#william kage

[mendelpalace]

William Kage - Rogueport (16-bit SNES Remix) [Super Mario RPG soundfont]

@titleknown @basilouija

[hamofjustice]

[hamofjustice]

[williamkage]

DevDiary#3: "Monster again... I'm afraid... I'm always afraid..."

When it came to enemy encounters, Earthbound did it best. Not only could you see (and potentially avoid) enemies, but if you were strong enough, you could auto-defeat them, without even entering battle!

SixEngine has those features -- and adds to them.

I made custom sprites for all enemies out of battle so that there are no random encounters. This gives the player greater control, and makes exploration a lot more fun. Enemies can move randomly, follow a script, or actually seek the player. Watch out!

Interestingly enough, FF6 did have enemies that were visible on the field -- they just weren’t used very often. You probably remember the dragons roaming around, but do you remember the rafter rats in the opera house, or the dancing flames in Thamasa?

This feature will be helpful for pacifists and power-levelers alike. It’s fun to be able to sneak past enemies, or re-spawn them for some quick EXP.

Next up: Bite-size backstories, from Bahamut to Branford!

http://www.sixengine.com/

[williamkage]

DevDiary#2: "Oops! Forgot I was wearing these clothes."

I’m no Relm Arrowny, but I’ve been known to tweak a pixel or two. Sometimes, all you need is a palette swap to freshen things up. Fortunately, I can go way beyond that, and easily make my own sprites!

Back in early 1993, a talented 27-year-old woman named Kazuko Shibuya started working on the graphics for Final Fantasy 6. By that point, she had much experience taking sketches from Yoshitaka Amano and pruning them down into admirably expressive sprites. Her adaptation also allowed a huge cast of characters to share a very limited number of palettes on the SNES.

SixEngine gives me more freedom. I can go back to Amano’s source artwork, and blend a wider range of colors into these sprites. But, you know, I can still skip over those bright white boots that Locke had in his concept art. I wanna make some exciting custom visuals, but still keep it very close to the look and feel that I grew up with.

For enemy sprites, there’s been a lot of new content recently, straight from the source. In 2014, Square Enix released a mobile game called Final Fantasy Record Keeper, which allows you to build a team of heroes from any Final Fantasy in the series, and then take that team through battles from each game -- all in the style of FF6.

Record Keeper has some great hero sprites as well, but the frames are limited to basic battle actions only. They do not have north- or south-facing animations, and they also lack most of the “expressions” that FF6 used (like surprise or sadness).

To see just how much of that expression was missing, I aligned one of the FFRK sheets with the frames from FF6. The art style is spot on, but I was only able to match up 11 of 43 frames. I experimented with plugging FFRK sprites into SixEngine for the Wutai Tech Demo, but I had to create quite a few new frames myself, from scratch.

Then, of course, there are custom maps!

Custom maps are the most time-consuming graphical component -- I want each map to feel as polished and interesting as possible. In an effort to limit spoilers, I can’t show too much of the landscapes that I’ve built, but I’ll continue to share glimpses along the way.

What I can tell you is that interaction with the environment is much more frequent in SixEngine than it was in FF6. One of my favorite interactions was jumping from building to building in Zozo, so keep an eye out for stuff like that.

Next up: Monsters on the map!

[williamkage]

DevDiary#1: “We stand on the brink of a major breakthrough!”

Let’s talk about SixEngine, the side-project I’ve been secretly picking at since mid-2013. It started out as just a proof of concept, to see how closely I could simulate some Final Fantasy VI mechanics in a web browser.

Since then, it’s grown into a very powerful retro game engine. In fact, lately I’ve spent much more time making my own graphics, music, and dialog, instead of writing lines of code. And that’s a good thing. As much as I enjoy coding, it feels amazing to finally start building the scenarios that I’ve dreamed up over the past three years.

In the beginning, the mission was simple: I wanted to pair up my new SNES music with new SNES gameplay and storytelling. However, I wanted it to be accessible to everyone, and I don’t think native SNES code (or a ROM hack) would be the easiest for people to consume. Instead, I decided to try a “low-tech website” approach, so that all kinds of modern devices could play. Thus, I set out to create some authentic SNES gameplay, from scratch, using only HTML and Javascript.

The first pieces of SixEngine only took me a few hours to code. The player could walk along a grid, collide with obstacles, and transition in and out of a fake battle screen. It even included music and sound effects.

I cooked up a very simple field map using 16x16 tiles. The goal was to allow movement across this grid, and then set boundaries at the edges of the walkable region.

Back then, the battle screen had no ATB, and all actions had to be triggered manually. However, you could use these actions to kill the enemies, and doing so would automatically return you to the field map.

Three years later, I have coded a field map, world map, menu system, combat system, inventory, party, npc scripts, special effects, event management, camera control... you name it!

Now it’s time to share some new content with you as I develop it. Stay tuned!

-WK

[dfatowel]

Casey interviews William Kage and talks about his amazing SNES music!

Casey interviews William Kage and talks about his amazing SNES music!

It’s very rare that I pay attention to the sidebar on my Facebook page, but for reason I noticed this classic Super Nintendo controller out of the corner of my eye and clicked on the link. It brought me to the page of William Kageand the amazing SNES music that he makes. For the duration of the day, I listened to the fantastic scores that he composed that were reminiscent of my favorite video…

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[emperorarcana96]

William Kage is a brilliant producer who creates originals using 16bit sound font. Por example: Chrono Trigger.