Just a note to anyone who wants to keep instantly up-to-date with anything and everything relating to Mordor: Chronicles – I’ll almost always use my Twitter and Twitpic feeds to blurt out the bleeding edge state of affairs, stuff just like the screenshot over there on the right. Like everything else it’s not updated consistently – but it’s probably much better than waiting around for it to appear here!

I think I can sense a lot of diary-clearing going on! Much as I would’ve liked Runic Games to be the ones to announce their date for Torchlight 2 first, I’m still happy to finally have a firm date to look forward to.

Presumably as a reference to the 15th anniversary of the Diablo series, Blizzard will be releasing Diablo III to the general public of Earth on Tuesday, May the 15th. Fwee! Just another two months of nail-chewing to endure before we can all finally get our hands on the latest entry to the series that defined the term “lootfest”.

With it being such a short time away*, it makes me feel somewhat less impatient at not having gotten into the beta.  I’m hyped!

* Note: 2 months in “Blizzard time” is barely enough to have a nice cup of tea in, so yes, for them it IS a short time.

The past few days rank up there along with the first week of coding as the most productive time I’ve spent on the game yet, which I suppose can only be a good thing! I thought I’d go into a bit more detail about where things stand as Milestone 4 of Mordor: Chronicles is nearly done.

The main goals for this stage were to get combat working and to allow the player character to equip a selection of weird and wonderful items that are magically placed into his possession by the use of arcane debugging magic. I’d been at a dead stop for a couple of weeks after reaching the dreaded point where I had to formulate a reasonable way of calculating damage done by player and monster attacks… but several days of concentrated braincell burning, spreadsheet wrangling, and interface jockeying has paid off!

Barring a few rough edges, combat and equipment is working, and the video below illustrates how the flow of combat is displayed. As you could probably guess, bloodstains with numbers inside indicate damage dealt, a skull indicates the swing killed a monster, and the small diagonal slashes indicates a miss. Also present are shields, which indicate that you (or a monster) landed a hit successfully but, due to high defence, did no damage. Didn’t catch any of those in this short clip – but they’re there.

There are still rough edges, the most serious being the character’s uncanny ability to move and escape from combat at any point – but nothing some further hacking and bodging can fix!

Tomorrow I’ll be setting up a new level and giving the monsters some varied, real stats to properly check that the combat formula gives satisfactory results (and at least partly matches up with my test spreadsheet). Unless there are signs of serious problems I won’t spend too long balancing and creating real content at this stage, though… that lovely task will come much later. 

Although for quite a few weeks of this feature I’ve gone with tracks that a lot of people will already be familiar with, I hope that this one might take you a little by surprise. It was certainly quite elusive to find information about – although I had acquired this MP3 via the indispensable remix.kwed.org, I didn’t know the slightest thing about the game it originally came from…

Zolyx’s Game Music Monday #22: Kate Z. – CityBomber (PsytroniKateZoid remix)

I like to understand the roots of a track, even if it’s only so that I can include a bit of artwork to go with the song in question – and after some tentative research, I couldn’t identify what was going on with City Bomber. Did it refer to this game, a clone of Blitz? None of the emulator images I could find had music anything like what I was looking for… but then, after what in hindsight was an unnecessarily long road, I came across Kate Z.‘s homepage and everything started fitting in much more smoothly!

So, there’s no need to keep passing over this fantastic remix any longer. It’s from the in-game tune of a game which was originally to have been published by Psytronik but switched labels to Visualize part-way through development – then never actually reached completion. It’s a shame, since the demo you can find through Games That Weren’t is really quite fun. Try it!

The remix itself is brilliant, featuring a sublime mix of samples both old and new alongside a great bit of drumming and guitar work that plays to the action and theme of the game nicely. Hopefully it pleases your ears – it surely does mine!

Tune in next week for more blippy beats! 

Well hullo thar!

Tonight I can offer no more than a very brief writeup of my choice of tune, but that’s probably okay, ‘cos since when has anything I’ve written about this stuff ever been that engrossing? Cue the clicky vid!

