I officially have 44 more days to the deadline, although I am setting myself on a strict 30-day private deadline. Beyond that I promise to start practical work on Empire Wars.

The game has an interesting history. The parent project was designed two years ago under the name of “Mission Impossible”. A couple of weeks ago I pulled out the file and began improving it. While “Mission Impossible” had 3 levels, “The Adventure of the Evil Demons” has 9 rooms, 6 of which are actually gameplay levels. The 3rd level of “Mission Impossible” was half redone, the graphics were improved, the layout set up again, and the instructions rewritten 4 times. Now there is a much more interesting shop system giving the user an inventory with several items that make gameplay easier.

The game is being entered into the Tech Fair. I currently have two deadlines, both of which don’t worry me at all.

*Tomorrow: Present the game to my school’s Tech Fair team head. He will have to approve the game so that it goes on to the county level Tech Fair. I know that he will approve it because up until know he approved everyone’s and half of them didn’t have 5% of my projects’ value.

*January 31: County-level Tech Fair. I have to finish the game by this day, although I will most likely be done by the end of Winter Break (January 6). Beyond that I will just be fiddling with the controls and designing more levels for the fun of having a more complex game.

I plan to publish this game later on after the Tech Fair to see if it will earn me some good bucks. The main hope I have from this game is to gain popularity for Phazii Entertainment. Beyond that I will stick to Empire Wars for the major popularity hits. I also hope to gain some good bucks off of the Tech Fair itself.

Follow-ups will be posted almost daily throughout the Winter Break.

As “The Adventure of the Evil Demons” is going to be my game and my game alone, it will probably not be advertised as an official product of the Phazii Entertainment (departments following) more than the more general, unfocused “Phazii Entertainment product”. I also plan to make a sequel and that will probably be a company product with departments participating.

The first game will either be ‘Empire Wars’ or ‘The Adventure of the Evil Demons’. I am now refocusing my work on ‘The Adventure of the Evil Demons’ because the school Tech Fair is going to be on January 31. For further information, visit the recent post.

For the essence of efficiency and time I will be completing the projects separately and most probably one after the other. That is why I am totally abandoning the programming and graphics for Empire Wars currently. In the meantime I am planning the menu, graphics, buildings, and units that will be in the Empire Wars game. Under that I am practicing my drawing skills.

As an entirely parralel project I am now finishing up the whole “The Adventure of the Evil Demons” beta. Although “The Adventure of the Evil Demons” actually has a parent game that, at the time of creation was called “Mission Impossible”, it will probably be advertised and sold as the first game in the series to follow.

Tomorrow I am presenting my idea for “The Adventure of the Evil Demons” in the school Tech Fair team. I will obviously be chosen to represent my category as I only have one competitor in my category (animated graphic design) and his project looks extremely unfocused and has glitches upon glitches. The collisions don’t even make sense and it is extremely hard to use the keyboard functions. On the other hand, mine is organized and neat and much better in every possible way. As tomorrow is coincidently the last day of the semester in my county, I will generally have the entire Winter Break (15 days) for myself just to improve the graphics, layout, and display. The product shown on January 6 (first day of second semester) will look much, much better.

While Empire Wars will probably have several expansion packs, the original will be probably be functional but dry. There will most likely be no additional special effects or any other effect that will spice up the game. This includes transitions and instant events and subevents verified. My friend that is working with me on it and myself have already thought of several ideas for expansion packs that will follow Empire Wars. Many of them are editions that will not change the layout and gameplay as much as the tactics, graphics, and units. In addition, there will obviously be additional functions.

I decided that instead of showing you snapshots of the game I could show you guys dry sprite images. That way you can see the graphic quality that will be employed during the future publishing of the game without actually seeing the game layout and all of the game’s functionality.

