Live progress #4 – throwing old stuff away

Today’s went under the “Throw away old stuff” flag. Since the code is our property and art assets are mostly not, they all have to go. The process has started a few months ago already, but today it was mostly finished.

The game looks really empty at this stage. There are no replacements yet, except for a few elements. It is a fresh start, like an empty canvas ready to be filled with new stuff.

ware_unknown

So what’s been thrown away – read under the cut:

  • Sprites – can’t use any of the old ones, all thrown away. There are few exceptions – a few dozens of country flags and minor elements we have added ourselves, those will be re-added.
  • Fonts – replaced with new ones (I’ll post a story about searching for fonts sometime later)
  • Sounds – can’t use those either
  • Texts – those are mostly okay, as they are pretty generic. Had to cut out old credits text as obsolete.
  • Defines – were all moved to code and will be XML serialized later on (btw, tileset surfaces are already in XML)
  • Music – sorry, nothing is left. We’ll see later if Andre allows us to use score he wrote previously

Summing up – NG is stripped clean from artwork perspective.

Now to creation side – been busy reworking sprites usage. In the older days all sprites were harcoded, so e.g. build menu icon ID was 383 written right in the code. Now, when everything needs to be replaced this is very inconvenient. Borrowing solution we previously used with texts – every sprite gets its own named constant that can be used around, e.g. ST_GAME_MENU_BUILD = 1 // equals to 1 cos thats the first new sprite now. Another change in the code, which is being applied everywhere, is that everything is counted from 0, for simplicity sake. In case with sprites – 0 is reserved for ST_NO_IMAGE that will be used to mark missing sprites locations.

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6 Responses to Live progress #4 – throwing old stuff away

  1. Ben says:

    Hmmm, maybe by the time you start adding sounds, my voice will be deep enough to do some nice voice acting 😀 (Fingers crossed!!)

  2. The Dark Lord says:

    Still have to hit puberty, Ben? 😛

    Anyway, concerning the music – I’d rather have a completely new soundtrack. It will add so much to the feeling of a completely new game. When it comes to music there shouldn’t be anything that reminds me of the old game, unless it’s some kind of awesome remix. I can imagine some nice orchestrals… yes, that would be quite nice…
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQ-SMsaYZuM
    xD

    • Krom says:

      Sounds like a good idea to me 🙂

      I’m hoping that after we go public with this project it naturally attracts more creative people

  3. Shadaoe says:

    A new beginning !

    This is a really interesting read and I’m looking forward to other live progresses.
    A whole new game, now that’s something ! I’m sure you’ll do something awesome, and reading the progress is awesome, thanks for this.

    I’ll try to keep notes of my questions and ask them sometimes, just to be annoying.

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