I've been working on what I'm referring to as the Proto-Animation, which is the rough, sketch style, glorified stick-men, style. In this game, you'll have the ability to do a Combo Attack by mashing the attack button. So far it's up to 4 hits, which might be the end of that. I'm posting a rough snippet of it. It plays as;
The first hit is just your standard Sword Slash Attack. The second will be a Claw Swipe (because the main character is a cat.) Then another Sword Attack ending with a Spin Kick just for some martial artsy goodness.
Still is lots to do, so the next update will be sparse at best.
Animation is kicking my ass!! It takes so long to figure out the motion of an action. That said, I don't know how often I'll post for the next while as this is all I'm going to be doing for the next while. Once I have something more substantial, I'll post more. Until then, here's todays Run animation in all it's crude, glory.
Today has been spent working on animation work. So far it's just the rough armature rigging, where I sketch out the size and movement of the animation. In the example I'm posting, I've worked in a few variations the character can do in their Idle Pose. The tail moves up and down, sometimes will shake in a cane shape, and other times he may lick his paw. It's cute.
Tomorrow I'll probably start working on roughing out some more animations for the character. If all goes well, I should have a lot more done to show. Anyway, that's all for my report today.
I really don't expect anyone is out there reading/following my posts. I don't expect that. I just want to document my personal journey of building a video game. Maybe someday I'll create a message board to communicate. Otherwise, I just like updating a dinky little website on Neocities. Feels nostalgic.
I've decided to take a break from coding to start working on the artwork. I've come up with crude sketch of the main character named Fai'Ji (pronounced FAY JEE), based off of my former real life cat. He would be proud. I'll have to work more on the design and draw a better final version (never drew cats before).
Now just spent the rest of the day working on the design. I may try a few more costume designs yet.
Didn't really get much done today, since I woke up today with a back spasm that's been following me all day. I did sort of get the combo system in place, but it's not working as intended yet. I also changed around some variables, nothing much to report today.
As is the case with writing code, I ended up running into a problem with the Aerial, Jumping scripts. They've all been rebuilt now basically. After that I spent many hours getting collisions with the enemy object working. I couldn't for the life of me, figure out why it didn't want to behave the way I wanted it to. I think I might have finally figured it out, but I had to quit for the day.
Now with the problems out of the way, let's move on to the things I managed to impliment today. I've so far decided this game will be hack & slash type, platformer game, staring a ninja feline, at least that is my initial working concept for now. So that gave me ideas for some things to include in the game such as; a sword attack, which I believe I mentioned yesterday, so it was only right I added an air sword attack version. Then I got onto the idea of power-ups and special abilities. I spent some time drawing quick, crude, sprites for these items. Obvious one would be the basics; two life postions (one small and one full health), and an extra life (1up) item. Then moved on to the concept of having 3 ancient scrolls that you can collect throughout the game that grant upgrades to your attacks. First one is a simple damage multiplier, next is the ability to do a button mashing combo with up to 3 hits, and finally a dash attack, which also includes an aerial version. I was able to test out the dash attack today, which turned out pretty neat, so I'm looking forward to working on the rest.
Besides the scrolls, I've also decided on a system that gives you these magical talismans that give you access to special weapons. To prevent it from getting to overpowered, I think it will work like this; you collect the talisman, and then once activated, runs on a timer. When the timer is up the item is drained and in order to use it again, you will need to find another to replenish it. Of these items, there is; the Ninja Star, which allows you to of course throw projectiles. Then you have, The Shadow, which makes you invisible to enemies (they can't see or sense you and don't retaliate when attacked.) Thirdly, The Protector, which gives you invulnerability. With this you can run right through enemies and slash them up. Fourth, we have the Paws of Fury, which creates a ring of fire that encircles the player, dealing big damage to enemies.
I haven't coded these in yet though, just their variables. It may not sound like much, but overall it's been a productive day, (coding takes a lot of time). I have to plan out a list of things to tackle tomorrow and report back with the new things I've implimented.
Today went back over the physics and fixed a few things. Added in an "enemy" object to interact with. So far all it does is walk back and forth in a predetermined, timed loop. When placing it up on a platform however, I couldn't get it to not walk off the edge. I'll work on that later. But I did make sure it turned around when it ran into a wall. Also, it has physics and gravity now.
Added in CLSN objects, which are my way of creating custom collision boxes. For example; on a certain frame of an animation, a box will be created in front of the player during their attack animation. When this box collides with an enemy, it deals damage, then removes itself.
The player also now has new states besides just; jump/walk/idle. I've added in a "get hit" state which causes you to get knocked back when hit by an enemy. I'm working on adding a flashing invulnerability effect as well, such as, in old classic video games. The previously mentioned attack state has also been added.
As of right now, I'm strictly working on the coding side of things. I have placeholder, squared, sprites that I'm using. Currently, the game is using 64x64 tiles and a character sprite of 64x128. This all might change once I start with the actual artwork. I'm most certain of that.
Converted everything over to a state machine as I'm more familiar with that style. Now have basic platformer collision working. I had to spend a lot of time tweaking the aerial physics and jump codes. Spent too much time on that actually. Also had an issue getting stuck on the corner. Turns out I wasn't doing things in the correct order within the code, so it wasn't first checking collision then moving when it found one.
Today I started building the code for the game. My first real go at a platformer game.
Started building the main objects for; the Player and a Solid Block (for collision).
Implemented some basic movements, otherwise, not much progress. It's been a couple years since I've even written a single line of code. I spent most of today, trying to remember how.