coffeeraptor

Ditto to what Helladen said. I think I like the low-saturation look of the first but the second's sprites are in better order when it comes to perspective. Both look nice!

Hi, A.J., and welcome! I took a look at your website, and like a lot of the themes you have presented. You have a gift for storytelling and interesting concepts. That said, I'd ask an editor type to look over your portfolio, as there were a few grammatical errors (mostly the use of apostrophes/possessive versus plural, etc) but do keep writing - these are minor details. As it pertains to Eclipse, you might try diving in and making a game yourself, as the learning curve for the engine isn't too steep. This will also give you complete freedom to create while learning the ways by which a game storyline properly immerses a player. This is how most of us who are of a creative capacity got started. Just dive in and good luck!

Not in charge of it myself but I can tell the person who is, if you give me a specific thing that needs fixing. ;)

Greetings, folks! Just a quick update from yours truly. We have officially opened Limited Alpha to our small crowd of donators, and things have been going pretty good. We've been crashing the server only occasionally, usually when we actively try to and don't unlock, so there have been some things to work out in that regard. Quest bugs are the biggest issue - NPCs not handing over items when they should, etc. But in all, not hard fixes yet. Those of you on the forums here will get access in February, and we hope things will be significantly more polished. We're honestly just as hard at work getting the word out about the game at this point, and that has been something I myself have been mostly tasked with, aside from generally adding content. More here: [http://www.indiedb.com/games/age-of-the-four-clans](http://www.indiedb.com/games/age-of-the-four-clans) and our new domain [http://www.dinosaurmmo.com](http://www.dinosaurmmo.com)

Not a lot to report this week. Biggest deal was coping with what appears to be some screw-ups on my computer after uninstalling some software and apparently deleting some things that made VB6 agree to run on it. No big, as I'm sure it'll just take a weekend of reinstalling DLLs and OCXs and whatnots. Until then, we've worked on a system for leveling up transcendent classes that doesn't deviate too much from Skywyre's class system. Super simple… >!  Yay - Joeyjojoe made it to level 25\. He now can choose to continue on the path of the Lightwalkers as a Lightwarrior, or become a hybrid class… >!  Joey decides to become a Lightrogue, half Lightwalker, half Bloodfury. But wait - he still looks the same… >!  A quick stop to the town's class trainer allows Joey to change his look if he wishes… >!  Awwwyiss, now Joey is looking like a true Lightrogue. Dig the feathers, Joey! He can also change his scale color from dark to light or vice versa. His scale accents though (stripes, etc), will remain the same.

Grats! Takes guts to come out, even just to a bunch of gaming people on the internet, so big kudos to you, Mal!

Nice. I have a couple motorcycles myself. It's important to mix it up. Keep the rubber side down! :)

Looking really great - I like your custom tiles, and overall think the graphics look awesome. Very interested in the hero/villain thing as well. Keep up the good work!

Checking in, this week. As always, kudos to those of you giving encouragement and critique..! So, to begin, Rez made us a quick little video of gameplay spliced from using some of our characters to explore maps. That's been fun to promote. Here it is on Youtube: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66U9AKsfOWs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66U9AKsfOWs) Second biggest thing was working with the new Skywyre server update which is wholly awesome. There _are_ a few customized things our version of Skywyre uses that I've needed to muck about with, but so far so good and I for one am really looking forward to using this version of server. We ran into a snag when inviting some friends to play and had our first crash in a long time. Luckily, it was due to some ridiculous amount of healing over time being set off by one of the spells, so we quickly fixed that and had a good time of trying to crash it again, which we never managed to do. Thumbs up there. Work continues on mapping, quests and general content. The fun stuff, as it were. Still looking forward to a limited Alpha in January! More to come as always.

Dynamite - I have a few edits to make so it can run with A4C, but I can tell this is going to be really good. Nice job!

Looking great - grats on launching it. Can't wait to play!

You as well, and a merry happy to everyone out there! ;)

The dungeon system is looking really good. The game looks "robust", really nice and pro!

