Mark of the Beast

red moon

Member
Ha, yes indeed! That's hilarious...I was trying to squeeze a little personality and humor into these area. I figured it would be nice to mix things up a bit.
 

red moon

Member
This is quick update...
I have a number of things i am working on at present and will try better to describe the game play changes to the map in a later update. Right now, I am cutiing the cavern and caves sets (both blue in nature and can be seen on page 1 of this thread) that I had planned to do since I already have a cave pit and will be replacing those ideas with a church catacomb and underground castle. I felt the previous cave and cavern where too similar to the pit set I added a couple weeks ago for the initial starting area and looked rather flat and uninteresting in pomparison to the newer background screens.

Here is my initial drawing for the castle, sheet test and scale mock up. I try to do this to test out the limitations of the set first.
Thanks for all the help and support from everyone so far!
 

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red moon

Member
and thank you, it’s taken a little bit of time to understand how to get better visuals with the total color and palette choice limitations, it’s a interesting challenge for sure!
 

red moon

Member
thank you Dale, having a community help out when you get stuck or want feedback makes all the difference!
 

red moon

Member
Hey everyone, its been about a week or so since i updated so I wanted to post on what I have been up to. I am putting map up to better show progress.

I have been working adding the crumbling bridge sections, night time wooded areas, a burning town, an abandoned mining town, village square areas along with setting up the traps, NPC's, loot,enemies and behaviors for those areas. I've tried to put in a mix of walking, running, flying, floating and jumping enemies (thanks Dale for that one!) I attempted to get hunters throwing knives, but they kill themselves at present! I plan on exploring a teleporting behavior in the next couple of weeks. I'll look around here, if anyone knows any good test settings for that behavior, please let me know!
 

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red moon

Member
I am adding these extra screens to get a better feel for each of the areas.
The bottom town section represents where everyone fled to when the town was set on ablaze. Its meant to be an old mining town, so there will be a small section of mined "dark Shards" that are shown embedded in the cave walls. I wanted some element to help explain why there are monsters walking around the world.
 

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red moon

Member
I wanted to see which of these final test levels you all preferred...the orange or the yellow palettes?

I started to fit this town square zone of the game in and wasn't very happy with how the areas looked. It seemed to fit the early style of the game but since its evolved to less simplistic looking background images I wanted to try something a little different. I re-concepted the level to be at sundown and wanted it to look stark. I then created another pixel test to see how it would translate before building out the tile palette.

I couldn't get exactly what I wanted visually with the limitations of the palettes but its close.

I would love to know which looks more appropriate and thanks for the support and help thus far!
 

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red moon

Member
It's been a little while, so I'm posting a new update on where Mark of the Beast is at present.
I have been working on the additional zones for the game and the enemies that fit into those zones...enemy behaviors, animations, color palettes, difficulty...etc.

There is still much to do of course, I still need to get sub bosses and a final boss in the last chamber.
In addition, I need to add more depth to the game play: couch attack, player swapping, items unlocking abilities and numerous little bugs here and there need to be fixed still.

If anyone has any feedback, let me know! Once I get a little further along I will put up the game to test for feedback and a full play through video!
 

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red moon

Member
This is likely to change a bit, but it helps for me to see the distances and placement of secret areas, npcs and the like. I did reuse some of the previous zones with new palettes for the forest, cemeteries and dead end areas so they would feel a bit different.
 

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red moon

Member
Thank you, I could not have made it this far without you...that's for sure!
I am hoping the extra game play stuff I plan to add will make it far more fun to play once its hooked up. It's a bit simplistic at this point mechanically (explore/punch or shoot/pickup/read) and needs more mechanics to make it feel like a full thought.
 

Dirk

Member
Really beautiful and it touches the nostalgia part of my heart, looking in magazines how levels were layed out.
I can also imagine the pictures you've posted printed in a modern NESzine.
 

red moon

Member
Dirk, that is a huge compliment! I thank you for your kind words. Truly. This sort of thing can be a labor of love, that's for sure!

I too, remember those days fondly of looking at magazines at screens of upcoming games and trying to imagine what the experience would be like to move through those environments!

I will need to look for some modern NESzines, It will be interesting to see what I find!
 

red moon

Member
I am doing a bunch of mini updates!

After the last pass on getting the overall map together, I went through and added some additional secret areas, NPCs and additional lore. It needed a little bit more in that regard when looking at the early parts of the map I intlally assembled.

I'm putting up my map to show the additional changes.
 

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red moon

Member
After that I went through and added 2 sub-bosses and a hidden secret 3rd sub-boss. These are in and functional, but need some balancing for sure. The wolfman runs around jumping sporadically, while the dead rider runs back and forth at the bottom and is invulnerable in that state. After some time, it switches to a "panting" idle where it is vulnerable to attacks. I will be adding monster locks to the right side of the screen for these guys next.
 

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red moon

Member
Lastly, I started working on the final chambers and boss room for the end of the demo. Its functional at present, but needs some balancing like the other areas. I wanted the claws and a head to fire projectiles at the player, but the sprite count is really slowing the experience down. It will need to be adjusted for sure. The look of the boss room is close, but not completely there.
I wanted it to be red but it seemed too bright so I tried a dark variant as well. Oh, I still need to add the little monster head lol.

Thanks for all the help and support from Dale, Mugi, Dirk, Raft, Cutter and everyone else here, its close to being complete! I have some system stuff to get in next for locking and unlocking the shard and beast form and i need to experiment with player swapping and see what that involves. After that, its implementing the shard ammo system and then difficulty balancing and bug fixes. Then I am going to call it and take a break to start something new....
 

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