Thanks for those two ideas jchamplain, I had a look at both of those games and their perspectives really blew my mind. I've decided to reel in the view perspective and make it more standard (posted about it on the dev blog) to save myself having to bend my mind around weird and wonderful angles.

I have to admit that I prefer how it looks now:

<center><img src="http://img843.imageshack.us/img843/9978/1936e9e8cf4a4a2caba87f9.png" border="0"></center>

Cancel all of what I've just said!!

It was Barry bloody S�ance and his wild � in the filenames that was throwing everything into disarray!

I'm not sure what is going wrong here, whether it's a bug or if it's something that's going wrong that I'm doing:

<img src="http://img543.imageshack.us/img543/6189/ae11470134794768926df84.png" border="0">

On the left is the editor preview version, as you can see the green ghost and blue/gold chest are rendered properly. On the right is the exported version (running from my site) which doesn't seem to show either of these sprites correctly. I'm using a 'master instance' layout as a place to have all of the items/characters that will be instanced elsewhere; this system works for all of the other objects, besides these new ones.

Sorry guys, I've removed the capx since I solved this issue :)

Thank you Rory, I'm being very meticulous with the artwork.

Shinkan, I completely agree with what you're saying. The hero and skeletons are from the original iteration of the game (which was a sidescroller rather than isometric) and I haven't got round to creating new, perspective appropriate versions.

The weird perspective of the game interiors has flagged up a few times now when I've shown other people, my reasoning to have this strange perspective is mostly to do with gameplay; it is easier for me to represent the likes of doors and switches on all of the walls if the perspective is like this. The inspiration for this came from Link's Awakening:

<center><img src="http://www.zeldawiki.org/images/e/ea/LAfullmooncello2.jpg" border="0" /></center>

But if I am entirely honest, I'm not keen on it, as the perspective seems very off in places, and detracts from the aesthetics.

Thanks KSLR I've edited the post and the link should work now.

I've posted up a brief introduction to the story of Dungeon Buster in the development blog:

https://thelightupwarrior.wordpress.com/2012/09/11/let-me-tell-you-a-little-story/

And you'll be pleased to hear I'm inching closer to releasing something for you all have a run around in.

Thanks to both of you, Tokinsom you gave me a totally different angle which worked a treat, and TELLES0808 you gave me a neat idea for randomising the loot :)

It seems that for now the only way I can do it is to have a unique object for each chest and just manually copy the events/actions and change the objects the events/actions reference.

Hi guys, I've been wracking my brain over this for a while now, my issue is that I want to have an easy-to-use system for storing the status of each chest in a given layout (whether it has been opened or not, and have it act accordingly).

As it stands I have all of the chests inside a family, and the family has an instance variable called "opened" which can be either 1 or 0. The rest of the setup would be easier explained with a screenshot:

<img src="http://img204.imageshack.us/img204/3814/a55ce1a54d5a4248adffe67.png" border="0" />

I'd rather not have to do this using global variables if it means I'll need a variable for each chest since the game will have a large number of chests.

Can anybody help me brainstorm how I would do this? I'm totally stuck!

<center><img src="http://i.imgur.com/3TuT5.png" border="0"></center>

Dungeon Buster is on IndieDB

Latest News:

12/3/2013 - Added more info about the upcoming alpha demo!

--------------------------

Hello all,

Dungeon Buster is a long term project that I started work on a number of weeks ago. It's an action adventure game done in the style of Link's Awakening for the original Gameboy.

I've started a development blog for the project here but I will include all updates posted there in this thread as well. I won't be releasing any playable prealpha versions just yet as it's not so much a game right now, more an art-style and game mechanic testbed. That being said, until that time I'll be posting screenshots on a regular basis.

For now, here's a look at what I've done so far:

<center>

<img src="http://i.imgur.com/IrsrO.png" border="0">

House interior with steps leading to the test dungeon.

<img src="http://i.imgur.com/mNsey.png" border="0">

The entrance of the test dungeon, complete with skeletons who wander around and attack if you get too close to them. The hud is also visible here but has a few debug numbers visible.

<img src="http://i.imgur.com/QUs4B.png" border="0">

The dialogue system as it stands now, the NPC's picture comes up on the left hand side of the dialogue box, and Buster's picture comes up on the right.

</center>

That's it for now, as per the development blog I'll be posting tomorrow about the story the game is based around.

I would suggest giving Dxtory a try, it isn't nearly as CPU heavy as Fraps at the cost of being a bit more daunting to set up:

http://dxtory.com/v2-home-en.html

It's always worked well for me, and if you need a hand setting it up I'll be happy to help.

I've heard about this before, and it's not just limited to games. There's a whole culture in China known as "Shanzhai", dedicated to ripping off genuine products from all sorts of areas. More info on it here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanzhai

As for protecting your work, I honestly don't know how you would go about that, especially since its Chinese copycats we're discussing. Informing Apple about the infringement is about all you can do; you'd never be able to take substantial legal action against the rip-off developers themselves, since the Chinese themselves don't seem to be able to curb the issue (which is what I gathered from that Wikipedia article).