Thanks again for the good vibes, guys! Work this week mostly consisted of map making and tile polishing (still). But we did break up the monotony with a few more interesting things. One of our devs, Reznor, is going to school for multimedia design. He basically is building us a Wix website he can also use as one of his graduation portfolio pieces. It's coming along pretty good and we've also got a mailing list he's running that'll be another piece for his portfolio. Here it is thus far: [http://evolvmailbox.wix.com/ageofthefourclans](http://evolvmailbox.wix.com/ageofthefourclans) Rez's class requirements include social media, so he also has us on Twitter and Facebook, too. We also started to think about monetizing and started nailing down our model. Basically, our aim is to be a free MMO but donators will be rewarded with insights into the game, be able to vote on features, etc. We're keeping a close eye on items we'd give out to these donators in-game, since we don't want it to become pay-to-win, of course. For the most part, these items will be aesthetic - a different sprite variation, a unique looking spell, limited "stimpacks", etc. We'd like to give to our donators on a monthly basis, so we chose Patreon as our go-to channel for that. We have plans to release an open Alpha free to certain people (like you guys on this board) but for random persons we don't know who just stumble across the game, we're putting a $5.00 donation tag on that for now. The best thing I think, to me at least, was getting online with Matt/Green over the past weekend and putting together some of the arena games… In-game games if you will. We had a lot of fun just trying to make goal-oriented, ctf and gauntlet style games. Came up with a few stinkers but also some things I think people are going to enjoy as a diversion. Also a special currency system for winning arena games was founded. As I said, lots of fun and especially with placeholder sprites: >!  That's all for now. More to come. Certainly more mapping to do. Lots to do in all, but I feel we're into the fun bits of getting a game together at this stage, with things running stable for a month. Feels good to be working on sprites and not working out crashes and etc. ;)

Thanks again, all. This week work has continued on spriting and tilesets mostly. I want to completely replace all the default and RMVX tiles to custom ones (hence the blurry/sharp contrast James and others pointed out) so getting rid of "placeholder" tiles has been a priority. A big part of what I'm doing now is mapping. I do about 5 maps a week. Right before I posted work on the project to this board, I trashed a good 30+ maps because I had gotten better at using the tilesets, and mapping in a grid fashion was only giving me boring looking backgrounds. So what I did was a more shoot-from-the-hip method that ended up more intuitive. There's still a planned grid, but the maps don't feel like row upon row of *standard background with trees*. They've got a bit more character. Also fixing some bugs and problems when working with really big sprites (for bosses and etc) Anyway. Some screenshots: >! More tile work…  Placeholder big boss with appropriate name… 

Sounds really great! Gonna check it out when the time comes.

Love 'em - side note: Are you making an Adventure Time themed game? Because that would be epic in the style you did those sprites.

@'BeNjO': > Holy Jesus there good! Keep up the good work :D > > Edit: > > I'm sure I've seen those before, have you posted them before? Haha - not unless you were around Realmcrafter forums in 2006… I also dug deeper and found this journal entry (some links not working): [http://fav.me/d408hlh](http://fav.me/d408hlh) As I said, I was using Realmcrafter, apparently. Neat engine, not particularly frequent on updates, though - my first MMO, so probably doomed to start from my own inexperience. ;) Anyway, the link there provides game footage and "manual" pages. So old but so hilarious it's almost good. I like that I took the screencaps during the time when the raptors had a wireframe based on cruddy triangles instead of polys, and their chara creation happened in what was apparently a castle. Also, downloading the client was quite an affair. I think it was bigger than WoW at the time. Ludicrous. That said, I still liked some of the concepts! So here it is, coming back in a scaled down sense.

@'Abyss': > [Are you this lady?](https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/p1ssv/dear_internet_im_a_26_year_old_lady_whos_been/) > > EDIT: ^That's a link^ Ooooo.. no, but I'm curious about her project. And thanks for the further positives, guys! EDIT: Some links to old concept art for the curious… I think I was working on an engine literally called, "MMORPGMaker". This was very much a dinosaur game and I remember the biggest snag was running into a server that could handle the game and not having a functioning updater... This was also the time when everyone and their brother was scrambling to pay overseas developers to work on a WoW competitor, so there was a ton of competition for 3D games. Not a lot that panned out, though (this was 2007): http://fav.me/drtp68 http://fav.me/dofhsj http://fav.me/dogc2w

Hey thanks, guys. We've only been on this since kicking the idea around over summer, so I'm glad it's got your attention at this early stage. Agree that a lot is in cheesy mode right now, and that there's work to be done on tiles, too (the ground\sky transitions are driving me bazonkers, atm) but we're gonna do our best to put a polish on it all. That said, we've already been running off what seems to be a good server that's hardly been lagged and will definitely hook this board up with the first shot at playing the game when we're close to the end of big debugs!

