The basic run of the mill dudes. I realized most of the other bad guys I'd been hammering out are so complicated they would never work for early levels, where the player isn't yet accustomed to the controls- need to ramp up the difficulty with an interest curve.
I'm having great fun coming up with the more interesting enemies though. When you factor in time rewinding into game design, it opens up whole new windows. For example, one guy I'm working on is completely "unfair" in a conventional game- shooting lightning bolts that are impossible to predict where they are going to hit and kill you. *But*, you can rewind and know where will be a safe spot to stand to avoid it.
hmm forgot to motion blur that sword swipe, better get back to work
Actually I've watched a lot of videos of speedrunners to do some research on it all, its very much alike. But it opens up a whole can of design space on how you interact with it- like with enemies that exist outside of time, or only when in reverse, or that can travel time themselves as part of their attack. So if you put it on say a Mario game, it would be like cheating, but when you make a game balanced around it, its a whole new way to think
Yeah I shoulda split those sprites into a few more chunks- the rib cage and head are actually one piece and the rest are nodes branching off from it (I just cut the head bob afterwards). But I'm learning it as I go
"Skeletoning" has a good ring to it! Better than "Generic Kinematics Application" at any rate. Its just something I threw together ad-hoc as a tool for working on it, but I filmed myself messing around in it real quicklike if you're interested in how it works;
Is it intentional for the player sprite to be in the ground? The black blobby guy? Or you going to change it to something as cool as these enemies sometime?
I decided after trying a few shakes at player spriting that I would save the best for last, since I'm getting way better each day. So the most important one should be far down the line
But who knows, maybe the player will have a sword sticking out of his forehead Comment edited by Pixelthief on 7/9/2011
That is a really interesting animation program you built. Does it allow you to develop animations directly into it, or is it strictly a save one image at a time kind of deal?
I use after effects to do most of my animations, but kinematics is something it lacks. There is a plugin developed by some french guy which is cute, but it's extremely bulky to use and only supports 2 and 3 bone structures. The other thing that ticks me off about it is that it forces you to use a bilinear interpolation, which is fine for images that need it, but if I'm working with a sprite that only needs a few colors, it throws a bunch of other random unnecessary colors into the mix. But if you added a key-framing/tweening system to your application that can export each frame into an image sequence, it'd probably be one of the best pieces of animation software I've ever come across.
Hrmm yeah I built it in a single sitting because kinematics/nodal skeletons for small sprites is something I simply couldn't find in a program, so I imagine it fills a niche that would actually be quite useful, and if this was polished up it could be marketed. But then again, that would take a fair bit of time and effort- I know exactly how I would accomplish stuff like direct animation editting and tweening, but it would force a delay in my work on the project, so I'm putting it off at least. What you can't see in that video is that this program leaks about 0.3 MB of memory per second, lol, and you see the GUI I cobbled together without even trying.
So who knows, maybe I'll hone it some day, but I'd rather get the game done first.
Oh of course I didn't mean to imply to drop what you're doing and start working on it, you do fine work, who am I to question your judgment when it comes to programming?
The game is looking fantastic, albeit in this stage it seems remarkably confusing, but I'm sure as you progress it'll become quite clear.
Oh no don't get me wrong- I was actually debating when I made this whether I should polish it up and release it, or work on my project first. It was a real consideration. But I think it would take too long to make that tool into something presentable, and I've got a lot on my plate already
But yeah I'd hope this looks confusing, since the test level I'm using for debugging is like a virtual Noah's Ark- 2+ of every single type of object in my engine ^____^ It gets so cluttered that I realized I was getting killed by monsters nonstop when I was trying to test out the collision boxes on that skeleton guy yesterday and had to clear it out.
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