This is to get the walkthrough to TDR RPG: The Quest for Xirang  off the first page so that people won't peek too much.

Here is the game, lest you have not tried it:

http://www.newgrounds.com/projects/games/778014/preview

If people like TDR, I'll certainly make a sequel, but my next project isn't going to be that.

Instead, I'm returning to Land of Towers, which I've been planning since 2012. I have since lost the files, and I'm going to rewrite it, either in AS3 or JavaScript. I haven't decided which...

Note: SPOILER ALERT!!!

Before we started, the following points must be duly noted:

• In order not to take away the fun, I will not give away any map locations. Explore by yourself!
• The walkthrough is not detailed. Its function is only to help along those who are stuck, and to give goals for grinding (though not much of that is required in my game). If you want to make a detailed walkthrough of your own and post it somewhere, feel free.

Flooded Town

• Kill all the piranhas.
• Once you get to Level 2, you can start killing turtles.
• Talk to the tudi. Grind until you're level 3 and have all the tudi's gear.

Road to the Underworld

• Kill everything you see at first, including the yaksha. She's easier than she looks.
• Be level 4 before you go past the yaksha's square. The foxes can be pretty deadly before level 4.
• Get the thing stuck between the bricks. It contains a password, 5201314, you'll use later.
• Talk to the guard and go west.
• Grind until you're level 5 and defeat Meng Po.

River of Blood

• Grind until level 7-8 (8 is safer, but 7 is possible) with best possible gear and defeat the Ox Head and Horse Face.
• Get to level 8-9 (9 is safer, but 8 is possible) and kill the guards at Ghost Torture Pass.
• Go to Fengdu.

Fengdu and Yin Mountains

• Talk to the old woman and give her the correct password (5201314).
• Get to Level 10-11 and go to the Yin Mountains. (Heart attack alert!)
• Get to Level 12 before you go to the egui. Best available gear advised.
• You'll teleport back to the guard. He'll tell you to chaodu his mum.
• Return to Fengdu and find a suspicious-looking guy. He'll sell you a boat in the yang realm.
• Go back to the flooded town and row a boat to the island.
• Salvage the mother's soul.
• Return to the Yin Mountains and make sure you are Level 14-15 before taking on the group of egui.
• Give the guard the vest, and get the iron axe. This step is extremely important! The axe is almost OP if you have it (as you'll find out), but if you don't, it's unlikely you'll beat the game,

City of Wrongful Deaths

• Ensure you're Level 18 first. The enemies should be easy as long as you follow these steps: Grind on a street until you level up, then proceed to the next street!
• After having upgraded all your gear and got to Level 26, the final boss will be easy.
• Read the ending and wait for the sequel!

Secret Medals

• Just kidding, I'm not gonna tell you.

***I make you grind slightly in the game to make sure you get to read all my descriptions, so please do read them! They're the best part of the game in my opinion!***

Okay, I have some bad news. A while ago, my external hard drive stopped storing the data it originally stored. (I don't want to go into the detials again.) That means all the games that used to be in the making, and have been floating around with no real progress (i.e. around 10 of those) have vanished into digital thin air, never to be seen again. (Fortunately, the only game in which I was more than halfway is Land of Towers. I'll have to remake that someday.)

With that aside, I'm announcing that I'm making games again! Here are the details:

1. Strictly solo. (Not hard)
2. I want it to be done in 12 hours. (I know that's a bit too optimistic, but I'll allow myself flexibility.) (Edit, four days later: Yeah, way too optimistic.)
3. I'm doing it in HTML5. It's faster to prototype in HTML5 and frankly, I think text-based games are better off with HTML5 now. (In retrospect, they're also better off with HTML4 and XHTML than Flash..)
4. Yeah, it will be a DOM-based HTML5 text-based RPG.

That's it. ^^

Alright, I know nobody ever reads my news posts, but I'll write a post-mortem here anyway. Consider it a personal rant...

The choice of screenshot... originally, I had never thought to use that screenshot; it was too difficult for me. I was quite surprised when Nimble and Sam decided to choose it... but yeah, two weeks is a lot of time, so why not? It's great to try something new anyway.

Unfortunately, I didn't finish it on time. All the art and stuff were finished on the last day. After I'd coded in everything, embedded all the XML files, fixed the seemingly infinite bugs... I had no time to incorporate those sprites. Not to mention that we had no volume control. (or game saving, but I coded that during the time we waited for Tom to reply to our PM requesting a rise in storage area...)

Not sleeping for 36 hours, which I did on the last day, was no vacation. It was more of a nightmare to me, and although I didn't feel that sleepy, many times I felt like stamping on the floor, and it would probably break. Darn. Nor did that change much in the next 24 hours following our publication: We kept unpublishing after discovering series of major bugs, and only like 24 hours after the deadline was our game eventually playable. It did NOT help that the make live option was automatically checked by default, and I kept unchecking it!

Still, I was rather satisfied with the game myself. I felt it was pretty cool, especially with the plot...

The plot is actually one I've been turning over my head over the past few months, wanting to turn it into a game. I figured it fit pretty well here, so I suggested it. It was Nimble, though, who eventually turned the storyline into the great plot it is now.

What really sucked was that only one player ever got to the climax of the plot! It was exciting: Cal fainted, lived the last moments of his life, and came back, then he embarked on his journey to I'm-not-going-to-tell-you-where-it-is. Nimble's music for these two acts was PURE AWESOMENESS. and yet only one person could enjoy it.

