StarOde Revival

[Pkeod]

During my last attempt at StarOde I considered making it first as a game made with Defold with NES constraints as in trying to make it seem like it was NES game in graphics and sound, and then I considered making it as an actual NES game… learned a lot and made cool things, but ultimately derailed the project as I ventured into 6502 assembly and got lost in it for a while. Making NES games is still really cool but it’s not really a good use of time at all!

Now I’m going to begin working on this again but from scratch, from the ground up, and certainly making it with Defold. A handful of assets will be kept, reworked, but mostly redoing everything. And this time using some of the great community assets such as Monarch by @britzl and Rendercam by @ross.grams . I’m keeping the name and world, but I’m changing it from a turn based RPG into something different. I’ll probably still make a turn based RPG something eventually with Defold, maybe even in StarOde world but for now this project will be a different genre. I won’t discuss game design beyond that for now though, I’ll show as development goes.

I’m laying groundwork on my own first and then will bring on some people to help with content and polish.

Will publish on Steam first, then mobile, and if it’s popular enough hopefully publish on consoles. This will be a fully commercially focused project with high polish and production values. No Early Access release on Steam, but I will sometimes share pre-release production builds here.

• Resolution is 320x240. Still doing it in pixel art. Beyond 4:3 resolution will be repeating pattern black bars.
• The music will still be made with famitracker, audio will still be retro.
• Supports keyboard+mouse and gamepads.
• Again not talking about gameplay mechanics yet so if you’re interested follow the thread!
• $10 on release for all platforms.

[britzl]

Cool! Best of luck to you!

[cubixpix]

Excellent

I like when you talk about «derailed on 6502 assembly».
I ventured myself past year in 680x0 assembly, programming an Amiga with UAE. Then i’ve stopped , thinking «no , there is too much to do with actual technologies».

I love this gaming era, it was when i was a true gamer héhé. Now, i don’t have time anymore, but i like to launch an emulator sometimes. I don’t know consoles very much, and Star Ode does not return results from Google. Is it related to Star Odyssey ?

For the music, do you plan to use a replay-routine, or convert the output of your player to an ogg (like i did for Mulu) ? I’d like to use a true tracked music for my next game, and i’m still wondering what is the best way.

Doing a search on the name, i’ve hit this very interesting thread

I’m impatient to see your progress!

[Pkeod]

StarOde is an original IP not based on anything else. I wanted my own Star Wars / Star Trek. Ode as in lyric poem. I’ll make other games and maybe other content like comics or novels in the world too for sure. I have a strong idea of the universe worlds, creatures, styles, looks, lore, characters, alien races, and so on from prior development.

https://www.starode.com/

I’ll probably have to export the music to ogg as I don’t know if FMOD can play ftm or nsf. There might be other solutions though which could be ported to Defold extensions. https://bitbucket.org/mpyne/game-music-emu/wiki/Home has nsf so might be helpful in making something.

[cubixpix]

Ok , i was thinking you were making a remake of a NES game (like WonderBoy remakes which used DotEmu for licence negotiation).

I don’t think FMOD support exotics trackers. In fact, i’m not even sure it still supports trackers in its latest releases. I don’t think they have left the support, but anyway it was only MOD, S3M, XM and IT.

[Pkeod]

I wish I could remake some classic games like they did. Actually Wonder Boy in Monster World is one of my favorite classic games! License owners for old games are very difficult to contact or have been swallowed up by big companies who have no interest in developing the IP but also have no interest in selling it either.

I’ll plan for ogg for music for now and later on can add the raw file support if it seems worthwhile. It would be cool! I spent a lot of time learning FamiTracker composition too already. Only thing I’m doing non-vanilla to NES for music is using the Konami VRC6 features.

[Pkeod]

First Friday preview… which reveals new direction for the project. 2D shooter, but not a rogue like like others in this genre (not focused on random level generation or “run” based gameplay). This preview shows some of the basic, simple features which can matter a lot to making the game feel good.

• Screen lags a little behind player movement with asymptotic average so it’s not a 1:1 scrolling with player movement
• Screen shake is based on perlin noise with z used as the “seed”, total impact of the screen shake based on a trauma value which linearly goes down over time but has an exponential effect the higher it is from 0,1 - I will add option in settings to completely disable screenshake because it make some people sick, and for the most part the screen shake will be very subtle effect not like in this preview such as when shooting or an explosion happens near the player or player is hit
• Screen center changes based on distance and direction between player position and cursor position

Next up I’ll add shooting, something to shoot, player death, and implement basic UI in GUI scene for the gameplay elements.

Soon I also want to add ability to add very short “freeze frame” pauses of like 20ms to make impacts feel more impactful - this is something fighting games often have. Will do it based on setting the update rate of the collection to 0 for duration of pause via an unpaused main manager.

I’m using trello with a board setup like this for future work. Still need to fill in the backlog with everything I want, then I’ll begin 2 week builds and continue 1 week previews.

Here’s the camera with a little more filtering instead of 1:1