While in the early years of high school, I was interesting in making an RPG in the squaresoft style, which I called "New Chaos". I had a lot of the story planned out, but never really ended up making the game. I did, however, make some interesting editors for the game, and most of an engine. I stopped working on it about mid 1999.
The main component of the graphics engine was a 3D diagonal perspective tile map, inspired mainly by Super Mario RPG. The map was made up of diamond-shaped tiles, arranged on a grid, forming an isometric view of a 3D surface made out of boxes and ramps. All of the blitting was written at the assembly level (and was quite efficient), and the map editor itself was point-and-click. I was actually quite proud of my program's ability to figure out exactly which tile the mouse was on.
I also made an editor for animated sprites. It was basically a simple paint program with some animation features. I actually adapted it to be used for the VERGE RPG engine (wikipedia), where it was known as the V2 CHR Editor. It was very functional, and was well used at the time. It could work on sprites of arbitrary size and the frame order and timing of the animation was completely customizable. You could preview the animation as you were working on an individual frame as well (the updates were immediate).
I was once quite active in the VERGE community; I made a small demo with the VERGE engine called "Vergespiracy". Its plot centred around the nonexistance of VERGE 2, which has long since been released (VERGE 3 has been around for quite some time).
Also here is a MIDI file of music that was intended to be used in New Chaos.
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V2 CHR Editor 1.5 (DOS, WATCOM C) | 2000-8-27, ZIP File 171kB |
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V2 CHR Editor 1.5 (DOS, DJGPP) | 2000-5-21, ZIP File 219kB |
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Vergespiracy (DOS, VERGE) | 1999-6-24, ZIP File 541kB |
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Glow (MIDI) | 1997-11-2, MID File 4kB |
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