Reading egg's review, I did get a good idea of what went wrong. First and foremost, people weren't familiar with the mouse system for platformers, which I actually stole from Poptropica, a kids' game I was still playing not long ago. I realised that using the mouse to move was rather confusing unless you came from there. However, since people never complain about movement in Poptropica, what made us different? I think the answer is arrows. Poptropica has arrows to show the player where they're going; we didn't. I could have coded it in, but I didn't have time.

Another thing is conversations. Before the final day of the jam, I still thought we would have voice acting, which would be easy to implement, what with a sound system quite ready. I eventually had to code the conversation system quickly, which I did in three hours. Unfortunately, it was not quite perfect. Large conversation blocks went as fast as small ones, and I can see why players will get impatient, having got impatient myself waiting for the next block to come. I'll have to add skip button.

Apart from that, there's no quality toggle or volume control, which of course I'll have to fix.

As for the screen freezing, I'm fairly sure it's a lack of resources because of those noises, which I had to convert to Starling in real-time. I'll fix that by storing maybe fifty of those noises in a static Vector.<T> variable and using them each time. That should take care of the freezing.

After fixing all that - and them bugs - I believe our game will be ready to distribute to other sites, where they will - hopefully - fare better.

To Nimble, Miha, bluebolt and Sam, sorry for being such a slow programmer. I do still hope we can do better on other sites.

The Madness Day entry, which is going to take a while, may not be completed this year after all. I'll go back to Land of Towers. Some of the algorithms in it will be reused in the Madness entry anyway.

http://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1331574/2#bb spost24528575_post_text

This time, the only allusion I made is putting books in walls. This happened during the Qin Dynasty, when all unapproved literature was banned, so the people had to hide those books. After the fall of Qin, people rediscovered the books inside walls.

Xiwang is Chinese for 'hope' and Geming is Chinese for 'revolution'.

In other news, I've started using FlashDevelop.

Re-writing the code for Land of Towers can get boring, so, on a whim, I decided to look at Adobe's AS3 migration page. Then I thought, 'well, that wasn't so tough after all', so I tried to rewrite what little I had of my Madness Day game into AS3. It was hard, but fun!

The lack of underscores will take a lot of getting used to, as well as the whole display object thing. The one thing I found completely counter-intuitive was the event handling system. It looks really scary to the AS2 programmer. Still, that's the price to pay for a more powerful and centralised event handling system, I guess.

Update: I've realised that the display list system is beneficial to my Madness game, so I'll stick to AS3 for Madness. I'll continue to use AS2 for Land of Towers, though.

In response to a post in the Flash Forum, I've coded a simple script for animators who wish to use scrolling buttons.

Click here to downlaod it on NG!

Google Code page

My current projects are:

1. Madness day entry
I refuse to reveal too much about it. All I can say is that it involves portals!

2. Land of Towers
Having finally found a solution to one of the two biggest bugs, I'm getting some more motivation to finish it. However, I may still have to re-code it from scratch. :(

3. A World of Colours
An art game.

...and I've thought of a perfect idea for Madness Day next year. In fact, it's the first good idea I've ever thought of. The code will be tough, though.

Meanwhile, here's a list of the allusions and references in The Lake.
1) Fight between Liu and Zhao - allusion to the struggles between eunuchs and the Empress Dowager's relatives during the Han Dynasty.
2) Liu himself is a reference to Liu Jin.
3) Cheng Zili - Li Zicheng, Ming rebel
4) Prince of Qin is a title often given to princes other than the Heir Apparent in ancient China
5) Asparagus - a reference to chicken ribs. In Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Cao Cao chose the codeword 'chicken ribs'. Yang Xiu took it to mean that they'd retreat because chicken ribs were tasteless but it would be a shame to throw them away. The closest I could think of was asparagus.
6) I made up the amplification spell, but that was partly inspired by the phrase 'walls have ears', which is also a common phrase in Chinese.
7) Divine Travelling - a reference to Dai Zong in Water Margin. The destructive spells are partly inspired by Gongsun Sheng's.
8) Bai Yiju is a reference to Bai Juyi, who wrote a famous poem about grass.
9) There were actually weather dragons in late Chinese mythology. The dragons refusing to rain is a reference to a similar situation in The Journey to the West.
10) General Wu is a reference to Wu Sangui, who opened Shanhai Pass (one of the passes in the Great Wall) to let the Manchus in.
11) The snipe and clam metaphor is commonly used in Chinese.
12) Qu Yuan drowned himself in a river when Qin Shi Huang was about to conquer his home country Chu.

All in all, I was going to blend both Chinese and Western elements inside, but at the end, the Chines elements turned out to be much heavier. (By the way, while there's no the Grim Reaper in Chinese mythology, there were 'soul reapers' who reaped the souls of the dead to take them to the underworld.)

I've spent way too much time on Santa now and I really need to get studying. The sessional exams are next month, so obviously my activity on NG will be reduced to fishing out AP music to play in the background.

The bug in Santa's Pilgrimage will be fixed eventually. I think it's got something to do with negative fuel (caused by race condition) but I wouldn't bet on it.

I will continue to work on the RPG. Santa's Pilgrimage was really important to me because I found out the mistakes I make the most often. About 1/2 of the IMs I sent to Clatform during the making of this game are about bugs! I've also discovered that I've really screwed up Land of Towers and I may have to start it from scratch.

Happy New Year, everyone (which is probably nobody, since nobody ever comments on my posts)! Wish you a nice 2013.