Gothazodings!

While the music project is coming along well, i do need to take a break from making music every now and then, so I decided to just start working on the Unity port for Turnament.

The first thing I had to do was install Flash CS5, which was... fairly interesting. 👀 I was then able to open the project and clicked around a little bit to get a feel for the project again. It was quite nostalgic actually! Working in Flash was a lot of fun back in 2006, at least during ActionScript 2 times.

I needed to refresh my mind about the game a little bit, so I played through it using the Newgrounds flash emulator plugin. You can watch my playthrough here. The audio levels are all over the place and continually clip and get distorted, either it was always like that or it's just how the game gets interpreted with the plugin. Anyway, I've found the original sounds already, so among other things, I look forward to increasing the audio quality with the port.

With the game now playable for me again, I also made screenshots of each level to create a storyboard, just like I did for Halfquake Sunrise and Catty & Batty. Really helps a lot if you quickly want to find a level.

I made a little list of things that I want to do to get things going, and a few days later I extracted a few sprites from the game. I decided to just extract PNGs with a high resolution, so that it should be fine on high resolution monitors. I was thinking of vector graphics, but i'm not entirely sure I want to go with SVG files, because I do want to replace this art eventually (if possible), so for now this will have to do.

I then decided to just duplicate the Catty & Batty Unity project and build Turnament based on it. There are several advantages to this: The whole game management, load/save of settings, start and options menu (sound/resolution/language settings, etc.), level transitions, music and sound management, the achievement system, as well as controller input are already there, so in theory this should be pretty quick to set everything up. You will see some Catty & Batty sprites for a while (in the pause menu), until I replace that, but it's important to start off with all these features and functions already set in place, which saves me a ton of time. It's a little bit like I'm modding my own game. xD

And today, I loaded the extracted sprites into the map and seeing it in Unity is already pretty cool (see screenshot at the top of this post).

Next I want to try and rebuild all the individual behavior of enemies and player-controlled entities in this test scene, starting with the enemy AI for the projectiles. These were able to patrol from point to point, or fly around randomly and stuff like that, so this should be fairly easy.

Another thing I was also thinking about was the name of the game. Turnament sounds cool to me for some reason, and the game is about "turning grid fields", but it also might make people think it's just "Tournament" misspelled. Alternate names so far are "Torment of Mine" (since it's about mining things) or Neek's Apprentice (that's what the story is about), or Turnminer, etc. I don't think anyone has spoken badly about the name in the past, but maybe having a better name could help a little bit. We'll see. I might just stick to Turnament in the end.

And that's it so far! As always, let me know what you think.

To be continued... 💎