Spring is here! The birds are singing, flower's are blooming, and plants are growing. With Easter just around the corner, lets hop into AoC's month development blog.
For starters we entering the end game for our first ASM modded boss, The Crimson Fool. This devilish clown appears in the carnival stage in his own private dressing room.
=An early excerpt from the games manual=The mysterious magician Saint Germain is the headmaster for a traveling circus. On its way through Transylvania, forces of the night capture the circus members caravan and bring them to CastleVania. Upon arrival; Dracula orders to see the party's leader. Once locating Germain he gives a simple, yet horrifying ultimatum. Join forces, or perish. So with no other options Germain chooses to join forces with Dracula, shaking the demon lord’s hand in defeat. To which Dracula recoils in laughter, subsequently Dracula's Curse takes hold and all in agreement transform into mindless monsters. Those unwilling souls remaining are consumed by their family and friends. Now under Dracula's control, this haunted circus sets up shop in Transylvania, preparing for an everlasting show.
The main inspiration for Germain's curse form, comes from machiavellian attire of Edgar Allen Poes "The Masque of the Red Death".
Over time this concept evolved into the Fool's Tarrot card. It fit the character's personality (spontaneous and fluid) and their situation as the inverse is a person who has fallen into a state of poverty and deprivation. It also fit's what Dracula sees Germain as, a personal entertainer who was foolish enough to take his offer of eternal torment over a quick and panful death.
Alrighty, enough lore talk, onto the sprites!
Cv3 actually gave us the opportunity to sprite overlay for this boss, which really helped sell the evil jester look. For those unfamiliar, on rare occasions NES devs a special technique that helped them expand the NES's active color range from 3 colors per sprite to 6. This was accomplished by using sprite overlay's, where one sprite is layered on top of another. In order to use all six colors holes are inserted into the overlay to show the colors of the sprite beneath it. In combination these two sprites can make a 6 colored image (in this case were limited to 5, as CV3's 2 master color sets are in effect.)
Next up on our list is the 2nd stage in our game the Wallachian Necropolis, based off of the irl Necropolis rail line that took the dead on an underground train ride which connected the dense city to massive external grave-yards. Here's some of our current test versions of the stage, in which we explore the underground rail line (extended from the previous stage), the massive grave yard where the mad forest once resided, and a memorial chapel(soon to come)
Reply section:Thanks for the kind word's Arcade-Elite
we cant wait to get this ready for playable testing.
I read you loud and clear Drax01! Hopefully thing continue to get better and better as we gain a greater mastery over the engine.
Hi Flavio, AoC's been in the works for about a year now. As for percentage of completion I would say were roughly at the 25% completion mark, however adding in new features and stages may increase the time it takes for things to be complete. I would check out
Reply #178 of this thread for more details on the proposed timeframe.
Currently our biggest roadblock to a public WIP release is music and sfx, while the sound engine is primed and ready it STILL needs time to develop the games soundtrack and jump CV3's unique hurdles. At the moment certain effects get still corrupted, including DCPM, so to give you guys the best the ForgeMaster's can offer were holding off until we can get music implemented.
Thanks for reading and have a wonderful day!
Topic: Castlevania III Total Conversion (NES) Hack: Aperture of Corruption (Read 65284 times)