, to be honest. Today I started programming the monster database, which also includes sprite definition+animation crap. Maybe, I’ll be able to show pictures of them in action with the next update. :0

Anyway, that’s all folks. See you next month (?)!

As usual, let’s proceed in order from the meaningless stuff. The last news speaks about some books I bought to reinforce my knowledge about programming, writing, and whatever is useful for projecting and developing a game. I’ve got bad and good news. Good news, I’ve got all the books in my hands (two of which I’ve gotten for free), bad news is that I don’t have time to read them in detail now. Unfortunately I’m back to university crap, which means that I have to study for a literature exam for the 19th of this month. Italian authors will haunt my dreams until that day, but I’ll try and bear it for the time being. At least I was able to read a few chapters from each of the books, so I know for sure they are pretty good and will help me developing a professional looking game, or that’s what I’m expecting.

Boring part gone, I can move to some of the interesting aspects: new ideas! Sin and I have been thinking about some new locations and monsters for the game, and the best idea so far was to have some sort of heretic church, with a dedicated stage/portion of the map. These heretics will be somehow connected to the vampires in the story, as both are part of an unholy order of sorts: the Zodiac Society.
Speaking of the heretics, I was also thinking about some trap in the boss area which leads you to a sure game over if you don’t act in a particular way, something similar to Ecclesia’s scene where Barlowe asks you to use the Dominus union and you haven’t rescued all the villagers yet. I think many will find this a little annoying, but that’s what makes games really good: add stuff to keep your interest high and make you actually think about a solution to progress. There will be other similar parts, most leading you to finding a boss’ weak spot, boss that would be invincible otherwise. Feels so old style, and yet exciting. :3

Most important part of the entry now: sketches. Yes, Sin did more of those nice looking drawings, and I’m gonna show you a couple as usual. Keep in mind that these are just concepts, so the final versions could be different, partially or entirely.

In order:

• Pier and Harle: these monsters are supposed to show up in the circus-themed level. Pier (from Pierrot) is a knife throwing male artist, while Harle (from Harlequin) is a female fire breather. They always fight together, similarly to what the Owl Knights do with Owls, or the Berigan/Slogra & Gaibon boss. There is also other stuff in the sketch, like that chimera, but I can’t really reveal that part yet; :p
• Euryale: one of the immortal gorgons, sister to Medusa (who isn’t immortal). What does it mean that she’s immortal? Simple, you can’t damage her with regular attacks or magic. :D She is going to be one of the new bosses, and you will need a particular strategy to kill her. This one’s gonna be really interesting;
• Various sketches, actually the first of this batch Sin made. This one gave me the idea of having a heretic church order (notice the two bishop monsters). Dunno if the other creatures in this page will make any appearance in the actual game.

There will be probably more sketches coming soon, or at least as soon as Sin or I have new ideas on monsters or stages. Probably the next one is going to contain a prototype of the heretic church, but that’s up to Sin to decide. As for myself, I guess I still have to plan the whole set of bosses in this game before asking anything new. :p

Now now, I’ve been writing about new monsters, but what about old ones? I mean, this is going to be a Castlevania game, so it has to have Castlevania monsters, right? Well, it will feature many typical monsters from this series, and most of them will be directly imported from the games where they come from. Thanks to Kingcom and some intensive sessions of reverse engeneering, I’ve been able to do this:

This is a little program using OpenGL to render monsters and other objects from the DS Castlevania games. Currently it supports all formats from all three DS CV engines, tho it still lacks a few things I will need for some particular objects. To be very specific, it can’t render most bosses from Ecclesia, and all entries from DoS and PoR appear as grey-scaled, since monsters in those two engines have no palette field, so I had to provide a “standard” one to see at least what I was doing.
The final build of the program is going to have an option to export monsters to Red Moon’s format, althought it will only be able to export graphics, assembly data, and probably animations. Everything else will have to be programmed from scratch, especially the AI. Still, that isn’t a problem as most of the monsters will have completely new scripts, especially “very classic” monsters, like Skeletons.
I’m also thinking about including some monsters from Castlevania X68000 (also known as Castlevania Chronicles for its Playstation port). It would be lovely to have those small clowns and flying dolls from “The Tower of Dolls”. :D Maybe I could just “fix” the sprites to look somewhat more recent, like they did in SOTN for Semler, Toad, and Blood Skeleton. And speaking of SOTN, some monsters will also come from it, but I haven’t decided which ones yet.

New year, new news, new progress. I’m not entirely sure about the last part, but some progresses were done during this period. First, I finally decided to migrate to Visual Studio 2005, for the most of my projects (not all tho), which also includes the Red Moon engine. Now I can finally have a not-so-broken Intellisense database for the Playstation SDK, woot! Second, I’m working on a little class set to handle most of my data in a more decent way, and the good part about this step is that, if I were to release it, this set would also be more or less useful for Playstation hacking (most of it comes from my previous translation projects). Third, there’s no third.

