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[Ishi]

Yeah that's the sort of thing I'll try for the X position, it can pan across based on where it knows Trixie'll be by the end of the anim.

The camera Y position will probably be based off the position of the current ledge rather than Trixie's exact Y position - similar to

, and the original Treasure Treasure. So once Trixie grabs a ledge the camera should probably treat just her as being on that ledge.

[PsySal]

The hair bobbing while Trixie climbs the ladder has me all AWWWWWWWWW

Other great details are the swaying grass, not enough swaying grass in pixel art games.

This is going to be sweet! Keep it up...

[Franklin's Ghost]

WOW, the game is looking amazing. Loving the new video and all the different animations. Agree about the speeding up though.

Can't wait to play this game. Looking like the best of old school platformers.

[Zack Bell]

So smooth...

[baconman]

Really, I think the people crying "speedup" are just being impatient, and that doing that too much would spoil all of the artistic detail you've put into the game. Being more "adventure-paced" than "action-paced" could help it, and it looks to me like the climbing speeds - especially the downward one - are quick enough to be responsive and not so fast that they're hard to control.

It's a good, fine balance you've struck, and I think once more hazards are put into play, that'll show better than it does here.

[Ishi]

Really, I think the people crying "speedup" are just being impatient, and that doing that too much would spoil all of the artistic detail you've put into the game. Being more "adventure-paced" than "action-paced" could help it, and it looks to me like the climbing speeds - especially the downward one - are quick enough to be responsive and not so fast that they're hard to control.

It's a good, fine balance you've struck, and I think once more hazards are put into play, that'll show better than it does here.

Well I'm being cautious and not increasing anim speeds and stuff too dramatically. I do want the game to have that adventure feeling you mentioned, but at the same time Trixie is meant to be quick and agile. I've made some tweaks and am quite happy with them at the moment, but after playing the new version for a while I tried out an old version and there isn't really a massive difference.

Thanks all for the comments.

Update

I also revisited the code for deciding which state she switches to when jumping into a wall - hit wall (for a wall jump), stumble on ledge, grab corner of ledge, etc. It's much more consistent and predictable now. Before I had some weird X velocity, Y velocity etc requirements so you wouldn't be sure how she'd react when hitting the wall.

Today I decided to take a break from player stuff. I finished off my pixel font, and wrote a font system. It has proper kerning for the first time ever, i.e. the X distance between each character is based on the how the character shapes actually fit together, rather than being based just on the overall width of the left character.



This is the actual font graphic. (Quoted for visibility as it's a png with transparency).

The usual ASCII layout. The first frame marks where the midline and baseline are, which are just used to determine the Y position of the characters when drawing (so the characters themselves don't have to be centred in their frames in order for the code to be able to centre them around a specific point).

The dark blue bits throughout the font are there to influence the kerning. For example, the extra bit added to the j stops the character before it from kerning too tightly. I also used it on the numerals to make them behave as fixed-width characters; so if I'm displaying a timer or something the characters won't shift around as numbers of different widths are displayed. The dark blue is removed before rendering.

The second set of frames is the second layer of the font, for borders/shadows. The second layer of all characters is rendered first, and the first layer rendered over the top of that. So the second layer all merges together quite nicely to make the font look chunky.

[delete me]

The Archer is the holy grail of devlogs.

The Archer and Trixie Treasure are the two games im most looking forward to.

[Ishi]

You honour me sir! Good to hear. I'll do my best to make the game worth looking forward to.

Mini Update

It's the end of the day so I may as well post this. I've been mulling the plot over for about a week, and it took shape a little in my head. I've just sat and scribbled a load of stuff out and suddenly have loads more ideas. So I now have a first-pass plot / game flow scribbling finished.



Don't want anyone to read it of course (though you may struggle with my handwriting even if it was full-size and not blurred).

[Ishi]

Update

Added line wrapping and horizontal alignment to the font system.



Spent way too long writing that tiny bit of text. Writing a whole game's worth of dialogue will be an interesting task.

