Lucretia - Demon Princess (鬼姫の呪い in Japan) NOW IN BETA TESTING

[OldRover]

Lucretia - Demon Princess is a horizontal shooter inspired by Magical Chase. It is the spiritual sequel to Eponasoft's previous release, Paradox Girl, using some of the same characters. The basic idea was to create an entire game based on Paradox Girl's shooter sequences. Equuskia is once again a character in the game (in her Castle outfit from Paradox Girl), although she is now joined by Reina (who was "Cici" in Paradox Girl), Zamy, and Rhianna (two new characters). Each of the four ladies represents one of the four elements.

The game is rather unorthodox in how it controls. Much like Sidearms, you can fire in both directions, and enemies will come from both directions. However, in Lucretia, you can decide how the game controls... it has three schemes available. The default scheme uses II as the fire button and I as a "direction lock"... that is, when you hold I, the direction you're facing in is frozen, allowing you to move backwards and continue firing in the direction you're facing in. There is also a "direction toggle" scheme, which uses the I button to switch directions. The last scheme is the same as in Sidearms, utilizing both II and I for directional fire. Also, the game is set up for two-player co-op, and either player can pause the game. There is a Pause menu where you can switch control schemes at will. Only the player who paused the game can unpause the game.

Demo version (still here):

wayback: lucretiademo.7z
wayback: lucretiademo.7z

Two download locations, just in case.

Here is the latest revision of the ISO track:

eponasoft .com/lucretiademorevision1a.7z
frozenutopia .com/lucretiademorevision1a.7z

UPDATE:

Beta testing is about to begin. We are now officially accepting applications for closed beta testers. Registration is simple but details are everything!

To apply for a position on the closed beta team, send me a PM with the following information:

-Name you would like to have appear in the credits
-An email address you can be reached at
-Whether or not you have previous experience with closed beta testing (and if so, list your experience)
-Whether or not you have hardware (and if no hardware, whether or not you can work with Mednafen)

We will be selecting eight people for the beta test, and it will run until the game is ready for manufacturing. Each beta tester will receive two free copies of the game, plus the complete set of additional promotional merchandise.

UPDATE:

Beta testing is underway as of Monday, March 3rd.

[_Paul]

Scrolling looks nice. I assume you're using these BG graphics as temps for the moment?

[esteban]

[spenoza]

I worry a little about the size of the character sprite. Will it have a smaller hitbox? Big "ships" in shooters can lead to lots of cheap deaths.

[OldRover]

Scrolling looks nice. I assume you're using these BG graphics as temps for the moment?

Yes, since the parallax mountains were designed for Monolith. Pretty much all the graphics are temporary at the moment.

I worry a little about the size of the character sprite. Will it have a smaller hitbox? Big "ships" in shooters can lead to lots of cheap deaths.

Everything is big but the game moves a little less speedy than other games of its kind so that may or may not be a problem here. Time will tell. If need be, I'll use smaller characters.

[spenoza]

I worry a little about the size of the character sprite. Will it have a smaller hitbox? Big "ships" in shooters can lead to lots of cheap deaths.

Everything is big but the game moves a little less speedy than other games of its kind so that may or may not be a problem here. Time will tell. If need be, I'll use smaller characters.

Yeah, sorry to be leading with a slightly negative tone. Been playing a bit of Dragon Spirit and Air Zonk lately, two big-hitbox shooters that are great but can be a little frustrating due to character size.

[OldRover]

No worries. It's still somewhat early in development, although this project has moved *extremely* rapidly and its core code is about 90% complete already. I didn't want to spring this one here until there was something to actually show for it.

I had planned on getting the demo out today but I was away most of the day so I didn't get the chance. Maybe by tomorrow morning.

[roflmao]

Woo hoo!

[Tatsujin]

HEIHEIHEI

[spenoza]

Will it be CD only or is there a chance of an AbCard/ROM release for those of us without CD capabilities?

[OldRover]

CD only.

[Bardoly]

Forgive me for being blonde, but this is a game that you're programming for Turbo CD/PCE CD, right?

[esteban]

Forgive me for being blonde, but this is a game that you're programming for Turbo CD/PCE CD, right?

Hell yes, it is. Expect a XaviX port, as well.

[NecroPhile]

Woot!  Homebrew, two-player shewtie!

[OldRover]

I've not had enough time to finish the demo yet due to kids but here is another prototype video... attack of the black birds.

[touko]

Some collision problems rover ??? 

