So, for those of you who have seen my old profile logo (It has changed), you might have wondered, "What is TAO: Unleashed?" Well, this is the answer. The most epic game that might ever hit the TI world. Okay, with more humility, and a more probable outcome, TAO is a game based around the concept of TAO. Confused? Just google TAO and look at the images. You'll see a weird little circle with two halves. One black, the other white. Go ahead and google it now, I'll wait.

Enjoyed the fancy picks? Excellent! Now that is TAO, what is "unleashed"? Well for that, we get to the story. The game is about two characters. There names are Raito and Kurai. Raito means light, Kurai means dark. That is why it is tao. You have both characters in there, that are the direct opposite of each others. Raito is a prince who is destined to be king after his father, the previous king, died.

So, there has to be a way to decide who the next king will be. There is a tournament held every year to decide who the strongest fighter is. This year, the strongest fighter will be crowned king. Everyone thinks that Raito is most certainly going to win. Okay, so this is where you actually get to start playing as Raito. You have to fight in the tournament against many different people. Everyone watches Raito's match, but none of the others. Raito has one more fight left, and along comes a very week looking guy called Kurai. The crowd assumes Raito is going to win, as Kurai has barely any HP left at all. When suddenly, bam! Kurai transforms into the beast sealed within him. He attacks Raito with a menacing blast, that almost kills Raito! Raito transforms too, and they attack each other at the same time! The fight is over? Who won? No one will ever know.

So, that's the unleashed part of it, as you can imagine. Oh, and there's another main character, who is the sage for the king. After the king died, he basically kept the kingdom from falling apart. He is much too old to be in the fight, though, so he wants Raito to win. I have no idea when this massive game might be finished. Just know that I have plenty of other things to do, so it might take time. But I seriously want to get this project done! Also, know, that what I put above is not everything that is in the game. There is much much more.

So, tell me what you think!

Sounds like a great concept! Haveeyou done any work on this yet? Are there any screenies (please be screenies!)? How about the gameplay aspect, sounds like an interesting game to code!

Sounds like a very well-thought-out concept to me, indeed. I'm also hoping there are some screenshots to stare at. That all sounds like intro stuff; what's the actual gameplay portion of it?

I should get screenshots when I finish the battle engine, but it heavily uses another part of the game.

Well, gameplay is a big secret.

Can you at least give us a hint about the genre? I assume action-adventure? Or could it be like a fighting game or something? I wonder. How much is written so far, though?

I'm in the planning and drawing stages. I should get the battle engine up in a few weeks or so. Depends on my schedule.

As for the genre. Well, it contains battles like paper-mario did. It's hard to describe. Okay, so it's kinda action adventure. You have "missions" that you have to do, battles that you must complete, and there might be a puzzle. It depends on how well a system that I'm testing works.

Excellent, then it sounds like a bit of creative thinking off of the standard action-adventure structure; I like when people try to break out of the standard genre formats, so I definitely look forward to seeing where this goes. Will you be trying to develop a complex story to drive the gameplay, or more using the gameplay to drive the story (and make the story itself less complex)?

Sounds excellent

Quick question(s?): Will this be a turn based battle?
Do you have any of this written out yet? Concept art?
What language will this be in? Ti-Basic with libs? Axe? Some computer language?

Okay, turn based battle, but that's only the battle engine itself. It's more or less an RPG game, with battles in it.

Yes, some of it is written out, but it will be partially re-written. There is concept art, provided by a few people. (I'm not gonna post them, because I can't remember all of them, and don't wanna go luck them up. I think MagicBanana9000 did the stage.)

The language is probably going to be AXE, but if my ASM skillz get reacquired, then I'll do it in ASM.

As for concept art... Well, if you insist.

Wow, that looks great! The picture packs so much detail into 96x64 pixels.

The way it sounded in your first post, it seemed like it would only be a battle engine. And if that picture is the battle part, what would the RPG part look like?

My question exactly. I kept noticing new things about that concept screenie, which is always a very good thing. The HP bars in particular are excellently understated in my opinion. And *look them up, not luck them up.

Update cross posted from omnimaga:

Oh hello there, faithful reader.  I know you wrote that script to be immediately notified of any progress on this.  Well, I've been busy, but I finally got multipage apps working, and it's pretty smooth sailing from there (yeah... right).  So, in honor of two pages, and the tcall that I'm using to do it, I've written an app and stuff with like, 2 pages.  Be sure to tell me if it like, jumps out of your calculator, and like, oh I don't know, like eats you or, like, something.  So, do you like?


How do I attach stuff here? Here's the file I was going to post:
TAO.8xk

That works well enough. You could also use other file-hosting services or upload to the /beta/ folder in the archives. At any rate, congrats on the progress. Does this give you any idea of your overall timeline, or do you want to leave it loose for now? What's next?

Still no set date or timeline. I have a pretty good idea of what needs to be done, the time to do it is the problem. Let's see, next is to start working on working out where everything is stored in ram/flash.

Quick question, can I use all of $8000-$843E.

I know I'll at least have to bcall 5014 to clean up $839F, but I don't know what else. (Note that I'm still considering just swapping an entire ram page)

Sounds good; that's excellent to have at least tentatively worked out before you get seriously fdar into the code. Unfortunately, I can more or less guarantee this will change as you being the actual coding, but it's nice to at least think about.

Is bcall $5014 the same as _FillAppBasePage? What's with everyone referring to opcodes and bcalls by addresses and hex equivalents instead of names and mnemonics?

I guess they're easier to look up. *shrugs* and no, that would be ArcChk or CheckFreeArchive or whatever name or mnemonic it is. It replaces 4 bytes at $839F for the free archive space. And I'm thankful for the vote of confidence.

I think it is because some people are learning to program in "HEX".

I think you're exactly right about that. You need to call FilleAppBasePage after you use that space as well.

I can't find that bcall on WikiTI.

Penguin77's post here on Cemetech about Geometry Wars reveals it's actually bcall(_fillBasePageTable), which is indeed on WikiTI as bcall($5011).