Friday, September 28, 2012

Animation - It continues

Hey dudes. I made some more frames of animation for Centure. Found a really great program for it: Graphics Gale. It's a little unwieldy at first but it's worth learning because it has some really useful features. I love my paint.net but I'll be using this from now on for animation at least.

Here's some punching animations I made. If you want you can use 'em to play around with animation. Make a .gif, do whatever. I'll probably share a bunch of these by the time the game is done. Whenever that is. I need to edit these a tiny bit.


I'm planning to make a little game in the console (command line window for the uninitiated). But it involves doing all the crap XNA was doing for me. I'll put it up here if I manage to get it running. It really shouldn't be hard to make after I get everything set up. But this is programming so it could be terrible :P.

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Animation - It Begins

I have the beginnings of Centure's animation set up. Have a look at this video that explains where things are at the moment:


To give you an idea of what animating is like, here's what some of the frames look like:


I made 8 of these for the walking animation. That was a fun day. The game should be done in two days (lol).

Sunday, September 2, 2012

Your mom is a collision

Today I got rid of a few major errors in my collision detection system. I had a terrible one where collisions from the bottom refused to happen and another one that made the character bobble in and out of the platform slightly. Those are now gone. There are still a few that need to be worked out however.  Somehow changing my movement class started creating bugs in my previously sublime collision detection system. Most of them have required me to add a little room for error to fix... once I've found the cause.

I also worked on the camera for ages trying to emulate Cave Story's cool inertia effect. I think it was coded  pretty simply it's just that that game doesn't have to account for the player speeding up a lot so it didn't have the issues I had when trying to code it. So I made my own version of things that I'm pretty happy with. Maybe I'll change it later.

I also changed the size of the window on start up. We now have an interesting 1200x675 which is quite sexy but not nearly as sexy as full screen mode. The scale of Centure was a bit big for the standard 800x450 so I bumped up the screen size 1.5 times while keeping everything else the same.

I don't think I should create the first level until I have all the collision stuff fixed. Urgh.

Here's a screenshot of the platforms I've been messing around with to test out movement.


Lol I've just realised this entire blog is me talking about collision detection and not making a game haha! Well my original game was a complete mess so I'm glad I started again and now I'm ridiculously close to being done with collision detection that works on slopes! It's waaay better than what I started with!

Here's a new To-do list so I can have fun crossing things off:


  • Fix up that gravity (90% done)
  • Fix collision issues
  • Cut down on collision checking using some variation of intercepting rectangles
  • Make sure collisions work in a way that the character can change size at any time
  • Entering polygons via CSV (probably)
  • Work out an animation class 
  • Get all of Centure's animations back (70% done)
  • Make a running animation for centure
  • Figure out how Centure's tranformation will work in different contexts
  • Create a better way to initialise levels
  • Draw some clouds (Yeah! Clouds!)
  • Create more platforms for the first level
  • Design the background art for the first level
  • Create animated and non-colliding objects
  • Rework the camera class
  • Make CenturePoly symmetrical since rare cases will cause collision issues
  • Think of more stuff for this list