[OldRover]

Nah, not really. Minor thing I've not bothered to go in and correct just yet because I have to rewrite the shot code anyway. As I work on this, I keep thinking of things to add, and as long as they don't break the existing design, they get added. I have an evolving design document for this project, which is how I work best anyway. What has to change in the shot code is patterns... it's currently designed to have each character shoot the same pattern. That got kind of boring pretty fast so I decided to give it some variety. The current code allows the shot patterns to be determined from inside the player input processor function, but it's going to become complicated so I'm moving individual player shot generation code to its own function.

I'm still deciding what to do about bomb-type attacks... got some ideas but haven't implemented anything just yet.

[touko]

LOL yes i know, i had the same problem with my caravan (in revival chase), because my collision routine was byte based ..

Have you planned to do the whole game with HuC ???

[OldRover]

So far the whole thing is straight HuC code, but I'll do assembly tweaks where required, and they will be.

[touko]

Ok, i have personaly banished all c code (but not huc) because it eats up too many ROM space ...

My caravan  :

, this is in 80 ko, and with all huc library for compatibility ..

[OldMan]

Very Nice guys.
Glad to see someone else is moving away from trying to do eveything in HuC

Are you guys still embedding the graphics in the program via the #inc functions?

[touko]

Yes, with #incbin for me ..

Glad to see someone else is moving away from trying to do eveything in HuC

Eh,not really, i have said huc library, not C code 

[OldRover]

The #incxxx psuedos are the best way for now, unless you have a better method. For stuff that only needs to be loaded once and forgotten about, I'll #incspr in the "bootstrap" overlay and push it into VRAM there so I don't need to bother with it later... less system RAM used later.

[OldMan]

"Better" is a relative term. I wouldn't say it was better, just different.  Just wondering if you guys were sacrificing the RAM pages to hold graphics and such.

We ended up with a way to squish BAT/GFX/PALETTE/Chiptunes into an overlay that could be loaded into an empty page of RAM (8K at a time, mind you) then shoved to where it belonged for each level in PP. But I wouldn't say it was easier/better.
We had no choice, there. The PP Game code (Thanks, HuC) came out to 72K iirc. One page too large for a regular CD, but plenty of extra pages for loading from scd. That's one of the things that made pp take so long from the demo version to release.

The reason I asked is I'm debating a way of loading code from overlays dynamically. Thinking about tuokos fighter, I wonder if it might be possible to load the attacks into RAM when the character is selected, instead of trying to embed code for 6 fighters at 10+ moves per guy.

And I'm really disappointed nobody noticed the hacked ipl in pp. I guess next time, I'll have to play an audio track instead of using ADPCM....

[OldRover]

The contents of VRAM are preserved between execoverlays so I'll preload lots of stuff. It doesn't matter if the data consumes RAM pages in a "disposable" execoverlay... as long as the RAM isn't wasted in programs where I need as much code space as possible, all's good. I used that technique in MSR, JB, Monolith, and now this project too. All of my productions use the first execoverlay as a "corporate splash" similar to the one you see every time a Sega Genesis cartridge is booted... that program also does ADPCM transfer, preloads anything into VRAM that will never change, and does any other pre-emptive stuff so the main program doesn't have to waste space.

[touko]

The reason I asked is I'm debating a way of loading code from overlays dynamically. Thinking about tuokos fighter, I wonder if it might be possible to load the attacks into RAM when the character is selected, instead of trying to embed code for 6 fighters at 10+ moves per guy.

Only player and current opponant are in level overlay, others are external, and also all levels adpcm .
A dynamic loading will be added for 2 players mode .

And like rover, all stuffs  which are common are preloaded in menu overlay ..

And I'm really disappointed nobody noticed the hacked ipl in pp. I guess next time, I'll have to play an audio track instead of using ADPCM....

An hacked ipl ???

[Arkhan Asylum]

An hacked ipl ???

Yeah.  There was a discussion about it on our forum.   You were part of it,

[touko]

Are you sure ??
usualy i'am not very aware of this kind of things ..
With startup.asm, ok no problems, but ipl

[MotherGunner]

Awesome Rover!  So you were just joking when you said, "Never again!!!! *Tears*" after MS? =)

[OldMan]

We were discussing doing fire effects. I don't remember if the ipl was mentioned or not there.
And yes, a hacked ipl. You can't change some of it because bios does a match check on the code. But if you disassemble the code, you can see how it works. You can pre-load palettes, a BAT, and graphics - the catch being Huc/Magikit doesn't expect those things, so you have to patch the iso to make it work.

