Stuff related to the Guardian Legend fan game I was trying to work on. Sigh.
Stream of Just Be Conscious
What a fun filled evening of Megumi Hayashibaritude and playing with the audience.
Posts categoriezed as Guardian Spirits
Teh Guardical Gaiden
It’s been a weird couple of weeks. Every so often I get in this state where the tablet just doesn’t ‘feel’ right and I need to bust out some markers or pencils until my mojo comes back. I say that when I should really be going ahead and knocking off this annotated bibliography for a research assignment, but… Ehhhh.
It dawned on me the other day with my new setup I can stream game footage in addition to the periodic Picarto streams. (Note to self: add sidebar links for my stream pages.) So over the weekend, I started playing The Guardian Legend live before trying my hand at the ROM hack version, TGL: Secret Edition. It’s kind of a trip playing a rearranged version of something so familiar. Playing online with a chat, small as it’s been, has already helped me learn more and appreciate other little things about the game I hadn’t noticed. I just love learning little details like the item drops not actually being randomized, or the curious “rubber band” pattern the Crawdaddy boss has. (If you maneuver side to side, he begins swinging around as well, spreading his projectiles and making him more annoying to hit, but if you stay put horizontally you can use the Saber Laser to cut right through him and his claw tossing with no fuss at all.) Secret Edition turns things on its ear by rearranging the entire overworld, upping enemy counts, changing what items you find where, and in especially interesting cases, puts shooter bosses in the overworld and vice versa. I never realized how much of a help that initial rapid fire upgrade out of the gate was until SE withheld it from the earlier stages and increased the number of enemies, which makes me rely on sub weapons more than I normally would. Which made when I reached an item room selling Rapidfire for 150 chips when I only had a max 100 kind of a kick in the teeth.
One of us has fists, you know.
I’ll continue to pick at it and probably some other games off and on via twitch when I have free time. I figure as long as I can support it, why not waste time with company?
Guardian Spirits Progress Check-In
So, I’ve been tinkering with my game off and on again lately, mainly doing my sprite work during drawing blocks or other lulls in production, as well as hammering and fine-tuning the story and concept stuff into place for when I work up the gumption to really experiment with the engine(s, stupid hybrid game style).
The biggest factors I’m undecided on right now are the exact system of weapon management I want to use (one being to have a simple array of weapons that can be leveled up through use, and one similar to Gunstar Heroes or Sigma Star Saga where weapons can be customized through combinations of items which would be cooler but probably a bitch to figure out how to execute), and whether to retain the overhead view for the exploration segments or go to a side-scrolling, Metroid-like overworld which would be both easier to plot out and make detailed sprites for. Not to mention offer more options for crazy movement equipment, originally the Booster gear just let the Guardian (Guardienne?) execute a short dash move, in a side scroller the same ability would make a good air dash or double-jump upgrade.
At least the storyline is fairly congealed at this stage. A space peacekeeping force is sending a crack team of android operatives to figure out why the Cancer Claw, a pirate group is dicking around in an uncharted asteroid field, only to find an ancient relic that looks to be a superweapon crawling with hostile aliens. After a quick assessment, the team decides it’s better to disable the relic site rather than let their goofball nemeses get ahold of it and split up to deactivate the energy reactors deep within the rock.
Of course, it’s still a pretty ambitious (or stupid) undertaking, so it’ll be a while before it sees the light of day. I’m tinkering with a couple of shooter game ideas at the present though, so maybe one of those will pop up soon. Ish. Before that game does, anyway.
Mockup #1
More like HasBLOW, AMIRITE!? LOLHEADSHOT
I got a box of air in the mail yesterday.
Well, not really, but close. I used some online coupon to order some of the forthcoming Movie Transformers figures and apparently most of the Western Hemisphere did at the same time, since I got a weird confirmation email earlier in the week stating “CONGRATULATIONS, YOUR ORDER HAS BEEN SHIPPED”
Below that, under “Items not Shipped” was a list of every single thing I had ordered, begging the question of how an order for products can ship, without the products being shipped themselves. Cut to yesterday, when I got a box in the mail just a bit small to be one, let alone a handful of Deluxes, and opened it to find:
- One packing list
- Some of that those plastic pillow things for padding
- The two “freebie” sigil magnets the stuff was supposed to come with.
The question won’t stop nagging me- Why not just an envelope? Two flat fridge magnets and a packing slip aren’t exactly fragile goods, not big enough by far to justify a carboard box and air-cushioning.
I think someone in that mailroom must be oddly diabolical, or worse still, the company itself hires exclusively psy-ops specialists who know how to create nagging hiccups, ingenious in their simplicity. TO HASBRO, YOU ARE THE TOYS.
Okay, I’m done stealing Shortpacked!’s material. I got a pretty substantial amount of Guardian spriting done at work today, enough to make a mock screenshot or two and come up with a probably over-ambitious menu screen design. Trying to settle on a finished resolution so the sprite look less HUGE as they do at 320×240, so probably something just shy of 640×480 is in order. I think I’ve got a few tricks up my sleeve on how to both cut corners and make nicer backgrounds at the same time.