Old Demo Reel

[DCurrent]

This was my very first demo of Illusion and The Falcon, a module that is still in progress starting Joe Musashi and Ryu Hayabusa, recorded in late 2006. I had shown some little clips but never the whole thing until today. It's a joke now, but I'm still proud; it demos features that were then considered impossible enough just claiming I could do them got me banned from the forum for being a stupid noob (different times, lol).

At the time the engine didn't have scripting, no NPC's or spawn system, was 8-bit only, had a 32 frame per animation limit, and nearly all numeric parameters had hard coded caps. There were a bunch of other annoying caveats as well... but even then the engine's potential was obvious and it annoyed me that no one besides bwwd and Mr. Q were doing anything with it.

Joe's dog Yamato (seen briefly when I called him and missed the target, lol), the various magic and summon effects, close up cut-scenes and such were made by daisy chaining bomb type projectiles.

Deaths are attack type based (wind blows them away, daggers cause bleed out, swords bisect, fire turns them to ash, etc.). No big there, and still the best way to do things. Thrown into screen scaling effect was faked using manually drawn images. Thank goodness that's not needed any more!

And now that I've expounded on memory lane, here you go. Try not to laugh too much.

 

[erf_beto]

Hey, I remember this one! I was wondering if you had any plans to update it. Though it had some pretty nice features which were incredible for the engine at the time, it's possible a lot of it would be a breeze to implement today.

 

[aL BeasTie]

Ah the days of crazy modding with workarounds etc.

It's cool to see these vids, I wasn't around anymore when you came on the scene, so had never seen any of your work before.

 

[DCurrent]

Yeah, the dog was a nightmare since you could only throw a single projectile (and only forward), with no direct control of where it spawned.

IIRC, the Joe's calling the dog animation (his Chargeattack) threw a bomb immediately in front of Joe. This bomb was actually the smoke effect. When it touched down the first frame (an invisible dot) made it get in proper position just behind Joe using the move command.

The smoke bomb then threw the dog as a second bomb. I had to play around a lot with offsets to hide the dog right at this point (again, because the dog bomb could only be thrown some distance out in front). To get around that issue, the smoke bomb's real location (offset) is quite a bit further back than it looks. The images were geared so as to be well forward of the offset and thus cover Yamoto up properly as he appeared.

If the dog bomb hit, it went into the bomb hit animation, which was the visual latching on and biting animation that included an attack box hitting the enemy in place several times (for 1hp damage since you couldn't hit for 0, wtf). With very careful adjustment - it looked and worked just like the dog attack from Shadow Dancer.

On a miss, the dog bomb's "touched floor" animation would go off, which threw another bomb to make the disappearing smoke. Once again the bomb location issue came into play, so the second smoke is yet another model - this time with images made to appear further behind the real location.

In the end it worked exactly like Shadow Dancer except the enemy took 4hp of real damage, which ultimately I didn't mind because it balanced out by being a charge attack and hard to hit with.

It wasn't the most complicated trick (that was the tornado and Mijin magic), but it was by far the biggest PITA because of all the painstaking adjustment it took to get working right.