Happy Halloween! (October 31st, 2011)
Happy Halloween from the staff members of Project: Crusade! We hope you have a wonderful night because you'll be sure to receive a hell of a fright from tonight's lunar might! (Gosh, I really suck at rhyming, Plasmis29ml8) Anyways, enjoy your night, and don't forget to sleep tight!
The Development of a Community (October 25th, 2011)
Welcome back to our second podcast of Project: Crusade! This week, we'll be covering more about the wiki, itself. Before we begin with the list of mass updates, we should discuss about why we've decided to make a wiki. FIrst and foremost, this wiki isn't considered our "first" wiki. In factt, we've actually moved from an old wiki called Crusade Wiki. Despite of this fact, it was one of our best decisions yet. The old wiki had "some", if not many, problems. These problems relate to vandalism and spam which have been causing havoc on the wiki. Not only that, but we feel that the old wiki lack good structure, balance, organization, and content. Although the old wiki is very informative, we are sad and glad to move away from it because with the new wiki, we can easily forget about those problems and start anew.
Now that we've covered the reasons why we moved from the old wiki to this one, we will now describe some of the huge changes that are transcribed to this wiki.
Home Page
Finally, we actually have a "real" home page. Technically, we already did have one on the old wiki, but let's compare and contrast the two, shall we?
If you compare the one on the left and the one on the right, you can tell drastic changes have been made. For a starter, we've added structure on the new wiki as you can tell by the different dividers and containers of the home page. While the old one was very informative, it lacked structure and division. Everything was bunch up in a paragraph, while the new home page is divided into sections. Also, styles and design are applied to the new wiki home page as opposed to the old one. Although we usually tell ourselves that content is the most important aspect of any source, appearance is also a must; therefore, we've dedicated our time and skills to create this improvement. And, what do you know? We now have a live news feed!
News Feed
If you haven't checked out our forum already, we have a live feed on there as well! Similar to the forum one, this one is just about informative as the other one. The wiki news feed features up-to-date events from the wiki and the game project. The home page features a short description of a particular event and article. Once you decide to read more in-depth, you can click on "Read more", and the wiki will immediately take you to the specified date of the event. No more digging through the surface anymore!
New Wiki Page Format
As most of you can tell, each wiki page has been renovated and distributed section by section instead of just big blob of text. We even threw in a modified picture of a certain character or stage to spice the page up! Also, a basic information box is now available to display basic details of where certain things came from.
Achievement Badges
This is something new. While we were looking at some of the new features of wikia, we've stumble upon this great feature, achievement badges! You should know what they are, but for those people who don't, they're basically rewards awarded for accomplishing certain tasks. It's a nice, little nifty feature for promoting activeness and contributions on the wiki.
Conclusion
That's about it for the new updates of the wiki. Be sure to check in next week for more updates and information on Project: Crusade. Toodles!
A Little Game Announcement (October 15th, 2011)
This will probably be one of our first "podcast" of the wiki. In today's news, the Staff of Project: Crusade has confirmed a number of future updates which will be featured in the next demo update of Project: Crusade. Yes, you and the rest of the community have the privileges of knowing what's going to be released in the next exciting release! Before we break them down, we will like to say "thank you" for supporting us ever since the launch of this project, and we really appreciate your contributions to our community. Without you, we wouldn't have started this project, let alone thought of continuing its existence. Anyways, let's get down to business!
What characters are confirmed?
To start off, there are a quite a few things that we've confirmed for the next release; however, due to the lack of experience of coding in GameMaker, progress has slow down considerably. Since Team Phalcon disbanded, the fans of Project: Crusade decide to continue the works of the Smash fan game, Super Smash Bros. Crusade. As you know, Dettadeus is now the head coder of this project, and he will replace the once, infamous Falcon from Team Phalcon. Although progress slowed down, a few features have already been confirmed and added within the new modified game engine. First, let's talk about the confirmed characters.
[Place confirmed character animation here when finished! (Referring to the DK Profile animation)]
If you've read from our forum, you've noticed we have officially confirmed Donkey Kong as the next released character. So far, the sprites are still being worked on by a previous member of Team Phalcon, Falcon88r. If the sprites go smoothly as planned, then there shouldn't be any problems. However, at the moment, we do not have the sprites on us; therefore, a sneak peek of the sprites won't be covered here. So, let's move onto our next character:
Wait, what? Isn't Kirby already on the roster list? If you answer "yes", then congratulations, you're an official Smash fan! So, why is he even confirmed? Confirmation of a character isn't just about new characters. It's about change of character sprites as well! Now that you understand the concept of confirmation, let's compare Kirby's old sprite and Kirby's new sprite.
Notice the similarities and differences between the two sprites? The old sprite attempts to obtain a "brawlified" version of Kirby, while the new sprite maintains Kirby's true colors. Not only that, but originally, the old sprite contains about 15-18 frames, but we've modified the old sprite just for the purpose of comparison.
Why did we decide to change Kirby's sprites? You can say that the old sprites lack movement and quality, but the main purpose is to match Kirby with other characters. Ranging from cartoon to almost 2.5D, we need to change sprites that seem to be unfitting. Therefore, a little sprite change won't hurt. If you're curious as to who created this new sprite, his name is The 85 or Leonardo J from our wiki. We are grateful to have him on the spriting team!
What stages are confirmed?
Wow! We're getting new stages? Yes, you heard us. We're getting three new stages. May we announce our first stage:
Hey, look! It's everyone's favorite F-Zero stage, Big Blue. Big Blue is one of the biggest and longest stage we've ever implemented into our game engine, and guess what? The stage is already in the game, so get ready to fight on a fast, lightning speed track towards victory! The only reception is that it's still undergoing heavy development. We're trying to get the F-Zero racers to move smoothly on the bottom of the stage just like the one in Melee. With that said, Big Blue will be one of the most experimental stage in terms of implementation.
Looks like we're returning to the past and releasing a new stage called Gyromite. For those of you who don't know what Gyromite is, it is indeed a game released for the Nintendo Entertainment System. It is also largely influenced by R.O.B. which allows players to control with if they choose to. In this little historic game, the main platform stage for Gyromite composes of several platforms along with bundles of dynamite laying around the stage, but be careful of them, or else you'll wind up exploding yourself!
Our last confirmed stage is Ice Cap Zone from the Sonic series. At the moment, there hasn't been much details about the appearance of the stage, but you should expect to see it soon in our next update!
Other great features
Recently, Dettadeus and another team member, Felipe_9000, played around with the game engine. Of course, they stumble upon a great idea: revive the famous L-Cancelling technique. You can read more about on its own page, especially for those who are eager to learn more about this AT.
Conclusion
Thanks for reading our first podcast, and we'll be back with more new content within the next week, so don't miss out! Be sure to check our forum for more daily content, and please stay tuned for another exciting podcast!