2013/04/30
Heroine Dusk
My April One Game A Month game is complete! It's called Heroine Dusk. The sun hasn't risen in days and creatures are swarming towards human civilization. You're a serf who takes up arms agains the darkness.
2013/04/17
Flare Minions
I recently approved code (contributed by Ryan Dansie) that adds basic Minions support in Flare. This will allow Flare games to have summonable creatures, tamed enemies, or simple allies.
This may be the last major new game feature I approve for Flare 1.0. Wow!
Not to say that we won't be adding/improving features. One of our major goals probably for version 0.20 is making all the menus work fully on systems with no mouse/pointer. And there will be smaller game features that make it in, but those will mostly be expanding existing features -- like adding new item bonus types, or adding new spell types.
But the bulk of the remaining code work for 1.0 is cleanup. Refactoring some parts to make more sense. Hardening input file handling and adding more helpful error logs. Naming and comment consistency. That kind of thing.
2013/04/12
Upcoming Tasks
Everything is coming together for the Flare engine. It's an exciting time, and there's so much to do! If you are interested in helping in any way let us know.
- Beta Engine tasks
- Convert internal map units to floats
- Cutscene additional cleanup
- Consider minions feature
- Input file standardization pass
- Flare-Game tasks
- Create new logo
- Create new website
- Launch name branding
- Map and quest design for Act I
- Tutorials
- Create reference wiki pages for all data file types
- Create example maps for DevLab
- Create longer, friendly content-creation tutorials
- Core Art
- Test updated lights/colors for all three tile sets
- Create one alternate of each existing set
- Render HDCore data
- Create set-pieces useful for Flare-Game
- Add additional tiles to make the sets more flexible
2013/04/05
Change in the flare-game repo
We made a big change to the flare-game repo today, hopefully to help distributors/packagers in the future.
The repo at https://github.com/clintbellanger/flare-game no longer contains source code. It only contains the mods (and supporting data sources) for the actual game.
If you're playing flare-game from the latest sources, you'll now need to pull from flare-game for data and flare-engine for sources.
We suggest that a similar separation be used when distributing Flare in software repos, starting with the upcoming version 0.19. First the flare-engine repo is the bare-bones engine, and then flare-game which relies on the engine repo. Other games, like Polymorphable, can also be distributed this way (package just the game mods and set flare-engine as a requirement).
2013/03/31
Flare v0.18 Released
Release Summary
- 10 Equipment Slots, up from 4 (and easily configurable)
- Starting "Class" choice (beginner's power/item kit)
- Environmental/Ambient Sounds on maps
- Much improved handling of Animations, Effects, and Sounds
- New Powers: Stealth, Traps, Thrown Weapons
- New Item Bonuses: XP gain, Gold Find, Item Find, and more
- Improved support for various input devices
- Two new starting quests
Screenshots
Engine Updates
- Implement avatar layer composition and configurable slots (Igor Paliychuk)
- Allow low quality (no alpha) textures for gameplay art (Igor Paliychuk)
- Add support for font styles (Justin Jacobs)
- Introduce AnimationManager and use it for existing animations (Stefan Beller)
- Make buyback price the same as sell price (Justin Jacobs)
- Remove many warnings from static code analysis (Stefan Beller)
- New starting class system (Justin Jacobs)
- Allow assigning titles based on xp, primary stats, or campaign status (Matthew Krohn)
- Powers can require HP and optionally kill the caster (Matthew Krohn)
- Add on-hit, half dead, and dead power triggers (Justin Jacobs)
- New EffectsManager to handle buffs and debuffs (Justin Jacobs)
