2pm on saturday, today is problem

When the sprite flips, the layers are also flipped around so that the arms and legs stay on the correct side of the sprite. At this point I need to decide whether I want to:
A) break the color palette I've been sticking with and darken back facing limbs programmatically, or
B) flip the joints targeted by keyframes instead of flipping the layer order

B could potentially get more complicated and error prone, but it would allow a really simple way to make moving limbs more distinct. Probably going to go with A, since it makes item attachments much simpler. Also allows me to have asymmetrical characters.

I feel like experimenting with a livestream! Anyone who has questions about the animation system, that might be a perfect time to ask them. I've got a couple pretty major changes to make to that code, and I'll be starting on the editor, so I'll be able to really pull it apart and show how stuff works. 2pm probably?

haha yeah, that's exactly what I was going for. I think there are a couple things going on that make it look strange right now: he is leaning back a little too much, and the little chest detail makes it hard to make out the silhouettes of his hands.



Here's a build that fixes both of those things. I might not do much more to the animations until I write an animation editor, editing keyframes with vim is for the birds

https://www.dropbox.com/s/fuhcyju5jqdn56x/cavex_test5.zip?dl=0

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/66774144/cavex_test4.zip

new things in this build:
-debug menu
-"hitpoints"
-better camera?

productive morning 

Lots of structure planning happened this weekend. Mostly focused on entity-entity interactions, and on making sure it'll be relatively painless to add all the behaviors I want later. Today, there's a new test build with some pretty fun visualisation stuff enabled.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/v17svb0bya3txqn/cavex_test3.zip?dl=0

The thick yellow lines show ground interaction, and the teal rectangles show overlap with the little crab robots.

You'll notice a tiny red line at the top left of the screen! This is a little visualisation of the budget for each frame. If the line is touching the right side of the window, the frame budget has been blown and things will run slowly. I might leave this one in for future test builds, until I'm satisfied that it's performing well on everyone's systems. If the red line reaches halfway or farther across your screen, tell me about your computer!

it's this in 2D. The animation so far consists of 12 keyframes. The arms in the walk animation have their own set of keyframes so that I can swap them out for other animations eventually.

Try this one:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/66774144/release2.zip

Animation is in the game properly now. Might clean up the interface later, but for now I like the results.
might be nice to write some sort of animation tool so that I don't have to type all the keyframes in by hand next time

Anyone want to try it out in its current form? not a lot to do, but I'd like to hear what you think of the player and camera movement https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/66774144/cavex.zip

Almost forgot: arrow keys to move and jump, d to dash, esc to quit

mixing two animations!

I had no idea that that sprite would be so charming
Maybe I'll add it back in as a playable easter egg character. mr. D. Bugman 

Well, I went ahead and fixed up the skeleton sprite thing

I'm hardcore like that

Spent the better part of the day putting in skeleton style sprites, but I really don't like the way the rotation looks at this resolution. Also, his shoulder seems to... wander. Not sure I want to spend the time to track that one down right now.


So I went ahead and started animating the old fashioned way:


Any comments on the sprites so far? I've left the arm off right now in case I want to animate it independently.

I use licecap. It's pretty easy, but kind of records in low framerates.

Looks great so far. I use GifCam for recording gifs. It works great and it allows some basic editing.

Thanks for the tips! I used fraps and virtualdub for the op, hopefully recording directly to gif will make it easier to capture a couple seconds of stuff here and there.

Love the player, hope they stay like that!

The player is just a test image for now, while I figure out what set of movements I want to make animations for. For instance, in the op the player turns pink and slows down for a few frames when landing on the ground. I've taken that out for now, but it might go back in for landing from long falls. For now though, I made a turnaround of the character:

Got a bit of the ol' twitchy hands

Do you use an 8x8 sub-tileset? Looks good so far!

yeah! I tried a couple other styles before settling on this. I like how easy it is to vary up the detail on the platforms.

Making a pretty neat sci-fi thing with a little bubble helmet man. It's platformy! It's Pixellated! I have no idea what to call it yet, but I do know that I want to make a sidescrolling dungeon crawler. IN SPACE



Download the latest test build here!

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/66774144/cavex_test6.zip

Changes:

• Big level format changes
• Beginnings of random level generation
• Start of a level editor. navigate with vi keys. not super functional yet
• Moving skeleton sprites look a lot more stable
• Tons of internal changes, not a lot to see right now

Known bugs:

• tile grid is extremely janky, i blame fmod

Arrow keys to move and jump, d to dash, esc to quit.

New things this version:

That little red line at the top left is a performance visualisation. If it reaches all the way across your screen, please tell me what computer you're playing on!

~~~ rip rainbow square man ~~~

The game is pretty fun so far.  One thing I would suggest is to shorten the time between dying and restarting.  The game is difficult, and having to wait for the player to get knocked out of the room and then walk back in is frustrating.

That was actually a deliberate thing, because I found people were getting too angry at it with short restarts. Probably because of the mace. It's also much easier to hit things when moving cautiously.

Thanks for the feedback guys! My next project will hopefully be smoother

Greetans, TIGers! I am recently very happy because I MADE A GAME god that took long enough.



 

In all seriousness, it's a platformer with a physics-based attack, randomly generated levels, and an AI director. It also contains a complete mockery of a score page. I made it to see if I could get past the complete lack of entry level programming jobs around here through sheer force of will. The jury is out on that, but I had fun.

When working on my first pyweek entry, I decided to save time with the physics engine by calculating the collisions with level geometry using the same data that was used to get neighboring tiles for selecting the correct graphic off the sprite sheet.

Good IN THEORY, but in practice it had two problems that caused three unique and hilarious bugs:

1) You would regularly fall into the floor and get trapped in a 32x32 box until the program quit.
2) Occasionally, while falling against a wall, you would clip into the wall at near infinite velocity.
3) You only collide with blocks that you hit directly from a face. No corner collision for you!

The third one is actually still in the finished product, since the tile adjacency only stores the neighbors in four directions, so if you approach a tile from a diagonal, it can't see it at all.

mmkay. I'll send you the version from directly after my post, so there's some continuity to the madness.

seriously? go ahead. I have so much going on right now. My turn managed to come up in the middle of midterms and such, so I haven't really been able to do it justice.

GO GO GO GO GO GREEN FLAG WE'RE ON THE HOME STRETCH NOW RUN