Blood And Plunder 2 - Some Early Screens

As a side project I thought I'd spend some time putting together a new version of Blood and Plunder (my old Gauntlet clone). Here are a couple of screens of a simple test level.

The game is 2d with each character having between 800 and 1000 frames of animation with antialiasing written in blitzplus. It really looks a lot better moving though than it does with screenshots. However taking rendering movies really stuffs up the frame rate so you will have to do with some screenshots.

The characters and monsters are mostly done, and I'm still toying with the levels (only done 1 test level so far, the one you can see part of here).







It can be played by up to 4 players simultaneously on the same pc.

A friend of mine who is an artist and myself are still working on our sci fi game seen here earlier, this uses the same code base and is a side project for me while my friend puts together the art for the other game.

Looks cool, keep up the good work.

[edit] sorry double post

Looks well coool :)

What package are you using to create the characters?

I take its done in some 3d package but how do you render all the frames so you can use it in 2d.

Thanks

Destroyer

Characters look really good, level looks bit... eh, gray? :)

Looks great but why are those giant milky bar buttons all over the dungeon floor ;) ?

Is it like Legend (Atari and Amiga Days)?

Hello all,

@Destroyer - I am using Poser to create the characters or rather to render them as a series of tiff files with alpha (the characters have mostly been purchased from Daz3D), I then convert the images to my own format which has a similar compression level as a png image but which can be easily sent pixel by pixel to the screen.

@Mustang - the level does look a bit bland/grey but I haven't done much work on the level yet, this is something thrown together so that I can test the gameplay, characters however are pretty much complete.

@Yeshu777 - I don't know Legend, it is more like Gauntlet - run around kill monsters, collect gold, potions and power ups. Unlike Gauntlet however the level is not completed by finding the exit but rather by collecting all the stuff/killing all the monsters.

Looks nice, but you need shadows for hte players and objects

Hope the memory requirement isn't going to be as huge as I'm thinking it'll be.

Lookin good though, aside from Mustang's comment, and those black horizontal lines running through some of the sprites. Wall graphics remind me of Diablo2....should get back to playing that somed day.

Genexi2 - it uses about 32MB of video memory (for the backdrop) and each man sized character 'class' takes up between 7 & 9 MB of system memory with a few that are larger (the barbarian (19MB) and the demon(50MB - yes that is a bit too large for one type of creature...)). When they were originally rendered out the combined size of all the frames for each creature was usually between 300 and 600 MB of image files (per creature), most of which is transparent and has been reduced to around 9MB in most cases.

Making levels is actually quite easy - render from an isometric perspective the level, do a second render which is with a gradient texture applied - this is not visible but is used to calculate if a pixel on a character should be in front of or behind a wall etc, a third image is created also to generate the collideable area (black=impassable, any other color = passable), and it is possible to include a final image which has lighting information if you want the characters to be affected by the lighting - similar to vertex lighting but on a per 'entity' basis not per 'vertex'.

Looks fantastic

Haven't seen a PSOne RPG look nearly as interesting as yours, that's for sure...