Legend of Xenia 3D

Following the first and second games, it's time for the third entry in the Legend of Xenia series! Now for the first time ripping of the Legend of Zelda in the third dimension. At this point I am not sure whether this is a sequel, prequel, remake of 1 and/or 2, an actual ending to 2, or all of the above ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

- Day 1? It hasn't even been 24 hours yet, but I'm going to bed now. "Day 0.5"?

I spent today doing some preliminary engine work. I'm using GMS2, and I'm doing a 3D game, so I set up a base project, and tried to program some simple 3D collisions and ramps. The entire project hinges on this, so it better work. For now it looks like it does, so that's nice.

If Legend of Xenia 1, with it's simple Pico-8 look, was inspired by Zelda games on the GameBoy, and Xenia 2, with its Minish Cap-esque colours, inspired by the GBA... Friends,  it's time for janky 3D graphics like on the Nintendo DS! 😃

The idea of making a game where I can't design everything specifically for the 64x64 resolution (as I could with 2D pixelart) is very interesting! I am looking forward to the next 2 weeks a ton.

Very cool! Interested in seeing where it goes.

Ooh, this is a very impressive start!  Can't wait to see how far you can take it. :)

Pretty fun to see you taking the series in an entirely different visual direction. Good luck, looking forward to playing it!

Day 2

I spent the first half of the day moving stuff from yesterday's prototype project into the "real" project, while refactoring the code, making things neater and more easily expandable. Things like creating a parent object for every single "3D"-enabled object that give them z and height variables since GM doesn't have any instance variables like that by default, making objects automatically use the z value of the layer they are on by default (so I can very easily build terrain with different elevations, place props and enemies at correct elevation, etc.) in the room editor, moved all my custom 3D collision code into a parent entity object that all moving objects like the player and enemies will inherit, etc.

Then I started modelling some 3D "tiles" that I can build terrain with.  I'm completely new to modelling, so my process can best be described as "rolling my head around on the keyboard until Blender does the right thing", but eventually got something usable. For the slopes I cheated by just making a 2D texture, and of course it looks much better than everything else... typical 😅

I am looking forward to making more 3D models and implementing some more basic things tomorrow!

Looks very nice so far! Can't wait to see how the gameplay will work.

I was going to make a Duke Nukem 3D reference, but I couldn't think of one.

It looks really cool!

Day 3, 4

Slow days! Also I did a lot of stuff that wasn't very "showy", so I didn't post yesterday. I also did a lot of experimenting with different things that never resulted in anything concrete getting implemented yet (playing with mipmapping, antialising, texture filtering, different 3D things I haven't touched before), and I also did some UI and menu mockups. You'll see that stuff later.

I added some grass to the ledges of the hills, so that it's easier to tell where the ledge ends, when seen from above (you'll notice that's quite hard in the gif from Day 2). I also added some subtle fog that starts almost immediately, but ends very far away, just to slightly shade the grass below (since it's further away (this was done after the below gif was recorded though). I need to look into proper lighting/shading soon >w<

I also designed a new font, an update of the I made last year. It's just a bit more compact this time around, and slightly more AA'd. Not sure how I like that tbh, might tone it down. I then started working on a textbox/dialogue system, and made a signpost to test it with.

Ain't no lowrezjam without a shitty dialogue test or two

Day 5, 6, 7, 8, and some of 9 - who needs a consistent devlog schedule anyway

I am starting to feel the burn a little. Lots of new progress, but perhaps 10 % less than what I would've liked at this point. Anyway, it's going fine! List of new things:

• Moving between rooms
• Work in progress pause menu + HUD
• Rocks, fence posts and trees - got a good workflow of quickly adding inanimate solid objects now
• Sword pickup + sword attacks (I debated a lot whether to have the player carry around an in actual sword and animate it in-game, or do some kinda pre-rendered 2D overlay as part of the HUD - ended up with the latter, animated in Blender, and hey it looks alright!)
• Slime enemies!
  • Green is the basic one, 2 HP, fairly random slow movement
  • Blue is a bit more tanky, 4 HP, moves directly towards player, then flees for a while when hit
  • Red is aggressive, 3 HP, moves by jumping quickly towards the player

• Kbjwes77 has been working hard on composing music for the game, and the prototypes are sounding really delicious!!
  • https://soundcloud.com/john-wesley-kbjwes77/sets/lox3d

Here are some GIFs (most of which you've probably already seen on Twitter by now but eh 😜):

Sword pickup - at this point in time the equipped sword is a 3D model...	...which would be difficult to animate, and it causes problems like this	Solution: Attacks rendered as 2D sprites, shown on top of gameplay!
Slimes!	Putting everything together for the first combat test - it's decent™