Castlevania Flash: Update

I fixed a major bug and made changes to Castlevania Flash tonight to make it more playable:

Bug:

As Alucard, press down and jump to turn to a bat. Stay close to the floor and transforming back to Alucard would push you down through to the floor and die. Not anymore.

Changes:

I removed the pendulums in stage A-02-02. Pendulums and platform were never implemented properly. In fact I need a lot more time to do them. I spent hours if not days trying to get them to work last year. I know from a friend who made a 2D platformer before that they are a pain to program so it's not just me apparently.

I removed the stairs going down in stage 9-02-03 to prevent to user from going down. 9-02-03 is the last level I designed so there's nothing down there anyways. I would be surprised if anyone made it that far.

Bats and Medusas are fully implemented. They can now hurt, kill and be killed. Nasty creatures.

Things I want to fix soon: Vertical scrolling. Ever wonder why early famicom titles had no vertical scrolling? It's incredibly tough to make! Every time I make a small change to the characters' falling down state I have to go back in horizontal scrolling to check it and lo and behold it no longer works properly.

Here is the link: http://www.firebell.org/guardiansoft/castleflash/

Megaman PC

Megaman PC is a game I developed with my friend Nathan in 2004. The tiles and enemies were entirely redrawn using a pen tablet to give the characters a cell animation look over the course of 6 days to present to Capcom. This game was also ported for the PS2 and when we played it on a wide screen TV we said we should rename it "Megaman High-res".

Latest download available here

Dragon Quest icons and characters

Put up some tiles from my portfolio. I originally made these tiles for Dragon Quest 4 and Dragon Quest 5. The Nintendo DS limited me to about 128 colors so I original made a color chart I could go back to when working in different shades. Hopefully I can upload more of these later!

Dragon Quest 4, 5 and 6 trailers

So I came across the TV spot for Dragon Quest 6 in Japan. This is the last of a series of 3 commercials that Square Enix made for the 3 DS remakes of Dragon Quest 4, 5 and 6. What I really like about these is that all three are high production value, were filmed in Europe and use Sugiyama-san's amazing Dragon Quest score that he remade for the DS. I watched a "making of" at a developer convention in Tokyo and apparently these TV spots were all filmed in different locations with local actors:

Dragon Quest 4: Czech Republic
Dragon Quest 5: Netherlands
Dragon Quest 6: Spain

The guy playing the hero (older version) in 5 was on location and said they filmed in late October in the North Sea one hour out from the Netherlands and that everyone was freezing cold, especially the girls who had to be covered in blankets when not shooting in their skimpy outfits. Interesting fact: they had the actors speak in their native language and dubbed over or added subtitles after. 4 and 6 are actually in their original languages! Pretty cool stuff. I linked to the first one because it seems to be in wide screen, the other ones are embedded.

Trailer for Dragon Quest 6:

DS Dragon Quest 6 TV CM

Trailer for Dragon Quest 5:


Trailer for Dragon Quest 4:

Castlevania Flash

Not game art per say but game development. For years I kept this to myself and never bothered uploading it. Well I finally put it up. Something like a 4 year ongoing project, an engine for the classic NES Castlevania 3: Dracula's Curse, made entirely in Flash.

http://www.firebell.org/guardiansoft/castleflash/

I started with just a simple character animation and collision detection in 2005 and ended up coding the entire final stage and half the previous stage. My humble goal: to remake the entire game except similar to Metroid where you can go back and explore areas you previously visited and solve puzzles in order to progress. This explains why you can go back and fourth through doors in my version. My idea was that it would be a sequel, that you started after you defeat Dracula, and realize that his curse has not been lifted. You would have to go back and find his missing body parts (like in Castlevania 2, another great non-linear "vania") and make your way back to the beginning. Of course the original Castlevania 3 isn't made to be freely explorable in this way. Some areas have drops that are impossible to climb back. Which is why I programmed Alucard with his powerful but incredibly cheap power to turn into a flying bat. He was the perfect character to help debug my game.

Sounds overambitious enough? Well I had the entire map drawn out in Excel with new mansion areas where you would recover Dracula's missing body parts. The final confrontation would take place in front of the church where you started originally. Yep. I wonder what I was thinking. So why Dracula's Curse? Seriously, I don't know if many people realize how amazing that game was for the time: It was non-linear, had 3 hidden characters, around 15 stages all with boss battles and an amazing sound score. The only better game of the time I can think of is Mario 3.

Here's a short list of features I had to build:
- two playable characters
- collision detection
- side-scrolling
- horizontal scrolling
- enemies generation
- spikes (instant kill)
- breakable blocks
- stairs
- water animation
- one incredibly easy boss
- text parser

The thing I'm most proud of: size. In true NES-era fashion, this side-scroller is only 130kb without sound.

Here we are!

Hi everyone, for years I wanted to put up some material I have been working on over the years. Many of these projects have been released, some for a while, so I can finally share with you the art I have been creating for various commercial video games.

One thing I noticed recently, Pinball Attack has been out for a while! This is the last game I worked on with Arte Piazza. It was the first time I developed for DSi Ware. It's basically a pinball game that uses the dual screen. Your typical pinball bumpers and lights are replaced by characters from different themes: Deep sea, alien and air etc:



Link to the official page:

http://www.artepiazza.com/pinballattack/