Looks pretty nice indeed, as usual

http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/ is a HTML5 Canvas-based rendition of some great palette effects from 1980s and 1990s games.

This is great, thanks for sharing! I like that you can mouseover the palette entries to see where they're active in the scenes, very cool.

Those are great, I remember being wowed by the fact that it's static image data and animation through palette rotation - Magic Marsh Night is a great example ... doesn't even use all 256 colours!

Yeah it blew my mind too, I remember noticing the first time I was running a Sega Master System emulator and being able to see the palette swapping going on.. Just one of those cool moments of seeing how coders overcome hardware limitations.

I've spent a bit of time on bosses this week, mainly tweaking their AI for the bigger play screen, but also started doing colour sprites (and I finally put some colour in the player sprite too )

Difficulty levels are now finished, which are:

- Easy, enemies have less HP and hit softer.
- Normal (no change)
- Hard, Gold death penalty is increased to half (normally a quarter), enemies spawn more often, and instead of respawning at a nearby Well of Life, you respawn all the way back at your house (or the castle dungeons if you haven't completed the first area yet)
- Hell, same higher enemy spawn rate as Hard, but you only have one life. Once you die, the game is lost.

Below is a roughly 4 minute clip of me running through the first area fairly quickly (on Normal difficulty). There is now an intro wall of text when starting a new game too, which you can speed up or skip if you don't want to sit through it.

The game is/was almost finished, I was knee deep in play testing and balancing.. And then decided I wanted to rewrite the AI for a couple of the enemies.. Which meant I needed to rewrite how all the enemy AI was structured because of the convoluted way I did it years ago But it's now mostly done!

Some of it was improving the basic path finding for walking enemies to be a little smarter (still not that smart, just not prone to sitting idle in a corner now). But what I really wanted to do was improve the Bee and Bat enemies to behave more like they do in Golvellius, which they're meant to be based off. I tried doing this 20 years ago but had no idea how to do it then.

The first image is how Bees and Bats used to behave, which was to just move in the same circle pattern every time. The second image is how Bees now behave, which is that they have various circle patterns to choose from, and sometimes turn clockwise, sometimes counter clockwise. (Semi related, enemy bullets now are deflected by the shield instead of being absorbed). The right image is how Bats now behave, which to sort of swoop at the player in arc patterns.. This one is what really did my head in 20 years ago, so I'm glad to have come up with a solution.



I think I'm on the home stretch now. I have a bunch of notes for small revisions from my testing, but it should be finished soon

The colours are so vibrant! Can you show us the full palette? I think it would apply to other games nicely.

The artwork looks amazing, I just noticed that the mountain Corners weren't rounded but other than that everything looks good! Keep up the good work

Thanks! Here's the palette I'm using:


Mmm that was on my original wish list of things to improve, but then I kept adding other tiles and now all 256 slots in the tileset are used! There are a couple of tricks I could use to swap out tiles for different areas, etc. that would free up some slots for some nicer mountain edges.. I'll see how I go

Cool - are you using all 64 colours or do you switch between 4 x 16 colour palettes?

I'm using all 64 colours together, so each 8x8 sprite is stored in 8-bit format, using up 64 bytes. Colour index 0 (magenta) is transparent, which is ignored for tile sprites for speed.

I've added in the random chance for enemies to drop a health orb upon death that heals the player half a heart when collected (the random chance is lower in the actual game, I turned it up for the below capture). I did this because I found that longer dungeons were a little tough and had no way for the player to heal, so now you could potentially find yourself a nice little grind spot mid-dungeon to heal up

Version 2.0.0 is now available in the archives here

Downloaded! Amazing work .

Do you think putting some information in the readme about there being no Asm( token and perhaps using something like arTIfiCE for newer calcs would be a good idea?

Great Job on the release!! "Production was very fast"

Do you think you may have any future plans for the game?

