Since my page is only online for a few more days, I better hurry and do the promised second part:



I'm sure you've all been waiting for this, too.

Back then, this so-called "Real project" was an RPG with lots of similarities to Pokémon. You encountered, fought and caught wild "Monsters", and then used these to fight against the monsters of other "Trainers". It's really similar to Pokemon, but it's in 3D!! Also, the monsters look different.

During the course of this project, several people worked on this, which I'm afraid I cannot list all at this time (I might if I had the backups at hand, but unfortunately, I don't right now). Thanks to them, though! Apart from the "usual suspects" who help me with all my projects (you know who you are :)), I definately have to mention Stefan and our modeller, who called himself "positive_electron" back then (which was a long time ago, I don't know his current nickname, and I also don't know if he was ever active here). Then, there was a guy named KeNiBu. And ... I'm sure I forgot lots of people, for which I apologize.

Have fun with the shots of this unfortunately failed project. Some here have played it!

Part One (the less impressive part)
Part Two (the more impressive part)

Some notes I remember while looking through this.

- The black borders around the screen highlight a "cutscene" or are shown during a dialog, but they don't appear during all cutscenes or dialogs. I don't know what exactly triggered them, but I do remember being exceptionally proud of their nice fade-in-effect.
- The dialogsystem was extremely easy to work with, and very powerful. It also had lots of options like shaking text, automatic centering and what-have-you. I wanted to use TrueType-Fonts at first, but they slowed down the game so much (due to a bug that I'm not sure was ever fixed (I believe it wasn't a Gamestudiobug)) that we went with Bitmap-Fonts. The font used here has been used in many, many other projects since and was made by the amazing Turrican.
For my new project, I made a new dialogsystem, since the old one used execute, and was generally not the best one. The new one "kind-of" encrypts the text, is faster, but uses a standalone editor.
- "BESIEGT" is shown when a monster dies in battle (nobody ever "dies" in these games, they're always just "knocked out"), but in this game, it's "BESIE". Obviously, the text is cut short way too early, but I never bothered to fix that. Huh.
- The "Realtime-facial-animation-code" in this project was made to look like the faces in Wind Waker. It's not too bad, actually, but it doesn't really nail it like Wind Waker did. The code in my current project is closer
- Not shown: If you pressed the spacebar, a menu popped up. It was a neat effect with gears - but thats about the only nice-looking thing in the shots, the "time" and "action"-panels look extremely bland.
- However, the dialog-panels, as well as the "dinodex" and other menu-ish-screens looks nice: Turrican did those, thanks!
- Speaking of other peoples work: Positive_electron did the models, Stefan the levels (but also craeted some models, panels, graphics and what-have-you). I, however, only made horrible programmers art.
- The guy in the pink shirt was supposed to be an annoying character who always told you weird, long and elaborated stories. It was an in-joke to show off the dialog-system. The idea, I believe, was ripped off from Paper Mario 2, where Luigi does the same
- The battle-screens differ a lot. This is mainly due to the fact that there were two battlesystems in place: A turnbased one that worked just like Pokemon, and a realime-based Battle system in whcih you control the monsters movement. Nowadays, I'd try to create a realtimesystem in whcih you indirectly control your monster.
- The battlesystems may look confusing, and they were, but they worked. They weren't balanced great yet, but every attack did its job and could be used.
The code in place for this, however, is a giant mess.
- Even the turnbased battle system had realtime elements: By hitting the left mouse button at the right time, the attack would become stronger (or weaker, depending on if you're attacking or blocking). This shamelessly stolen from Paper Mario, again.
- The grass are actually particles. It was a lot faster this way, but they also had sorting errors and obviously wouldn't eract to lghting.
- The inventory was hastily coded from old pieces of code. It worked, but could easily be taken advantage of by other people - the whole thing was stored in plain text.
The black-and-white-effect was used in several places, and personally, I do think it looks nice!
- Catching the Monsters was possible using "Crystals", for whatever reason. Different Crystals had different effects (i.e. effective at night, effective for water-type-monsters, etc.). Some of those catching-effects looked nice -- but the zoom in was done using camera.arc, so the view-entities are placed incorrectly. Never bothered to fix that.
- The first pic from 11/23/04 is a favorite of mine - the camera position for these kind of animations (i.e. knock out, monster sent out, etc) was chosen randomly, and they do look nice!
- There were two playable areas: The grass-level seen in the first few shots, and a cave-level.
There was also a random-cave-generator in place to provide the player with ENDLESS FUN!! Although I think the random caves were only fun for a short while...
- The "ó" and similar characters were placeholders for symbols (like the male-female-signs).
- The shot from 11/05/04 shows the character looking at the sign. This was done by manipulating the bones, which at that time was a brand-new feature of Acknex.
- The first shot from 11/06/04 is also a favorite of mine, I really like how there's lots and lots of stuff on the screen.
- The trainer battles could be customized a lot, and I remember having a field day with this. Basically all trainers cheat or do something unexpected during the fight. One trainer, in particular, forced the player to balance on a ball of all things, so you always had to balance by moving the mouse while doing battle with him. Good times.

All in all... It was a nice little project, but the scale of it was way too huge, so it's not a large surprise that it was enver finished.
I have never shown the shots before apart from posting them on the website (and, given the pathetic amount of views, this is pretty much "never shown them before"!), so this is a BRAND NEW EXCLUSIVE!
Have fun with that.

Anyone here who still has shots from very old projects they'd like to show?