$12256 / $11500
This has been (mostly) finished for a while. I've held off on posting it here until the Android port and Countdown to Adventure companion were finished. Links are at the bottom of the post if you just want to try it right away.
Ascension: Adventure is a retro dungeon crawler. It is a sort of spinoff of Ascension, fitting between the first and second games with little connection to either. It is based on Clint Bellanger’s Heroine Dusk.
In other words, it's pretty much a bastardized version of Heroine Dusk, with identical game mechanics. Some of the art assets have been replaced, most of them have been edited. The engine is nearly identical to Heroine Dusk, so it will run in any modern browser. There is also an Android port, which puts the game inside a WebView and uses some interfaces between JavaScript and Java to handle things like audio.
I know the graphics are ugly. It's only been a few months since I did Ascension: Adventure, but I've already learned quite a bit. I may redo them in the future if I have time. I've used a mixture of Heroine Dusk's art and other art from this site. Music is mostly from here, but some is from Kevin MacLeod (Incompetech.com).
Like Heroine Dusk, this game is licensed under the GPLv3 (or later) for code and CC-BY-SA 3.0 (or later) for the art.
PC: Play Online | Download | Source
Android: Google Play | Download | Source
Countdown to Adventure (companion)
This website's content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
I'm currently working on redoing some of the art, getting rid of the horrid dithering and doing manual recoloring. I'm not very good at anything artistic, so I'm pretty much just replacing colors, not adding any shading. Ascension: Adventure uses a 256-color palette and 320x240 resolution, but I don't really have the skill to take advantage of it.
Death Speaker/Cult Leader.
From left to right: Heroine Dusk Original, Redshrike's Remix, Ascension: Adventure V1, Ascension: Adventure (New)
The first two use DawnBringer's 16 color palette, the last two use my 256-color palette.
Of course, once everything is done, it will be posted here.
Yeah, you have to be careful with filetype conversions and resizing to avoid getting those compression artifacts. Good luck on your edits--I put in a fair amount of time on these and I can testify that they're a lot of fun to work on.
The issue wasn't with filetype conversions but my ham-fisted attempt at 256-color graphics. What I did was import, scale 2x using "Bicubic Automatic", then switch to Indexed Color mode, dithering enabled. Most of the actual editing was done after the scaling, but before the palettizing. I was trying to go for a certain style, but after looking at it for a while I decided that it was, well, garbage.
What I did this time is do my edits at the original resolution, recoloring manually to the new palette, then scaling 2x nearest-neighbour. I do miss the fake texturing and perceived detail that some of the old scaled graphics had. For the world tiles, I layered the old dithered graphics on top of the new ones at half opacity. I'm still not sure if I like the look. The backgrounds have dithered gradients now, and again I'm not sold on that either.
I'm almost done now (enemies are done), and I'm mostly happy with the results. You can try it here. I haven't updated the download or android version, but the "Play Online" link should work. You may need to clear your browser cache first.
The new versions are a significant improvement indeed, they look much better!
I've started playing a game and it's fun, but I keep finding the locations too similar to Heroine Dusk. Not sure if this effect is intended?.. I understand that game mechanics are hard to change, but the ruined village is all to similar to the monastery, the plains also have 1 house, the polis has the same houses as the town in Heroine Dusk.
I must say I like the way you’ve changed the palette. It really creates a different atmosphere compared to Heroine Dusk.
Thanks for your work on this game.
I will freely admit I got lazy and didn't change the layouts much. Adding and removing interactive houses is somewhat complicated, but I could have moved them around a bit more.
I was worried about giving myself 256 colors to work with and then not using them effectively. I think the new art does a much better job of using the wider gamut.
The Android (Google Play) version has been updated, though it might not be live yet. I haven't updated the apk or downloadable versions yet, and I haven't pushed the changes to GitHub. I'll have that done by the end of the week, along with posting the rest of the art on this site.
dear @XCVG thank you for sharing your work. Unfortunately your github page doesn't tell how I can build and play the game locally. I don't like playing games in the browser and instead would like to play it within my system. Is this possible ? IF yes, how ?
If you're still following this, I'm not sure. It is possible to build HTML5 into a packaged app with some of the frameworks that are out there, but I've never done it.
This guy figured out how to build Heroine Dusk as a Metro app, and it should be the same for Ascension: Adventure, but it's only useful if you're running Windows 8.
You could run the Android version in some kind of emulator, but this is terribly obtuse and I don't see the point of doing it.
You can also download the game and play it locally in your browser by simply opening the HTML file, but this doesn't seem like what you're looking for.
Well, I decided to play with it last night, and I've got it running with node-webkit. Saving doesn't work, and there's no way to quit or restart, but these are solvable issues. It's also kind of big, but I think I can make it smaller.
http://www.mediafire.com/download/t74h22fl6dulrt8/cerium_standalone_beta...
This is a Windows build, but node-webkit is cross platform.