I wanted to do another game project and asked Geekboy1011 about it. He suggested a recreation of a minigame from Final Fantasy 8 called Triple Triad and I sorta went with it. Then I stopped working on it for a while and then picked it up again. Here's a brief summary of the development process from start to now:
*Copied template and opened up all my previous (relevant) projects for appropriate copying
* Looked for source to preexisting iterations of this project to grab all the important images
* Messed around forever with IrfanView to get a good result from batch resize/conversion.
* Wrote a python script to cram all that image and card data into a separate file.
* Write a C program that read it. Made it into a card pack viewer.
* Quit forever or at least until next year.
* Plan using a sheet of paper, a pen, and chicken scratch
* Write game logic.
* ???
*PROFIT Animated PNG of basic gameplay using the Open rule
TODO:
* Additional game rules (Elemental, Same, etc.)
* Fancier graphics everywhere
* Maybe an AI?
Fun facts/long rant: All the input card images were 256x256 which included a transparency to allow a border overlay. I had to crop that out before resizing. Then I had to play with image quantization to both get a decent display and still get 110 52x52 images to compress and fit in 64KB. The number of colors to quantize to is 6. I spent way too much time trying to figure this out and still get transparency to work. The file structure for the data file in which we pack things into originally started out similar to a combined CEVidium metadata file but spiraled out of control with the extra fields. It's pretty much this, each as a single block: Metadata - card data - card title strings - card image data. The card viewer as mentioned earlier in the post was designed to test reading this sort of file. I also intend on implementing multi-file support to allow higher fidelity images, but not right now. I did change things around so file access is more... contained? Yeah, let's go with that. Believe it or not, the most fun (or engaging?) part of the project was trying to do the pixel art for the 8x8 element symbols. The original images were 16x16 so shrinking to 8x8 was a challenge. Was easier to just do it from scratch using the originals as a reference if I even bothered with a reference. The menu code and main structure remains unchanged from since the very first (complete) C-coded CE game I've ever made (Land Loons). I really should do something different about the title screen but... meh. Maybe later. If you made it this far, grats. Here's a link to follow my project: https://github.com/Iambian/TriCards
*
* Looked for source to preexisting iterations of this project to grab all the important images
* Messed around forever with IrfanView to get a good result from batch resize/conversion.
* Wrote a python script to cram all that image and card data into a separate file.
* Write a C program that read it. Made it into a card pack viewer.
* Quit forever or at least until next year.
* Plan using a sheet of paper, a pen, and chicken scratch
* Write game logic.
* ???
*
TODO:
* Additional game rules (Elemental, Same, etc.)
* Fancier graphics everywhere
* Maybe an AI?
Fun facts/long rant: All the input card images were 256x256 which included a transparency to allow a border overlay. I had to crop that out before resizing. Then I had to play with image quantization to both get a decent display and still get 110 52x52 images to compress and fit in 64KB. The number of colors to quantize to is 6. I spent way too much time trying to figure this out and still get transparency to work. The file structure for the data file in which we pack things into originally started out similar to a combined CEVidium metadata file but spiraled out of control with the extra fields. It's pretty much this, each as a single block: Metadata - card data - card title strings - card image data. The card viewer as mentioned earlier in the post was designed to test reading this sort of file. I also intend on implementing multi-file support to allow higher fidelity images, but not right now. I did change things around so file access is more... contained? Yeah, let's go with that. Believe it or not, the most fun (or engaging?) part of the project was trying to do the pixel art for the 8x8 element symbols. The original images were 16x16 so shrinking to 8x8 was a challenge. Was easier to just do it from scratch using the originals as a reference if I even bothered with a reference. The menu code and main structure remains unchanged from since the very first (complete) C-coded CE game I've ever made (Land Loons). I really should do something different about the title screen but... meh. Maybe later. If you made it this far, grats. Here's a link to follow my project: https://github.com/Iambian/TriCards