Thanks! That's a good point, I'll hold off a couple of days in case there are any other small things like this I've missed, and then upload an updated zip

Haha indeed, I tried to keep up momentum so I didn't end up with another half finished project

I have a couple of ideas for updates.. I'd still like to improve the look of the mountains like you pointed out the other day.. I came up with a solution to do this whilst still having maximum 256 tiles (including doing nicer edging for water, swamps and lava as well), but it was going to require more re-writing of the map engine than I was willing to do at this stage. But perhaps I'll come back to it. I have also considered adding animation to enemy sprites as a possibility in the future.

In the meantime, I have a plethora of other unfinished projects. Some I've more or less abandoned for the time being and will likely never come back to, but some I'd like to try to make some progress on.

I don’t do video games that often, but I am trying really hard to beat the game, and I had to try 10 times to beat the first boss, and have tried 50+ times to beat Dezemon, but cannot. This is one of the first RPGs I’ve played, so I don’t really know tricks, etc. I’m going insane! Pls help!

You might find it beneficial when you first encounter a boss to focus less on attacking it and more on avoiding it whilst observing the mechanics. Eg. the first boss simply walks side to side at the top of the room, and will charge directly down the screen if you get in front of him. The simple way to beat him is to stay near the bottom of screen, get him to charge, and then walk to the side and attack him, like in the below clip:



As for Dezemon, that is a more difficult fight to time your attacks. My strategy is to have him chase me around the room (keeping relatively close to the edge of screen), and then get a few attacks in when he stops, but start running again before he starts rolling to get a head start.

If you're still struggling let me know and I can record a clip of me doing it

I’m trying to do that, but I tend to accidentally touch him, and after getting through the maze, I generally have somewhat depleted health. Stats: I tried to follow your advice for 11 tries, and my best was hitting Dezemon abt. 18 times. I can get through the maze without dying, but I always lose at least two hearts. Also, thanks for including the png of the map, I hadn’t noticed that and was trying to map the whole thing up to where I am manually. (I have a lot of free time, okay?) Also thanks, I hadn’t noticed that behavior in the first boss and now beat him first try when I start a new game.

Here's a clip of me doing the Dezemon fight, maybe this will help. If you're low on hearts before the fight, you can try to find a good spot to camp and grind normal monsters, they have a random chance to drop health orbs which each refill half a heart.



There is also a full walkthrough here that you can use if you like, which will help you to get all the available hearts.


Mapping it yourself it cool! Most people don't have the patience for that these days, but back in the 80's and 90's with RPG's we always had to draw our own maps, which was slow, but it can be satisfying and adds to the RPG feel

Thanks! I got Dezemon on my 15th try, and beat the 3rd and 4th bosses within 5 tries. I went insane trying to find the 5th boss, and went around through Brill Haven. Then, yesterday, I downloaded the walkthrough, and found out your better way of doing it. I also didn't know about the long press. I hope to beat Banchor tomorrow, if I can fit it around studying . Also, would you have to edit the assembly to render the 16x16 tiles differently and less pixelly, or could you just change the tilemap? (I'm planning on making my own version.)

Also, a couple suggestions for the game: 1, a super fancy animation for when you beat Banchor (fireworks or some thing where all the enemies appear and explode or something like that), and 2, a sort of timing or scoring system where you can view the time spent on that game slot (you would have to add a timer to the HUD, edit the save file saver and interpreter, and add the timer to the home screen, maybe even a highscore option), to encourage people competing on who can do it the fastest (I'm a very competitive person).

I've continued with my mapping, and am using it to try to make the best possible route. Also in development are a list of the AIs of each of the demons and enemies. As you can tell, I am definitely addicted to this game. Great job!

Yes the forest areas can be tricky to navigate, maybe implementing some kind of in-game mapping tool would be handy, or at least being able to hit a button to get a view of a few screens around your current location (I think Zelda: A Link to the Past had that kind of functionality?)

Unfortunately yes the graphics engine is based around 8x8 tiles that are scaled up to 16x16. I did this both to save room on sprite data, and also I like that old school look. But it wouldn't be a massive task to fork off a "HD" version that could take 16x16 tiles and sprites.

A gameplay timer would be cool if people were looking to speedrun! I'll keep it in mind if I get around to doing further updates.

I'm glad you're really enjoying the game! Did you end up beating Banchor?