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The Reign of Legends 0 - Remake

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DJ Omnimaga:
(This post has been updated on June 11th 2012)

This is one of very few RPG Maker/GM/TGF type project to occur on Omnimaga it seems, as this is only the third topic to be ever posted in this section O.O (There are more but they're mostly news or they got lost elsewhere on the board)

Spoiler For story behind the original 2003 version of this game: From February to June 2003 during my last year of hi school, in compsci intro 2 we had to create some sort of puzzle/RPG type game where you had to find keys and items to continue further in your quest, kinda like Myst, but instead of being a point & click adventure game, you had to implement a playable character that could move around with keyboard controls. Since we didn't learn about tilemapping in compsci intro, everyone except myself had hardcoded collision detection, using squares and stuff to block the character way. However, by the time I started working on my game, I already had some coding experience from my early TI-BASIC days on my TI-83 Plus. As a result, I was the only person in the class to use tilemaps, which allowed me to create a lot more maps at a rapid speed and a larger (and much smaller) game.

This basically gave The Reign of Legends 0: http://www.omnimaga.org/index.php?action=downloads;sa=view;down=139

However, this game will only run on Windows XP or lower (and maybe 32 bit Vista/7 systems). Also at the time I ran into a 99 object/item cap in Visual Basic, so I ran out of them to display the tilemap, forcing me to go with 9x7 tilemaps. I also had no clue how to change the screen resolution while playing. This, combined with lack of pixel art skills, gave a rather poor visual result: 86x86 tiles that were basically 25x25 tiles scaled up, and on larger resolution, the game displays in the top-left corner, with an huge frame around it.
Basically, I decided to do an RPG Maker remake of The Reign of Legends 0, which I released in 2003. So far, I am unsure if I will add music, since it would be rather weird to have 9-10 MB music inside a 15-30 minutes long game, but I might eventually add some if this game was to ever be expanded or something. It will feature the entire map layout from the original game and the graphics will remain true to the original, but they will be scaled down to 16x16 and the game running in a 256x224 resolution, so it looks close to something from the NES or SNES. It will also be translated to English.

Due to the low quality of my pixel art back in the days, the game graphics might appear to look weird to you, but for the default game remake, I wanted to keep it as close to the original, while giving it a proper retro feel (even menu borders will remain the same):


Here are the most up to date screenshots, as of June 11th:







Spoiler For Outdated screenshots: June 6th 2012 (graphical revamp!)


May 30th 2012 Outdated title screen remake:


[ Invalid YouTube link ]

Early remake showcase from May 22nd 2012, using graphics similar to the original:


Original June 2003 version below:








Also i remade the characters since they looked awful lol (even more at 16x16 resolution). I used Charas to remake them.

So yeah, basically this was kinda a side game that went along the ROL series, although none of the ROL games are related. ROL0 came out a few months after ROL1, but under two months before ROL2, and unlike the rest of the series, you don't fight monsters along your way: You just find items to unlock doors and activate switches.

As I do not have any long terms plan to learn any computer programming again, this is why I decided to use RPG Maker 2003 again for this game. Anyone is free to port it to an actual language or even calculators once the game is finished. At least I guess there will be a few improvements, though, such as speed (the original runs at around 3-10 FPS even on newer computers), animated water and character walking animation and the addition of scrolling.
 

As for future plans, here are the possibilities (although they are not guaranteed):

-Revamped mode: A game option would allow you to switch between the original, scaled-down graphics and new ones -Scrapped. Only new graphics will be available

-Expansion: It's possible that at the end of the game, in future versions the story would progress. In that case there would probably be monsters and the title might be changed. -Not started, but now officially being expanded

-Actual storyline

-Music: More chances of music if an expansion occurs. In the event where no expansion would occur but music got added anyway, there might be two versions of the game released: one with music and a smaller zip file with none. -Some music has been done so far.


Hopefully this game is made available for more people to try in the near future (since RPG Maker 2003 games runs on newer OSes too) :P. It is nothing huge, but I thought it would be cool that those who cannot run the original can still have a small idea of how it looked like, assuming they can run RM games in the first place (most likely, since they did on every computer and recent Windows OSes I tried). Hopefully in the future someone can also port it or something.

Juju:
Cool :D

Yeah, VB6 isn't really the best language ever. Anyway I'm looking forward to this :D

DJ Omnimaga:
By the way, part of the issue about the game not running on newer systems is DAXCTLE.OCX. There's no way to get it to be registered in command prompt, unlike in XP (it gives an error about it not being compatible with 64 bit systems). In Illusiat 5 PC it's even worse, though, because not only its OCX depedency doesn't work on 7 64 bit either, but you also need to register it to play the game, which costs $40 or 50.

Juju:
Yeah, those games were unplayable because you had to find those hard to find OCX files. I guess remaking the games solves the problem.

DJ Omnimaga:
They're easy to find, just hard to get to work. On XP, in some cases I just had to include the file with the game or register it via command prompt. The best thing for VB games is to not use any third party activeX controls or whatever. However without them, sprites just flickers like there's no tomorrow when moving around.

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