None. Hah.
I spent most of the past week getting myself together for the FLISOL, the Latin American Free Software Festival. Gave a speech on Free Culture and had my Fedora Stand all Saturday long.
Spent this week trying to do the stuff I should’ve done last week, so hopefully, progress will be on its way on the weekend.
I’d love to get a playable game concept as soon as possible, but I fear it’ll be ’till the end of May, at the earliest.
Well, at least I’m honest, right?
As some of you might have noticed, we’ve got ads on the site, and the forums.
Those of you that didn’t notice are most likely using adblockers. We’d *really* appreciate if you added an exception on your adblocker for K3rnel.net (Or for Google Ads).
Hosting + Domain registration can be costly, and its payed on a yearly basis, which is why we decided to use the ads route. You can also donate to help us get the funds faster, and actually get money to pay the artists/coders/writers that help develop the games you enjoy.
Here’s what the progress bar looks like, counting the money from Google Adsense up until April:
Thanks for understanding!
I really wanted to get a game demo out as soon as possible, but Karai set me out on a wild goose chase: Make the game work under any screen resolution (above 1024*576).
Thought to be impossible by previous devs, I started investigating, and digging deeper and deeper. Turns out that it was possible all along, but we need to get rid of “SUI”, the tool we used to create all application interfaces.
To replace that, Nifty-Gui will be used. It uses XML-Based layouts, which makes me instantly wary, though it’ll serve as target practice for the Android Apps.
The result will be a game you’ll be able to play in your preferred screen resolution, looking as shinier than ever, and with all sorts of fancy effects.
The downside? It’ll take a bit longer ’till I actually get a playable demo.
While ‘Monsters’ has been doing some progress in the Storyline, and recruiting side, I’ve been working on Arena on the code side…
But this isn’t a ‘Progress Report’.
This is an explanation on what K3RNEL Arena is, and how its different from the ‘Monsters’ game.
Arena consists of two parts, the first one being the Battle Engine that’ll be used in the game.
The second part is the actual game + storyline. An MMO, powered by the Arena Engine.
The main difference between the ‘Monsters’ engine and the ‘Arena’ engine is their inspiration. While ‘Monsters’ is a modified version of the ShoddyBattleEngine (Which will eventually be remade, from scratch, in Monsters), ‘Arena’ is an entirely new Battle Engine, heavily inspired by MegaMan Battle Network.
While the similarities will be many at first, modifications will be done as time goes on, for starters, by allowing 2 vs 2 player battles (With up to 5 vs 5 player battles!), bigger grids (3×6 – 6×6 grids for epic battles!), online play (Duh!) all packed in an MMO-Shape
The one thing you really can’t expect on ‘Arena’ are trademark violations. One Hitler video is enough, and I really like Capcom. This means you won’t be able to play with MegaMan.exe or face off against ProtoMan.exe, and while this would represent a discouragement for many, it also serves as an area of opportunity: Now we get to be creative with Enemies and Bosses (No more Bowlman or Numberman!).
Now, if you haven’t played Megaman Battle Network, you really don’t know what you’re missing out.
Go buy MMBN5 or MMBN6 for the Nintendo DS and Gameboy Advanced for a hands-on an offline version of Arena, complete with a great characters, and great gameplay.
Stay tuned, we’re planning to get a playable Alpha ready by next week, which means Late April/Early May in developer-time.
At least the Server’s, anyway, as announced on the April 12 Progress Report, but… What are the changes?
So, what can you do with the newly released code? Well, not much. We can now work on fixing movement bugs, as well as overhauling the old “ShoddyBattle” engine into a fresher one. Without resources like Maps, NPCs and a MonsterDex, the Server Code is useless for non-developers.
And what about the Client code? That one’s a different mess. See, on the serverside, we only had numbers and letters. On the Client? We’ve got actual pngs we need to replace, among a ton of hardcoded-for-Pokemon code which obviously needs to go.
In the mean time, story-writers are hard at work defining what the “New PokeNet” will be all about, but rest assured: It’ll be fresh & new. No more trademark violations.
The C&D has ceased for now, and peace has been restored. But those who sacrificed themselves for the victory may never return.
Exhausted, we gazed at the community we helped create and wondered why we chose to violate trademarks. Was there another way?
Standing on the cliff, the answers seemed to escape from us. We only knew that we’ll continue game development again, before we find the direction we’ll take.
How long will we keep on coding? How long will this migration last? Maybe only the Java Compiler in Eclipse knows for sure…
Need to organize some stuff up, like staff and position and project you’ll be collaborating in, if interested.
Please leave a comment on this post with your Name (Or online Nickname), the Position you’d help with (Maps? Coder? Artist?), the Project you’ll be helping out with (Currently there’s only “Monsters” and “Arena”), and if you’d like your shiny @k3rnel.com email (Which uses Google as a backbone, so its automatically awesome).
Thanks.
We’re still working on giving the site and forums a nice and clean look & feel. In the mean time, you can enjoy the blog via your Android, iPhone or Palm Pre devices. It’ll format it quite nicely.
We’ve also added Syndication. All posts from K3RNEL Arena should cross post here.
Akismet is up and running, which should prevent spam from showing up on the blog.
Now all we need is a decent skin, and to actually work on the engine!
If everything goes as smooth as expected, this post should show up on the K3RNEL Hub, while being posted at the K3RNEL Arena subsite.
I know things still look ugly around the site, but we just moved in. Give us a few weeks, and we’ll make this place feel like home!