After a few months in, I'm ready to show the work done on a little hobby MMO I've started…  Also known as "Dinosaur-Last Airbender Game", this started out as a simple grinding MMO built on Eclipse Worlds, was rehashed for Eclipse Origins, and finally found its way to Skywyre. The engine itself isn't modified too heavily, as I wanted it to be a project that I could begin simply and build onto as needed - and also as something that may get others excited about what they could do with a base engine and very little programming. One of the first things you'll notice about A4C is that you don't play a human, but rather a dinosaur. I'm a bit better at custom spriting enemies and monster types than I am humans, so this was a natural fit for me as team artist, plus it added a uniqueness to the game. Years ago, I'd attempted a 3D dinosaur MMO for which I still had concept art, and it got me interested in doing a "simple" 2D version now that I've had a few more years of experience making games and doing design work under my belt. Anyway, that's the intro… onto the meat of the matter: **Story:** >! The four Raptor clans of the ancient Earth always held an uneasy alliance with one another. After a meteor devastated the Deathclaw Clan and unleashed strange creatures upon the planet, truces were made in order to find answers and return the world to order. The slime, a bizarre life form which oozed forth from the impact site, quickly spread to all corners of Laurasia, mutating native species and trashing the delicate ecology everywhere it appeared - threatening a mass extinction of all life on Earth. >! You take on the role of a Raptor, choosing one of three clans as your starting "class": **Classes/Clans:** _>! The Lightwalkers **-** A sect of highly intelligent Raptors who take on the role of warrior class. They are fair minded and have always sought peace between the tribes. Their magicks are typically based on hard-hitting earth spells and they sometimes wear tough hides as armor. >! _The Bloodfuries_ - The largest clan of Raptors, these fast and nimble creatures are the rogues and assassins of Raptor society. Some practice fire magick and most like to adorn themselves with feathers and light armor decoration. >! _The Spectres_ - These are mysterious Raptors who are well-versed in magick. They are natural healers and warlocks, calling on nature spells to do their bidding. Some fashion armor from the bones of their enemies, which they believe grants the wearer with further power. >! _The Deathclaw_ - Large Raptor brutes who believe themselves to be kings among the other clans. Deathclaws use their great strength and powerful ice magicks to great effect. Some even fashion and wear heavy armor made of stone. Their home and their kind were nearly completely destroyed in the meteor strike known as The World Shattering. Players will not be able to select Deathclaw as a class initially, but there may be ways to become one, in game. **Features:** >! Additional character customization options alongside those found in basic Skywyre system Many classes to branch into - characters of one class may learn the spells of another, etc. "Hidden" classes as well - can be uncovered via questing, etc. Recipe/Crafting - Quest system - Day/Night - Friendlist - Boss enounters - Typical cool stuff found in Skywyre **Screenshots:** >!   (Cool Page description, bro)       **Other:** Current version is Alpha 0.2 (despite what some screenshots say, heh) and we're working with a team of 3 people currently, building maps, spriting and working on quests. No ETA at this point since debugging and rehashing visuals is a constant process at this point, but work is ongoing since September. Game will be free to play, naturally. More updating to come!_

@'MeKonster': > So Im stuck; > > find DrawPlayer and under > ``` > Call DrawSprite(Sprite, x, y, rec) > > ```add > ``` > Call DrawHair(x, y, GetPlayerHair(Index), Anim, spritetop, GetPlayerHairTint(Index)) > and at the bottom or somewhere in the module add > ``` > There is no DrawPlayer under DrawSprite except in the ERROR and that cant be right. Ah, you must be using Skywyre. Not a hard fix… here's the deal - you are correct to avoid the Error statements. Scroll down a bit and you'll see DIR_DOWN, DIR_UP, DIR_LEFT and DIR_RIGHT. You'll need to handle each separately, so under **Call** **DrawSprite**, you'd add the code. Like this: ``` Case DIR_DOWN If GetTickCount > Player(Index).StartFlash Then Call DrawSprite(Sprite, x, y, rec, a, r, G, B) Call DrawHair (x, y, GetPlayerHair(Index), Anim, spritetop, GetPlayerHairTint(Index)) Player(Index).StartFlash = 0 Else Call DrawSprite(Sprite, x, y, rec, a, r, G, B, True) End If ``` So that one uses DIR_DOWN as an example… find the code for DIR_UP, DIR_LEFT and DIR_RIGHT, add the code below DrawSprite and it should work. Let me know if you need assistance. It does work, promised.

Good luck with your game! As others have said, it is looking mighty pretty!

That does sound like it'd be worth my time to explore on my own. Thank you so much. I think I just got overwhelmed the first time I took a look at it because I thought I was going to go about it a different way and when that didn't happen, I just started looking for tutorials. Will give it another go - thanks for giving me a place to launch from!

Very Happy Halloween, all!