Currently I'm not sure what the total count for monsters will be, I have a certain set planned from the original but there are still two addition groups.
So to start let me break down the different groups of units you will encounter.
1) Red Units - Belong to the Scarlet Queen
2) Green Units - Belong to the Baron
3) Yellow Units - Belong to the Shadow
4) Blue Units - Belong to the Mage*
*also includes neutral townfolk who have been cursed. The player is also blue do to being cursed by the mage.
Currently in the works are:
Henchman - Red Unit - Complete
Bowman - Red Unit - Modeled
Formless - Red Unit - Needs coding
Guardian - Red Unit, Mini Boss - Complete
Shademer - Yellow Unit - Complete
There are 3 enemy units, two mini-boss and a boss planned for the green.
3 units and one 1 boss planned so far for yellow, but more will be added.
Nothing designed for the blue units beside the player and neutral town unit.
Enemy units are not all allies and tend to attack one another. Killing a neutral unit, though, is a bad thing.
This newest video shows some of the new destroyable objects and some increase gib splattering of the enemies.
However I've made a few changes since this video and certain textures and gib spawning have been altered. Waterfall effects may be changed too.
For awhile now I've been in and out of doing or planning something that makes use of voxels.
I had rebooted The Crawl, a planned dungeon crawler rpg that's doubles and an editor and creator not unlike RPG Maker and the likes. However time limitations and techincal troubles have stunted this.
However one day I was browsing around the internet and started to get renewed interest in Voxels being done in some classic engines. Doom had recently added voxels, but Duke3d and the Build engine had it in there from the start.
Knowing how well Ken's engine's perform with voxels, I decided to give it a go and convert Black Shadow, my platforming Castlevania style game into 3d. In a sense it will be like making a Castlevania game 3d but still a Castlevania type game. Unfortunatly Castlevania itself has never been translated to 3d properly.
Thus I'll be creating a complete original total conversion inspired by both Metroid and Castlevania.
The story behind Black Shadow is that you play a knight recently cursed into the form of shadow and faced with the foes of his past, revived as solid shadows.
He must re-defeat his former enemies and find a way to turn back to his normal state and escape the world of the shadows.
Graphics, at least strututure wise are being taken directly from the platformer with objects being converted into voxels.
Character models, and a few others are being created in Sculptris, converted with Poly2vox and shaded and touched up in Slab6.
Before being converted into voxels, I use Anim8tor to do the boning and animation. Do to the fact that voxels hender the loading time, and too many high detail models can effectly kill the engine, I'm keep resolutions modest and animations close or the same amounts as Duke3d's.
And heres the same model converted, recolored and shaded. Use of top shading in Slab6 to create the detail since actual voxel shading in the Build engine is on a per-object-per-sector basis.
This is the original platformer's cast of characters as of the last I've worked on it. There are still more to do, so far only the Henchman, Bowman, Guardian and Formless have models. Only the Guardian and Henchman have been animated.
CON scripting is being handled by Deeper Thought who's resposible for DukePlus, a rehauling of Duke3d's gameplay and hi-res updates and WSGR2, a total conversion of Duke3d that has a ton of impressive modifications to the CON code.
As for game play features, here's what's planned and in the works:
Leveling system
Money/Shop system
Shield blocking system
Interconnected Maps, revisiting, saved states
All new weaponry and items
Large levels with lots of secrets, alternative paths
Two Episodes, 14 levels total
5 Major bosses, 5 Sub-Bosses
Original Music
Pots and Barrels drop random loot
Weapons and shield breakdown
Custom AI monsters.
And so on...
At the time it's prefered to use Classic Rendering to achieve voxels, although OpenGL 32bit mode in Eduke32 does handle voxels, there's some drawbacks with speed and custom scaling. The scaling can be handled but the speed could be a probably if it persist on faster computers. An alternative is converting the voxel objects into polygon models for alternative play in a different renderer, but that'll have to wait until things are near the wrapping up phase.
