Looking for team members

So we are currently looking for team members to join Wizard's Legacy and help with the project. Here is an up-to-date list of positions we are currently looking for:

• Assistant Programmer

1. Beginner to advanced knowledge in C# or GML.
2. Reliable and able to meet deadlines
3. Good coding technique i.e. comments, good coding form. 

• Graphic Design

1. Intermediate to Advanced technique in pixel art. OR
2. Intermediate to Advanced technique in drawing and digitizing.
3. Reliable and able to meet deadlines

• Sound Effect Engineer

1. Intermediate to Advance knowledge in Sound Effects design
2. Able to create unique and custom sound effects
3. Reliable and able to meet deadlines

If interested, please leave a message to Wizard's Legacy (found on profile) with reliable contact information and samples of your work.

Programming Language Chosen

So we started the conversion over from Game Maker to C#. We actually got a bit accomplished with the game, although we really have been just throwing things together here and there.

The focus will be on C# and we'll worry about the other stuff later.

Row 5

An inn, a shop that sells Power Knuckle and Fire Rod. There is also a treasure chest here that contains the Magic Rod.

Main area. Has an obvious inn and a not-so-obvious shop that sells the Mattock and Power Boots. The treasure chest here has a Magic Potion.

Lyll's area, and the main entrance to it. Shop sells Power Knuckle and Fire Rod. Has an inn. I think the treasure is a mimic.

No inn or shop, treasure has a Life Bottle in it. Also has a teleport.

Music!

Row 4

Room 3,0

This is the entrance to Xemn's area, or rather, the room that the music changes. This is Xemn's first puzzle, and it involves moving around a lot of interacting blocks. The shop sells a Magic Bottle and a Life bottle, and the treasure chest contains KEYS! I don't know why, but I find that hilarious. There is also an inn here.

Room 3,1

The shop sells Power Boots and a Magic Crystal. The treasure chest contains Gold. What? Where you expecting the Magic Rod? There is an inn over there on Lyll's area.

Room 3,2

This room contains vault doors. These can be unlocked by using keys. The treasure chest here contains a Bread. The shop here sells Magic Wings and Magic Armor. There are two inns here.

Room 3,3

This room has no shops and no treasure chest. It does, however, have two inns and the almighty Dragonslayer. Can only be accessed using the teleports, which there is one here.

Row 3 - Spoiler Alert

Two rows down, 14 more to go.

Room 2,0

There is an inn here, as well as a mimic. There is a treasure chest as part of Xemn's area that contains the Power Boots. There is a teleport as well.

Room 2,1

This room is the reason for the spoiler alert. This room is two parts Lyll's area, and one part the main area. This room contains Lyll's Crown. It also contains a shop that sells a Life Bottle and a Magic Crystal. There are a few interactive blocks and a teleport.

Room 2,2

This room is deceptive. There is one shop among those doors that sells Jump Shoes and a Magic Bottle. There is a treasure chest here that contains a Bread. There is an inn and a teleport.

Room 2,3

More doors, but none of the do anything. There is a treasure chest here that contains, what else? Bread. Some more spikes, more interacting blocks.

Row 2

Dissecting row 2:

Room 1,0

This is a continuation of the room above. Both ladders should connect. Also, there seems to be a lot of interacting blocks here. The treasure chest here contains a Magic Crystal.

Room 1,1

This room is actually a section of Lyll's area. The treasure chest contains a Bread. You also have spikes that constantly harm you when you land on them, unless you hold up... There is a shop here that sells a Magic Bottle and a Magic Crystal. There is also an inn and a transport.

Room 1,2

This room really puts Lyll's Mattock to work. Besides the cat people and the massive amounts of interacting blocks, only thing here is a treasure chest containing a Bread.

Room 1,3

This room is split into two. On the left is part of Lyll's area, but on the right (Where the fish arrangement is) is where the Glove is located. The shop sells a Magic Bottle and a Life Bottle.

Row 1

Row 1

How this works:

There are 16 rows of rooms, each with 4 rooms per row. So we're going to assign the room in the upper left hand corner 0,0. The room to the right is 0,1, and the room below is 1,0.

So here is room 0,0:

This is a fairly simple room. It introduces common objects found throughout the dungeon. Something to note here is an interacting block, which certain items can manipulate. Also, we encounter various enemies and a treasure chest, containing a Magic Potion that fills your magic up completely.

Room 0,1

Nothing exciting about this room. Simple stuff. We have a treasure chest here that contains a Bread that fills your life up completely.