Let’s go back to the actual news. I said I did some progress, but that’s not quite right. I mean, I did something but it wasn’t really on the engine. I’ve been working more on the tool side of the game, defining formats, writing classes to handle said formats, and other boring stuff you won’t probably care about. As for the engine, I’ve been trying to fix my broken collision system, but I haven’t decided yet what approach I should follow. I guess I could keep on with the current collisions, but they are so broken I feel guilty for having them after all the work I’ve done on the editors. Also, I haven’t done much about the animation management so far, which makes me feel even more guilty about being freaking lazy during the last 30 days. >_> And to say that I even wanted to release a demo for Xmas with the very first location in game. :p Aaaaanyway…

This is going to be the “new” logo:

It’s not final, and in fact you can still see how the macron accent is missing in the word Akumajō. However, it’s pretty much what you’ll see in the final version of the game once all minor issues get fixed. Unless I decide to redo that for the third time. :p As for the rest of the title screen, I think I’m gonna draw myself a sketch of the 3 layers necessary for it and then have somebody to color it as if it was a painting. The effect is gonna be cool, I guess.

AND! Speaking about the new logo, I’ve got to show something entirely new: SKETCHES! sin_batsu provided them a couple weeks ago, and boys, I do like them. But let me show you a couple of those concepts (click to enlarge):

The first one is a concept of Igor, a new monster somebody suggested me some time ago. We are still deciding what he should look like, if more scientist or monster like. I think the scientist is probably going to be a villager, while the monster a boss or something (in combination with the usual Franken creature). As for the second and third page, they are just random sketches with both monsters and villagers mixed. You can also notice a revision of Igor in third page (the creature throwing knives).

As for the title of this news, it’s really what it says. I’ve got a new book. Well, actually two (got the second one this morning), both talking  about game design and writing. I should get a new one about programming in the next few days, unless they messed up my order or something, in which case I’ll have to shoot some asses through PayPal. I hope reading these books will actually make me improve somehow, and give a major boost to this project. Programming a game is freaking hard – this is my first time, and I want it to be as good as I can get it. Collisions are damn difficult to get correctly, and optimized at the same time. >_<

Now some final words… I’m. Still. Looking. For. Pixel. Artists. Yes, I haven’t got even one so far. I asked for help at Pixelation or deviantART, but nothing. I even tried contacting master Thaddeus (the pixel artist working on the homebew Vampiria/Parasitus, also known for hacks like Dragoon X Omega II and Project Wallachia), but he wasn’t really interested. Bummer. I guess nobody really gives a shit about Maria Renard project, except for players who are really eager to use her as a main character.

But now on to serious business:

• A title screen! I know I know, it’s as disgusting as watching two snails having sex. It’s a start, even tho it’s not a mock up (>_>), and it took me a while to find a way to keep the image more or less at decent quality using 256 colors. The result is that the whole screen is actually made of many fragments all put together to form the final effect. Now it only needs an actual artwork for the region of Macka, a fog effect, and decent scrolling.
• Back in game. Let’s recap what the scrolling engine can do for now:
  1. Broken collision detection: diagonal tiles don’t work too well for now;
  2. Everything loads from cd except for the collision data, which it’s statically linked in the exe, but it will be included later when I’m done with the map format;
  3. New HUD with glowing heart effect. It behaves exactly like it does in Ecclesia, timing included! The idea behind it comes from Maria’s HUD on Dracula X Gekka for the PSP. Now, I like having golden stuff for her, so I adapted the bars and everything else to use a gold texture and I made it horizontal (vertical is kind of awkward). Colors for the gauges come from a dummied out item in Gekka, which, by the way, is already in Red Moon’s database (it’s called Health Repair, as opposed to Heart Repair).
  4. Weapon*3 configuration button (A, B, C, like in Ecclesia). For the moment it allows the user to switch weapons pressing SELECT, but I’m not sure if I will keep this one. Weapons use a lot vram, and having 3 of them would mean having 3*2*128×128 images, for which there isn’t enough space. Maybe I could come up with a solution to reduce vram consumption by having the weapon images always in ram and switch them as necessary. This method would use about 48KB of ram, that isn’t really too much.
  5. Completely renewed rendering system, which includes everything graphics related. This made me use GsLIB a lot less, which consumes a lot of ram for primitives, not to mention that it works like ass on flipped flat polygons. The game is also sightly faster and renders fine on real hardware.
  6. And speaking of renewed rendering, I also took the two old screen distortion effects and adapted them to the new system. They had some bugs that made the HUD completely disappear, and other crap. They are working again now, even tho there’s still space for updates, especially with the left/right borders in the desert effect (see the screenshot above).

That leaves a lot of stuff to be implemented yet, like correct collisions, an actual map management system, and misc stuff. In particular, I’m currently working on animations for objects on screen, which cover the player, enemies, and “dynamic” objects like torches. So far there is a defined format for frame fragments and hitboxes, but I didn’t decide how to glue them together. The idea is to have an array of indexes that call the fragments and then give some simple coordinates for assembly, then another array of indexes, but for the hitboxes, everything with a timer ahead to determine how many refresh frames it will stay on screen until next sequence of fragments+hitboxes kicks in.

And for the sprite front:

Yes, she finally has new frames. I made them myself, so they will need some more touches, but this is the idea for Maria’s swimming pose. It will work the same way Soma’s and Shanoa’s do. I’ll also have to look into attack poses pretty soon, at least for stabbing weapons. For those who didn’t get the hidden hint, I still need a pixel artist. :(

I’ve also got a sample of the title screen theme. Hope you like it.