No update for awhile, just moved into my new "Cave" so to speak, no more mold, thank friggin god. I'm almost considering letting go of my 8088 and 286 as the 486 has been doing a LOT lately.
The new setup now I have an SSD in my 10 year old Pentium 4 for music production and semi-modern stuff, then I have my 486 for all the retro-gaming stuff. I also setup the Atari 2600 and NES to the TV, working out a way to add the Intellivision permanently to it, took a lot of fiddling to make it happy again, apparently the INTV II just did not like being at rest for a few years.
Picked up game building again, and have another game idea I'm working on.
Corporate Warfare (the one I was working on previously) is still at work, still mostly drawing the backgrounds, though I'm using the 2nd game to attempt something crazy with AGS 2.3 for DOS. But I'll talk about that there. I've been working on the backgrounds, then the sprites. I found out most people do the sprites first.
Mr. Flowers - This one is a bit of a story on how I got started on it....
So, a friend just moved from Cali to WA and she has a son. Her son is into this crazy game called Five Nights at Freddy's - those of you not familiar, it's a modern indie title where you play a nightwatch at a Chuck-E-Cheese-Alike restaurant where you have to protect yourself from wayward animatronic animals. Anyway, I jumped down the FNaF rabbit hole and found myself inspired to do something new with the graphical Adventure Genre in a similar vein.
So I had this bad guy in my mind since I was a kid, sort of like a cross between the boogeyman and the Pillsbury dough boy - if he travelled between dimensions via old Television Sets. Anyway, the game takes place at a TV shop, and you (like FNaF) are a nightwatch, but instead of sitting in one room and shutting doors, it's a point n' click graphical adventure with random puzzles - sort of like if Monkey Island stole the governor amidst the three trials and you had to somehow remotely free Otis from the jail. Prior to this, I was going to do some huge, linear, SOMI/FPFP style adventure game but I've been wanting to learn how to limit my scale so I can do all this as one guy.
Ie. Instead of 40+ Screens (Corp. Warfare), this game will probably only wind up having around half that, and half of those are just different screens for the daytime version of the TV repair shop.
So instead the premise is that you are the nephew of the owner of a TV Shop that was closed in 1988 due to paranormal activity, like FNAF, there's a few days you need to spend patrolling the shop to keep out urban explorers, take care of the homeless, and keep potential criminals out, not to protect the assets, but to protect the criminals, homeless, and Urban Explorers from the paranormal activity taking place in the electronics. Unlike FNAF though, you're not sitting in a room helpless, you are actively walking around the shop finding issues over the course of the night (Randomly activated puzzles), and resolving them to the best of your abilities. Your uncle checks on the shop during the daytime, and will brief you on any potential issues at the start of your shift.
One fun thing about making this game is all the creepy music and video stuff I plan to put in it. Anyone who'se playd One Night at Flumpty's 2 (another inspiration) can really appreaciate the creep value of an old, malfunctioning record player in the game, and B&W TV sets suddenly showing things in color, and whatnot.
Just yesterday I was finishing up on a nifty idea for 256 color (yes, I'm using 8-bit, as it will allow the widest compatibility possible, and smaller file sizes for older computers for the DOS version). Normally using AGS 2.3, one has to set aside a part of the 256 color palette for sprites and the rest to backgrounds, but I found, even when I LIMITED the background colors down to 10-12 slots, by somewhat copying the Graf-X II color palette (yes, all 256 colors, for the most part) to the palette in ROOMEDIT, I found I could STILL Run the game, and everything would look the way it's supposed to, plus I'd have sprites with the same colors as in Graf-X II. Basically, my idea is to have a global palette to save on development time a bit so I don't need to make custom 256 color palettes for sprites and whatnot. I can just use the same exact color chart and placement for ALL things in the game, allowing me to have full 256 color sprites and backgrounds, without having to go to true-color mode (which will only be for the Windows versions).
Another thing I discovered, using a test version of one of the rooms (our visitor insisted on putting the animatronic eyes from FNaF in there....so to compromise Chica's eyes are in the room but they don't really do anything. However, due to my palette mods, the default AGS sprite guy looks really funny....like he's an Oompa Loompa wearing a red leather jumpsuit....guess he joined the early 80's Loverboy touring entourage, 🤣! An artifact of my sprite alterations).
AGS for DOS was originally stated to require a 486 DX4-100 for min sys requirements, I'm actually achieving excellent performance on a DX2-66, albeit under 64MB of RAM, and no L2 Cache. I'm tempted to see how low I can go with this for future DOS games. It still will need a 486 though.....as it does detect what CPU you are using.