- Add support for Passive Powers (Justin Jacobs)
- Add "XP Gain", "Gold Find", "Item Find" bonuses (Justin Jacobs)
- Support granting multiple stat/power points per level (Justin Jacobs)
- Standardize init lists for classes (Stefan Beller)
- Add on_clear map event type (Justin Jacobs)
- Add flavor text option for item tooltips (Clint Bellanger)
- Convert MenuCharacter to stat listbox (Justin Jacobs)
- Allow bonus max HP/MP percentages (Matthew Krohn)
- Implement per-enemy loot tables (Justin Jacobs)
- Add Stealth bonus effect (Justin Jacobs)
- Standardize sound effect loading function (Stefan Beller)
- Add internal utility functions (Piotrrak)
- Support NPC and map events based on hero level (Stefan Beller)
- Allow Accept key to interact with the environment instead of clicking (Justin Jacobs)
- Mouse emulation mode (Justin Jacobs)
- Add default names for portraits to help keyboardless systems (Justin Jacobs)
- Add --game_dataflag for setting a user-defined PATH_DATA (Justin Jacobs)
- Introduce SoundManager for centralized sound handling (Henrik Andersson)
- Add game_prefix to segregate save games and config files for mods (Henrik Andersson)
- Add NPC Action Menu for NPCs with multiple discussion topics (Henrik Andersson)
- Add location-based sound volume (Henrik Andersson)
- Implement enemy style loot tables for map events (Justin Jacobs)
- Make the local data folder prevail over installed ones (Yohann Ferreira)
- Rendering optimizations (Stefan Beller)
- Allow config file durations to be specified in frames, ms, or seconds (Henrik Andersson)
- Fix LMB ignoring locks in some situations (Joseph Bleau)
- Add cooldown_hit duration to prevent stunlock (Joseph Bleau)
- Add status-based trader stock (Justin Jacobs)
- Allow equipment bonuses to be applied while transformed (Justin Jacobs)
- Handle fuzzy matching in translation files (Henrik Andersson)
- Add item count ranges for loot tables (Clint Bellanger)
- Don't allow dead hero to trigger map events (Justin Jacobs)
- Add additional cppcheck flags to the .travis.yml file (Hans Joachim)
- Clean up BOM from the languages.txt file (Hans Joachim)
Game Updates
- Updated equipment from 4 slots (weapon, offhand, body, artifact) to 10 slots (head, body, hands, legs, feet, weapon, offhand, ring, ring, artifact)
- Added chainmail and mage armor (Clint Bellanger)
- Clothes icon paintings (Ben at CrowLine Studio)
- Mage, Leather, Chain, Plate icon paintings (Justin Nichol)
- Ring art (Clint Bellanger)
- Iron Buckler shield (Clint Bellanger)
- Animal Figurines (Clint Bellanger)
- Abandoned Tower art and quest line (Stefan Beller)
- Mineshaft Longsword quest line (Justin Jacobs)
- Beginning of new item list (Clint Bellanger)
- Environmental Sounds on existing maps (Henrik Andersson)
- New powers: Stealth, Caltrops, Bear Trap, Dagger Throw, Axe Throw (Clint Bellanger)
New Translations
- Czech by Nikita Vanku (Zaraka)
- Norwegian Bokmal by Hans Joachim Desserud
- Polish by Pawel Puszczynski
- Many thanks to the other translators who sent in updates
Credits
Flare is made by a lot of great people. Tremendous thanks to everyone who makes it possible. It's hard to keep track of everyone with a project of this size. If you have been accidentally omitted from the credits list, let me know and I'll add you right away!
A Note on Save Files
Note that Flare v0.18 isn't set up to load save files from previous versions. With the armor slots changing so drastically it required recreating most items. You still may want to back up your existing save files if you're attached to those characters. But we expect players to start new characters in v0.18.
Downloads courtesy of SourceForge
- Flare v0.18 for Windows (zip)
- Flare v0.18 for OSX (dmg)
- Flare v0.18 for Linux (sources with cmake, tar.gz)
v0.18 Gameplay Video
Have a tour of the new v0.18 features while you download. Turn on annotations to see my developer notes. Watch at 720p!