What's really interesting is that bios loads 2 sectors (4K) for the ipl - but only about 512 bytes are actually used.
There's an empty space (that has to be all 0's for the check) that you can use for variables because...
you can set your execute address to be -in- the ipl area. And run a splash screen directly from the ipl
For those who understand any of that, bios also stashes the sector number of the ipl for you in the user data area, iirc, so you can load your program after the splash screen is done.

I understand using overlays to load things, and it's not a bad idea. I just don't like the fact that it ends up loading 32K of HuC libraries (most of which it won't use) just to set up vram. And I hate trying to maintain multiple copies of the same basic program because I have to keep re-loading slightly different versions of it...

[touko]

Oh, now I see why a hacked ipl,you have used this for your abcard ,to have scd bios routine in your card, no ??
I only (but this not an ipl hack) did a scd boot screen fade out when you press run ..

[Arkhan Asylum]

The ipl hack was mostly for shits and giggles, and to not use obnoxious overlay things just for a splash screen that plays a little jingle I made with a synth at 3am...

The AbCards don't have any SCD bios routines on them.  Don't really need them on an AbCard.  Atlantean sure doesn't, at least.

[OldRover]

New video with smaller character sprite.

[touko]

The ipl hack was mostly for shits and giggles, and to not use obnoxious overlay things just for a splash screen that plays a little jingle I made with a synth at 3am...

The AbCards don't have any SCD bios routines on them.  Don't really need them on an AbCard.  Atlantean sure doesn't, at least.

Ok, i remembered a CCAG demo with scd bios on hucard ..

@rover:this sprite is better really than pseudo digitised one .But you must also change the cameraman  

[OldRover]

Change the cameraman? Why, is he drunk?

[touko]

Lol, no he's doing hardware blur with his camera ..

But he's probably drunk too !!  

EDIT: arf, in fact, it's google which degraded the video .

[Arkhan Asylum]

Ok, i remembered a CCAG demo with scd bios on hucard .

That never happened.  Are you sure you don't mean the chip tune stuff on a HuCard?  That isn't the actual BIOS.  It's a rewritten copy of the music library that mimics what the CD stuff does.

[touko]

That never happened.  Are you sure you don't mean the chip tune stuff on a HuCard?  That isn't the actual BIOS.  It's a rewritten copy of the music library that mimics what the CD stuff does.

I do not remember really ..
it was a sgx with a flashcard, and scd bios startup was on the screen,and no cd unit was attached ..

[Arkhan Asylum]

That never happened.  Are you sure you don't mean the chip tune stuff on a HuCard?  That isn't the actual BIOS.  It's a rewritten copy of the music library that mimics what the CD stuff does.

I do not remember really ..
it was a sgx with a flashcard, and scd bios startup was on the screen,and no cd unit was attached ..

That's not a CCAG demo.   That's me at my house in my underwear, holding up a camera. 

That was me demonstrating that we have chiptunes on cards, instead of CDs now.  It's a bit of a fake-out.   I made it look like its the Duo-R doing everything but then I unhook it and show that it's really the card doing all the music.

[Nando]

New video with smaller character sprite.

She definitely needs some secondary animation ;)

[touko]

That's not a CCAG demo.  

That was me demonstrating that we have chiptunes on cards, instead of CDs now.  It's a bit of a fake-out.   I made it look like its the Duo-R doing everything but then I unhook it and show that it's really the card doing all the music.

Arf, my bad   ..

You killed me lol ..

That's me at my house in my underwear, holding up a camera.  

Ah ok, that's why you was nude and danced the gangnam style !!  
 

[OldMan]

that's why you was nude and danced the gangnam style !

That's what happens when you code until 3AM and it finally works.....And you can't wait to show it off

[Arkhan Asylum]

Really, I just never wear pants at home. 

[OldRover]

Really, I just never wear pants at home. 

...what coder does?

[OldRover]

frozenutopia.com/lucretia-0008.png

Two-player goodness. This screenie has the new version of the player shots and an early version of the HUD.

[roflmao]

YEEHAA!!!

[spenoza]

So, has this been a bit easier to develop thus far than, say, MS? Is this like a working vacation?  ; )

[OldRover]

This style of game is tremendously easy to develop in comparison to an RPG.

[Arkhan Asylum]

This style of game is tremendously easy to develop in comparison to an RPG.

And with this, a new realm of "Sonnnnn of a bitch!" problems hath been unleashed.

\o/

Awww yeah.

[touko]

That's what happens when you code until 3AM and it finally works.....And you can't wait to show it off

LOL, i can easily imagine arkhan, but not you, you'r wise in the group .. ;-)