Welcome Adamo!

I just want to let the millions who follow this blog know that Adamo, my brother, has graciously accepted to join me in making Zelda DS! He's taking over development of the game editor, Zelous, while I continue to focus on the game itself. He has already improved Zelous by adding undo/redo functionality, and the ability to see the actively selected tile! Welcome to the team, Adamo!

Video: Zelda DS - Editor to Game!

Lots of progress since the last post over a month ago! First thing is my Zelda DS editor, "Zelous", written in C#. It's very basic, missing a bunch of useful features (like undo, multi-tile select, and much more), but it works! Here's a video of the editor in action:



With the map saved, here's the game running the map:



Apart from being able to load the map, you may also notice that the water and waterfall are "animating". This is actually color rotation, where I rotate 4 palette values every 200 ms. Finally, this video also shows how the animated tiles for the ocean shore are synchronized across screens (I mentioned this in a previous post, but didn't show it).

More to come!

Video: Zelda DS - Animated Tiles

Finally, a better quality video! To get this video, I modified the video output code in desmume so that it only captures the main DS screen. The code is just a hack right now, but if I ever get around to improving it, I'll upload a patch to the desmume project on sourceforge.

Anyway, this video shows the latest update to Zelda DS, which is simply support for animated tiles. What's interesting is that a set of animated tiles can be bound to the same clock, to make sure they are always in sync across screen boundaries (imagine the animated ocean shore continuing onto the next screen). Furthermore, I can create multiple clocks, which means the tiles can animate at different rates. We can see this in the video - the ocean shore animates slower than the waterfall tile.

That's it for now!

Video: Zelda DS

Check out the latest video:



This time, screen-by-screen scrolling is properly instigated by the player touching the edge of the screen. Notice how the player remains in the same relative spot, but gets "pushed" by the edge of the screen (to remain on screen) when scrolling is nearly complete. This is exactly how it works in the original Zelda. Also enemies are destroyed when scrolling starts, and re-spawned on the new screen when scrolling ends.

That's it for now!

Video: Zelda DS

Crappy quality video of the latest Zelda DS:


Things to note:
- Sword kills enemies, and is attached to player so that even if player is pushed back, sword follows
- Player gets hurt and pushed back when touching enemies
- Boomerang works like in the original (collides with world, returns upon collision, stuns enemies, etc.)
- Player can die (respawns in place)
- Screen to screen scrolling is working, but is currently activated manually rather than when touching the edge of the screen (near end of video)

Welcome!

Welcome to my first blog! My name is Antonio Maiorano, I've been coding video games for over 10 years now, nearly 6 years professionally, and I hope to share some insights on this blog.

Enjoy!