[rek]

Update

Added line wrapping and horizontal alignment to the font system.



Spent way too long writing that tiny bit of text. Writing a whole game's worth of dialogue will be an interesting task.

I suggest modifying your apostrophes, as they're making the kerning look tighter than it ought to be. You can do this by making them true apostrophes, rather than foot/prime marks: more like ┓and less like |.

[Ishi]

Update

- Worked on improving the readability of the font a bit:



I quite like the minimal apostrophes, so I didn't change their shape, just altered their kerning. Cheers for the input rek!

- Added vertical alignment to the font system.

- I wrote the font rendering differently to how I've done previous similar systems. I calculate the positions of each character as a totally separate step to the rendering. This basically involves filling an array (that I call the render buffer) with X and Y positions (it also stores the width of each character which is useful for horizontal alignment).

This made it easier to add line-wrapping. Instead of trying to calculate it as I go through the initial string, I just fill the render buffer as if the text was on a single line. Then afterwards I go through it, and if the text is longer than the line width, I shift all of the positions in the render buffer down and to the left.

Yesterday I thought of another advantage of this render buffer system, which I've just implemented tonight. Between generating the buffer and rendering the text, I can now optionally pass the render buffer to a seperate class (that inherits from cFontRenderModifier) that can modify it however it wants.

As an example, I wrote a cFontPrintOutModifier class that has a timer and limits which characters are drawn, so they appear in sequence (like in any standard text box). Sure, this could be done by shortening the string that's passed into the Render function in the first place. But, because the render buffer is created for the entire string, it neatly sidesteps the issue of the first half of a long word appearing at the end of a line, and then shifting down to the next line when it becomes too long for the first line. (I added a visibility flag for each character to the render buffer for this).

Might add colour and stuff to the render buffer so I can do more interesting effects in the future, if I want.

- Did a quick first pass of a cutscene UI mockup thingy. The background image isn't particularly suited to this mockup, too busy at the bottom. It's a bit out-of-style now too. Also the font here is older than the one shown above.



But, I like the idea of sticking to simple speech bubbles or something.

[J. R. Hill]

Yeah, dialog-ing can be quite the task.  Text alignment seems to be working awesomely though.

[PsySal]

Font is quite readable to me, kudos on making a custom font for this! Totally deserves it...

[Ishi]

Update

Didn't want to go to bed, but didn't want to play more Mario or Zelda - so, drawing!



I love the contrast you can get in the morning between light colour from east- and west-facing windows. So tried to convey that here.

A bit of concept for the opening cutscene. I've got a three day weekend, so I might try and plan the flow of the game a bit more and start some rough storyboards. Depends what I feel like doing at the time though really. Other options are to start a system for the cutscenes, finish some ladder anim bits, work on upgrade item 3, or sort out some background layer stuff for in-game.

[ANtY]

Dsn't look like Trixie on the last artwork 

[Ishi]

Well, she has only just got up. Glasses, messy hair, etc. Looks like her to me. Like I mentioned before though, my drawing style is massively inconsistent so that probably doesn't help.

[Relix]

She has sharp jaw in the new pic, but not in the others.

[Ishi]

Hmm, yeah. It was only a rough sketch, so I'm not too worried. For any art that goes in the final game I'll have time to look at it with fresh eyes and tweak stuff. All this stuff is a bit of a learning curve as I've never produced this sort of art for an actual project before.

Didn't get much done yesterday thanks to various things (Zelda included). Today: gonna make a start on the collapsing flower platforms as it'd be nice to get some proper gameplay in there.

[happymonster]

Are you going to have enemies who have all these animations as well? Or will they be somewhat similar in behaviour (for your own sanity!)

[Ishi]

Probably not gonna have any enemies, it's not a combat-focused game. Even for stuff like jumping on enemies' heads you need the pure control of something like Mario. I'm planning more environmental hazards, and just general exploration. Not dissimilar to Knytt.

Would like to do some wildlife though. Lots of interesting animated plants, and maybe some small animals and stuff. The player won't want to explore if the environment feels lifeless.