The thing is that “The Adventure of the Evil Demons”‘ programming is pretty much complete. I have temporary graphics in the sprite reference although I know that I will want to edit the sprite reference later on. That means that in general the layout and the objects are functioning exactly the way they should be; the game is working exactly how it will later on, and all of the input methods are connected as they will be during the publication (mouse and keyboard alike) but in essence the game will look different in that that the sprites will look different and much better, as I am doing the whole sprite reference a makeover with GIMP.

While I am learning how to draw better dry pictures (as in dry sprites), I am trying to learn how to use different game programming softwares. I do know how to use several basic ones. The most complex one is Game Maker and it is obviously the best one and the most accurate. It is easy to use in general as the variable system has a reference that can be altered according to the game’s functionality and preferences, which are set by variables as well. Game Maker is good because you can adjust it well to the situation, so if your game is a geeky physiology simultation you can tailor it to be a geeky physiology simultation, although it could take a while… A long while. I do know however that there are a couple of different game programming softwares that work better than Game Maker according to the situation.

I contemplated the other option which was learning to draw well myself. I am good at making an average picture much better using my graphics software (GIMP), while the pictures I made from scratch usually turn out not as well as the already-started pictures. If I use GIMP to edit a hand-drawn picture, the final image on the sprite reference during gameplay could look better than it would otherwise look. Also there several of my favorite filters look much better on a hand-drawn picture because of the lack of perfect consistency in pixel color throughout the contour lines.

As the GIMP paintbrush is designed so that there is an inconsistency, this hardly looks like much improvement, but the paintbrush works in a way that separates the line in the middle with an opaque color and at the sides of the pixel formation it spreads out with more transparency. This doesn’t look exactly like a gradient because the edge sharply falls away as it reaches the boundary of the pixel formation.

I am now working on drawing several different sample dragon pictures to edit a bit with GIMP and add to the sprite reference of the game. However, the sprite reference editting facility of the programming software I am using (Game Maker) different in many ways as opposed to GIMP. The transparency has a total different function and helps only in the game as a transmission of pixels with a higher depth than the object reflecting the original sprite. That is why I am trying to turn the pictures into a JPG first and sharpening them out with Paint (although I hate Paint). Some of the design is being worked on using Google Sketch-Up as the display function is 2-dimensional in the game but is really 3-dimensional in the game context.

I will upload a few pictures soon to show you my progress.

I just wanted to remind you that I am working on the graphic design for Empire Wars. I have no actual coding done. I’m just working on the artwork right now. Several years of experience have granted me the ability to finish the coding in one to two weeks, but I’m having tons of problems with graphics. I never was a really good graphic designer.

I do not intend to hire a professional graphic artist, but I am thinking of just scanning some pictures I drew by hand and then editting them a little bit with my graphics program. I could also just ask my brother to do the graphics: my brother has mad graphic designing skills. He’s not “bad” at game designing–actually, he has just as much experience as me–but he just doesn’t spend lots of time on game design. He prefers to do graphic design. So he might be able to help me with that.

Without a good graphic artist, progress is going from slow to slower, so I will try to show you a couple of units by today evening or tomorrow, and I can almost guarantee they will need major editting before they actually get in the game.

If you have any questions, please comment on this post (below). =)

Empire Wars is a game about building, developing, and maintaining an empire. Building an empire includes conquering territory and exploring / colonizing unclaimed territory. Also, there is going to be a vast variety of troops to choose from, divided into 6 different types of troops: infantry, archery, cavalry, marine, artillery, and flight (and appear in the game in that order). There are several different engineering technologies that you will have to unlock in order to get the more advanced troops and buildings.

I don’t want to reveal any more about this but I will be posting pictures soon.

I have been programming games for several years, but I have never published a game. All of my friends say that my games are really good, and I have entered one of my games to a Tech Fair competition at my school and have won 1st place.

For now, all of my games I will program alone, but I am not sure if I will do all of the graphics by myself, let alone all of my ideas.

I will publish an update of my progress at least once a week.