next »

[Gregg Williams]

I mean basically every unit is constructed out of X possible parts which are visually represented. As such every part has to also be fully animated in every animation the unit will have. This is why just a walking animation on a mech, with a few options comes out to 180 frames for a single direction.

I feel your pain. I'm currently at ~40,000 sprites for the character animations in my game.

ARGH!! Yeah.. hows that going anyways? I haven't seen any updates on it in a long time I don't think. (Pretty sure the blog is RSS subbed to)

[Christian Knudsen]

It's going great. I just decided to dev in the dark until I'm out of pre-alpha.

[Gregg Williams]

It's going great. I just decided to dev in the dark until I'm out of pre-alpha.

Nice any particular reasons for that?

[Christian Knudsen]

I talked about it a bit in my DevLog: http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=14419.msg935394#msg935394 (Don't want to hijack your thread!)

With regards to making sprites, I imagine it's even tougher when making pixel art like you've got in your game. I use Poser to generate the characters in my game and can automate a great deal of it. I'd have gone insane if I had to draw each sprite individually. But I guess there are ways to optimize that as well? Scaling and rotating pixel sprites and stuff?

[Gregg Williams]

I talked about it a bit in my DevLog: http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=14419.msg935394#msg935394 (Don't want to hijack your thread!)

With regards to making sprites, I imagine it's even tougher when making pixel art like you've got in your game. I use Poser to generate the characters in my game and can automate a great deal of it. I'd have gone insane if I had to draw each sprite individually. But I guess there are ways to optimize that as well? Scaling and rotating pixel sprites and stuff?

Its all done by hand, otherwise it wouldn't really be much in the spirit of pixel art

I suppose if we really wanted to try an optimize it, the best way would be to model everything in a 3D program, export it as images, and then pixel art over the exported frames. However, at that point we would probably just drop pixel art, and have made it with a 3D engine.

[Christian Knudsen]

Yeah, that makes sense. Though Project Zomboid did some interesting stuff with making 3D renderings look like pixel art. Real pixel art (like yours) still looks better though.

[Gregg Williams]

Yeah, that makes sense. Though Project Zomboid did some interesting stuff with making 3D renderings look like pixel art. Real pixel art (like yours) still looks better though.

Hehe cheers! I guess one thing that also helps to set it apart is that none of our art is upscaled. Its all 1:1 pixel at current, unlike what a lot of pixel art games do lately where they target a low resolution and upscale like crazy.

[Gregg Williams]

Light day, RSI is flaring up again it seems.. But I managed to finish all the Lua stuff, and super basic support for defining items and their graphic IDs. So I can finally start work on the new unit rendering code.

[Gregg Williams]

Hurray! Finished the new isometric unit renderer, and all the data junk to make it work.



That mech is composed of currently 9 items, out of a possible 13 on that frame.

[Fede3751]

I love this! *-*
Posting so I can get every update!

Keep it up, i like this so much!

[Gregg Williams]

I love this! *-*
Posting so I can get every update!

Keep it up, i like this so much!

Cheers

So did a bunch of work to prevent items from switching sides/hands and so forth when horizontally flipping a sprite. (Almost no one ever fixes that problem, but its always bugged me like crazy.) So you all get a gif. (Rocket launcher doesn't suddenly flip to the other side as would normally happen, and you see in most games like Ultima Online, etc)



Also yes, colors are off in the gif for some reason slightly

[Impmaster]

The movement on the mechs looks way too fast. They have no sense of weight. But slower and it would be annoying for gameplay... 

[Gregg Williams]

The movement on the mechs looks way too fast. They have no sense of weight. But slower and it would be annoying for gameplay... 

Thanks for the feedback. The gif is sped up a bit more than it should be as well. Exporting at the actual frame rate was going to result in around a 40mb gif apparently. (Or so said gif brewery) I probably should of just you tubed it, but YT quality is always so shitty. Of course gif messed with colors, speed, and players back different depending on browser. Can't win

[karlozalb]

I love this! *-*
Posting so I can get every update!

Keep it up, i like this so much!

Cheers

So did a bunch of work to prevent items from switching sides/hands and so forth when horizontally flipping a sprite. (Almost no one ever fixes that problem, but its always bugged me like crazy.) So you all get a gif. (Rocket launcher doesn't suddenly flip to the other side as would normally happen, and you see in most games like Ultima Online, etc)



Also yes, colors are off in the gif for some reason slightly

wow, this is looking fantastic

[Gregg Williams]

Re-did deployment unit rendering and logic flow to use the new unit renderer.

Reduced 7% cpu usage from std::string down to 1.5% by switching to a sprintf (yeah strings shouldn't be getting used at all really)

Implemented variable delay frame animation support.

Started tweaking the mech animation to be heavier and have less moonwalking. This is really a timing and art adjustment issue. Mech movement speed will be reduced to probably around 1/3rd of current, but the game will feature options to speed up/disable animations for those that don't like them as well.

Also setup a development wiki to document lots of this junk, and did some milestone planning. I'm shooting really to get the initial combat prototype done by the end of the year, but this has a lot of factors in play including more artwork and animation work.

[Matt Anderson]

Wow, beautiful, beautiful pixels. The world needs more tactics games -- following this one with baited breath. This looks like a faster, more light-hearted, more approachable version of the Front Mission games, which is very exciting.

Mind if I ask, how big is your team on this project?

[Gregg Williams]

Wow, beautiful, beautiful pixels. The world needs more tactics games -- following this one with baited breath. This looks like a faster, more light-hearted, more approachable version of the Front Mission games, which is very exciting.

Cheers, its interesting how people see different games reflected in ours, its certainly true that Front Mission has come up a few times. Can't say I mind, even if we're no RPG.

Mind if I ask, how big is your team on this project?

Retromite is just composed of myself and are dashing pixel maestro Kawe. Which I also suppose is why things take so long in ways.

I'm coding both the client, multi-player infrastructure/server, tools, and things like photoshop scripts to boot. Kawe is of course busy with art and animation. On top of that, both of us have gamedev contract jobs as well, to afford to live while making M.I.N.T since we're not making any other commercial games to pay the bills.

[Gregg Williams]

Continued tweaking mech walk animation.
Started mocking up the in-game hud design to pass on to Kawe for artification. Need to get a hud and smart cursor system in to progress on combat.

[nikolail]

Curious about gUI, are you using inhouse tools / libs ?

[Gregg Williams]

Curious about gUI, are you using inhouse tools / libs ?

I'll probably just end up coding it with straight opengl, along with proper art, and writing custom logic.. As much as I despise the idea