This would of course be the haunting melody of The Armageddon Man‘s in-game theme, with this particular remix coming from Trace (also known as Kent Walldén) back in 2002. Off the top of my head, I think this is the first track I’ve featured that was originally composed by David Whittaker – why on earth it’s taken me so long to get to some of his fantastic compositions, I have no idea…

Against a backdrop of an increasing nuclear arsenal across the entire globe, your job in this game is actually quite freeform. Although you should technically try to keep the peace for as long as possible, you have complete control to intercept communications, order troops around between countries, authorise government requests to increase nuclear armaments, and watch as the results of your decisions come to fruition. An intriguing tactical strategy game from Martech back in 1987.

“Oh,” I thought. “This looks different…”

I had just embarked upon a new Roguelike adventure. On a whim, I had renewed my acquaintance with the rec.games.roguelike.announce newsgroup for the first time in an epoch, and lurking within were announcements relating to the usual long-standing suspects – epic saga ToME, fast-paced DoomRL, Rogue-with-mechs GearHead, classic Angband and its variants, and many others. But there were also lots of unfamiliar names, a testimony to the rate at which the Roguelike scene has expanded over recent times. Looking down the list, something drew me toward Brogue by Brian Walker – was it the clever name or the enigmatically plain description? Or was it just the fact it had an unusually solid-looking version number of 1.6? It’s impossible to say. Further investigation was required!

I was looking at a typical ASCII dungeon of hash signs and dots. But this dungeon had colour, variety, and life - not the usual console window of decidedly 8-colour visuals. Yes, yes – not judging a book by its cover is all well and good, but there’s no harm in making a good first impression, is there?

“Cool – there’s plants that block my vision. Let’s try walking through them. Oh, they grow back! Perfect for hiding in! Neat. Wait up, what’s that over there? Oh hello there, mouse control – this takes me back to playing Larn on the Amiga!” Good first impressions indeed. But there was plenty more to surprise me…

Read more…

Greetings to you, gentle folk of the internet. I bid you welcome! Gather ’round, for ’tis time for a rather special Game Music Monday – one that includes a chance for you to win some sublime indie music! Today is the twentieth episode, meaning GMM is finally out of its teens and is fast coming up on the small but important landmark of six months of running. Since I don’t need all that much excuse to throw a party and have some celebrations, and as it’s Valentine’s day tomorrow, this seems like as good an occasion as any to give out free stuff!

I have a gift code for the recently-released Indie Game Music Bundle 2 burning a hole in my monitor. Can you give it a good home? It’s easy to enter yourself for the draw – just log in to YouTube and post a comment on the video containing the magic word “Gadzooks!”

The draw will be held tomorrow at 19:00 GMT, and the winner will be notified through a message to the YouTube account to which the lucky comment belongs. Good luck!

Now, to the video itself…

Zolyx’s Game Music Monday #20: Glyn R Brown – Firelord (Symphonic)

It’s another of Glyn R Brown‘s tremendous orchestral arrangements, this time based on an 8-bit score for the 1986 game Firelord by Ben Daglish. I love both versions, though the game itself was a particularly tough nut to crack and I never got anywhere close to finishing it. Artistic license is exercised to full effect in the later section of this remix but it is still unmistakably the same tune and is done to a very high standard.

I hope very much you enjoy listening – it’s one of the best remixes I have in my humble collection. Good luck, keep it retro, and see you again next week!

Just a heads-up to mention that there’s also a shiny new vlog to illustrate the current state of my pet code-thing-with-no-name. A little progress is better than none at all, yes? You’re welcome to marvel at the 38% reduction in coder art in the little rectangle of moving pictures below. Not only that, but as promised, the Unnamed Dejenol Project now has an at least semi-official working title – it took me the best part of several days to decide, and I’m still not particularly happy with the outcome, but heyho. Watch the video to be underwhelmed by my choice!

Lying ahead for Milestone 4 are things that are somewhat more interesting, and at the same time, also more dangerous: Equipment and combat. I have a feeling that this will involve brain-melting consideration of maths as I try and create some decent formulae to cope with chance-to-hit, damage dealt, and suchlike. Preferably ones that don’t rely quite so much on exponentials as the original Mordor did…