Room 0,2

Here we encounter our first inn. The inn is a place to refresh your health and magic, as well as selecting new permanent items. The cost for this, and for all the other inns, is 10 Gold Points. The treasure chest here contains Gold that gives you 50 GPs.

Room 0,3

Our first puzzle, a teleport, and a shop, which contains a Life Bottle and Magic Bottle for 90 GPs apiece. The clue to this puzzle is one of the disappearing walls that tells you there are more disappearing walls. There is a treasure chest here containing a Speed Scroll and another treasure chest that is actually a mimic.

So there you have it, row one of 16. 

Planning Part 3 - Designing The Dungeon

Here we go, designing the dungeon and all its wonders. Let's start off with the dungeon dimensions as a whole:

The dungeon is a 4 x 16 room placement (Four rooms across, 16 rooms down) for a total of 64 rooms, each room being 64 blocks by 12 blocks, and each block 16 x 16 pixels. This means the dungeon is a total of 256 blocks across and 192 blocks down. That equates to a dungeon that is 4096 x 3024 pixels. And if we where to equate that to the 64 x 64 blockset, the dungeon dimensions are a whopping 16384 x 12288 pixels! My computer is sweating just thinking about it. So how would we go about constructing the dungeon? Well, we have an idea. Instead of creating 64 rooms in GM and laying out the tiles, we're going to create the room from plain text. We'll have one 4096 x 768 room for the dungeon, and using a room creation object, lay out the room depending on a variable received from the game.

So, in simple terms, we create two ASCII versions of the room, one for background tiles and one for the objects, and when the game lets the room know which room it's in, the room will draw itself.

Here is an example of what I mean:
This is what the first room looks like (MSX2):

Now this is the object layout in ASCII:


1211111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111
1200000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
1200000000000000000000000000000000000111111111111100000000000000
1211111111111000000000000000000011111000000000000111011110000000
1200002000003000000001111111111100000011111111100000000111100000
1200012000001111111110000000000000011110000011111111111100000000
1200012000001111000000000000000111110000000000011000000000110000
1200012000000111000011111111000000000011111111001111100000000000
1111112000000011110000000000211111111111100000000000000000000011
1000002000000010000000000000200000000000000000000000000000000000
1000002000000010000000000001200000000000000111111111111000000000
1000002000000011111111111111111111111111111111111111111111211111

Here, 1 equals a wall, 2 equals a ladder, and 3 equals an interacting block. 0 equals nothing.

Now, using a for loop, we'll have the game put an object depending on the number in the corresponding place in the room.

We'll use this same technique for placing all the images from a tileset for the background.

Note: The wall and ladder objects will be invisible, but because of the tiles in the background, you'll still see the walls.

Now that we got that concept out of the way, let's go through each room and dissect it.

Planning Part 2 - Outside

After you leave the item select screen, the character will appear outside in front of the house.

This screen is 64 blocks horizontally and 12 blocks vertically. Each block is 16x16 pixels. So, pixel-wise, each room is 1024 x 192 pixels. We plan on using 64 x 64 pixel blocks, so this would equate to each room being 4096 x 768 pixels. That's bananas, so we need to think of efficient ways to accomplish this.

A few things to note here:

• There are a few interacting objects here as well as a few platforms.

1. The door that starts the character select event over again.
2. The shop that allows you to buy a Life Bottle and Magic Crystal.
3. The dungeon entrance.

• There are a couple platforms to note here:

• Outside has it's own music.
• The shop uses music that all other shops use.

There is a shop here.

Inside:

On the left is a Life Bottle for sale for 50 Gold Points, and on the right is a Magic Crystal for 95 GPs. 

Back outside, note the fall damage:

If the player falls a greater distance than their natural jump height, they receive fall damage.

Ok, this is the other side of the map, where you can see a castle in the distance.

One more thing on this map, the dungeon entrance.

To summarize: Outside area has three points of interest: The entrance to the house, the shop, and dungeon entrance.

Planning Part 1 - Title, character select, item select

As any programmer who has made a game can contest, careful planning and strategy must be put into the game before any programming. Planning will help keep the game coding clean and on the straight path, and strategy will keep the code efficient and minimize bugs.

So let's start planning by dissecting the original:

Everything in the original involves squares, from the platforms, to the players and enemies, the backgrounds, everything. So to begin planning for everything, we need to keep in mind that everything is square.

Note: We are going to dissect both Legacy of the Wizard and MSX2's version of Dragon Slayer IV.

The original starts with a title sequence, followed by a gameplay demo.

From the demo (when the player presses start), we go into the character select screen. There are four characters situated around a table, a dog, and two characters off to the side.

