Super Alpha Test (Tech Demo)

UPDATE:  Due to major updates in the server, this client no longer works.  Stay tuned for further releases!

Hi all,
Today I am releasing a super alpha version of the game so far.
However, it's still not much of a game. This is more like a tech demo.
This is mainly to get some very early feedback on what I've got so far,
to gauge the interest in it.
I also hope to pull in a bunch of testers to help me further develop the multiplayer aspect of the game.

Please note that it's still really buggy and unpolished, I also don't have a production server and am using my development server.
So expect plenty of downtimes and broken server communication.
Also, the game was developed with an Android 1.5 (stock G1) and doesn't fully work with 2.0+ just yet.
Make sure you have TasKiller ready, you'll need it.

So with that said:
You can download the latest alpha apk here.
Use the signup word: 'douchebag'

Features so far:
Signing up for an account
Camera movement via trackball
Touch based movement, click on the tile where you want to move to.
Area to area teleportation, just step over some of the NPCs and you'll get teleported. (not polished)
NPC/Event/Player activation. Long touch a player or npc for the player menu to come up.
Tile animation, check out the water move.
Remote player display and movement (not fully polished)
Character name display (though it hurts FPS, it'll be optional)
Zone chat
All multiplayer enabled

Feedback, Comments, Questions, Testers, etc:
therevoltingx@gmail.com

Fun Shot!

Pressing forward, I've added a few features to my custom map editor for my game.
Including:
* Better toolbar icons (for the meantime)
* Muti-tile select/paint
* Eraser
* Area/Layer Clear
* Layer VIew Toggling - Alpha blending support in wxWidgets is weak :-(
* Toggle view grid and tile indexing/numbers information

This will help me make maps for the game.
I've also started to use the excellent Inquisitor RMXP tileset.

Here's a couple of shots of a map I designed using that tileset and the new features I've added.
Enjoi!

On The Road to an RPG

During the past couple of weeks I've been thinking how I wanted to handle the RPG aspect of the game.
Since I come from an RPG Maker background, I'm familiar with the event/switch system it implements.
However, bringing this into an MMO aspect was a bit of a puzzle. The answer turned out to be simple, and once I got all the details together I set forth into making a scripting engine for the game.

The scripting engine uses JavaScript and it aims to resemble an RPG Maker functionality in script form.
It was also challenging figuring out how it could handle many players at once, from the rough tests it seems that i can handle the load just fine, but only time will tell.
I'm not sure I should even be blogging about this, since it's part of the backend server and the project is not open source.
However, I find it too exciting not to talk about.

So, now that I'm able to sew together an RPG I've started 'prototyping' the game using RPG Maker XP.
The graphics that RMXP uses are pretty much identical to the ones I've designed to be used by my game. This will make finding an artist and transferring ideas much easier.

There is a mountain of work to do with the software, but I'm working on it. However, it would be great to get some help with mapping, scripting, quest designing and story brain storming. I'm also in talks with some artists that have offered to make the art (tilesets, character sets, sprites, etc.) for the game, but nothing too serious yet.

Let's Chat!

After taking a brief vacation, I'm back working on my game.

I was heavily inspired by the Android game 'Pocket Empires' which I think is brilliantly designed.

Integrating the chat involved working with Perl, Erlang, and Java all at once, but I got it mostly done in less than a week.

Most of the time was wasted fiddling with the Android UI toolkit.

So here's a screenshot of the rough results, of course multiplayer enabled!

New Client Screenshot

After a lot of work on the game's multi-player code, I've seemed to have wrapped up most things regarding real-time movement.

Though it's not perfect, it's working quite well, so I'm posting a screenshot with 3 players on the screen at the same time.

Videos should be coming as soon as I get some time.

Status Report 2/19/10

So, after a good 6 months of development for my game it seems that things are coming along nicely.

So here's a status of how things are going:

Android 2d Engine (Completed Features):

• Loading areas and displaying rendering to screen
• Independent frame-rate animated tiles/sprites
• Pixel based camera movement
• Character/Object loading/rendering

Android 2d Engine (Upcoming Features):

• Pixel based character/movement inside the area (DONE!)
• Character idle animation
• Render strings. (i.e. player names/levels/status)
  

C++ Area Editor (Completed Features)

• Loading previously saved areas.
• Editing and saving areas.
• Editing tileset properties (Tileset Editor).
• Works on Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows.
• No immediate upcoming features.

Master Server (Completed Features)

• Validating users
• Pathfinding character movement
• Track object/character positions/status/collisions

Master Server (Upcoming Features)

• Save player information

Fun Shot!

Haha, here's a picture of my notes for handling movement in the game....

Game Editor Screenshots

And now some shots of the game editor in action....

First Client Screenshot

The first screenshot I'm uploading of my game running on an android device. More to come soon!

Android/T-Mobile G1 + Cent OS 5

Fix for udev:
http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=1586