The four characters around the table and the dog are playable characters, while the two on the side are for getting and giving passwords. We won't be using a password system, instead these characters will be for saving and loading.

After we have selected our character, we go to the item select screen.

There are 16 "permanent" items here. These are rare items hidden around the dungeon that allow advancement or special abilities for the player. Let's take a look at what we have going on here, starting at the top:

• HUD. We have a life bar, a magic bar, a key bar, a gold bar, and an area for three items.
• Inventory. 16 rare permanent items found in the dungeon. From left to right, top to bottom:

1. Magic Wings - Menya. Consumes magic constantly, but allows Menya to "fly", i.e. control her like a  top-down all over the screen.
2. Magic Armor - Xemn and Roas. Consumes magic constantly, but kills all minor enemies instantly.
3. Mattock - Lyll. Destroys the interacting blocks. One magic point per block.
4. Glove - Xemn. Moves the interacting blocks one space in the character's facing direction.
5. Magic Rod - Menya. Slings the interacting blocks horizontally at high rate, killing enemies and damaging the player. Bounces off walls, other interacting blocks, and the player. Stops randomly.
6. Power Boots - Xemn, Roas, and Lyll - Jumping on a minor enemy will kill the instantly.
7. Jump Shoes - Menya, Roas, and Lyll - Allows the character to jump extra high. Can still inflict fall damage. One magic point per jump.
8. Magic Key - Menya. Allows the player to use magic instead of keys to unlock doors.
9. Power Knuckle - Xemn, Menya, Roas, Lyll - Increases the strength of the player's attack. Two magic points per shot. 
10. Fire Rod - All - Increases the distance of the player's attack. Two magic points per shot.
11. Shield - All - Protects against the attacks of the Guardians.
12. Magic Bottle - All - If this item is selected, it will fully restore the magic of the player in the event that the player's magic is all used up.
13. Life Bottle - All - If this item is selected, it will fully restore the life of the player in the event that the player dies.
14. Magic Crystal - All - Once selected, it will teleport the player to the beginning of the dungeon.
15. Crown - Roas - Guarded by Guardians. These allow the player to teleport to various areas on the map using the pictures found throughout.
16. Dragon Slayer - Roas - Allows the player to fight the dragon Keela, the final boss. 

• Equipment - Displays the items you've selected, if you have them.
• Status - These are the character's stats. Strength is how powerful the character's magic is. Jump is how high the character can jump. and distance is how far the character's attack will travel.
• Exit - Touching this will leave the item select screen.

You are able to move around the item select screen like a top-down.

Starting out

How did this project start out? A couple like-minded fans started to build the game separably, before finding each other and teaming up through a website called Hardcore Gaming 101 (link brings you to the forum topic). Marginwalker had come up with designs for a Legacy of the Wizard Remix and needed a programmer. Although a few tried, one has stuck around and worked on it. Kira Games (which we had to change because another company copyrighted the name before we could). At the time, Kira Games had been working with Game Maker Pro and was confident he could finish the game. Now the game has gotten some attention, so completion is a must.

In the next post, we will start describing how the process was started using GM and going over materials that we had to work with.

Legacy of the Wizard Remix Introduction

Legacy of the Wizard Remix

What is this?

This is a fanmade freeware game based on the MSX game "Dragon Slayer IV: Drasle Family" which was later ported to the NES in America under the name "Legacy of the Wizard". The game remake has been demanded from the fans and some fans are getting together to recreate the game in high definition. This blog is here so that fans can see the game creation's progression. Nothing is hidden, nothing is kept secret, everything is out in the open.

What kind of game is it?

The original was classified as a RPG platformer, and the Remix is going to be just that. You have a choice between five characters, each with varying degrees of abilities, and each able to only use certain objects, whom collectively have to work together to beat the game. The playing field is a massive labyrinth of a dungeon that is mostly open-world, although, due to the certain abilities of each character, certain puzzles can only be completed by one character or another. The game is a classic side-scroll platformer, puzzle, and shoot-em-up type game.

How will this blog work?

Everything Wizard's Legacy (formerly Kira Games) does towards the creation of this game will be posted in the blog. This helps the team stay coordinated and the fans updated. It is also a way for fans to actually see how a game is created from start to finish. Please note that future releases of Wizard's Legacy games will not be blogged like this.

What programming language will this game be written?

Currently we are using Game Maker Language Godot to program with. This is so the game can be programmed to run on other computer platforms other than windows.

If you ever have any questions about anything involving the game, please don't hesitate to ask.