I’ve got the beginnings of a mini HUD that I’ll use to track which weapon the player is carrying, health, number of health-drinks carried, and any other inventory items (keys, for example).
I also got the mind blast and whip weapons working. In the end, the whip will stun its enemies to make up for the fact that it’s such a slow weapon, but since the japanese level enemies have no need for stun behaviors (since the whip won’t be on that level) i’m leaving it as just a generic ranged weapon for now. I’ll start working on another ranged weapon, probably the molotov, and make sure that works, and then finish getting some of the more unique enemy behaviors down.
I ended up going back to the enemies with scrolling text like I had on deployment, as far as animations go. The poser thing was a neat idea, but just not a time-efficient way of doing things.
So, next up is to work on player health, which currently gos down every time he’s hit by the enemy, but isn’t really tracked anywhere, and doesn’t let him die at all. I need to make an appropriate-looking health bar for the HUD, program in the behavior for the pitchfork, make some health-potion-y things, and then I can start working on the first level in earnest. I’m pretty pleased by the way it’s coming together.
September 2012
Whip it.
Whip it good.
Tired. Spent the past several days working on weapons. Whip ended up kicking my ass. Finally got it satisfactory. Go ahead and try. It doesn’t do any damage, but you should be able to click and make it happen. Only works if you’re facing in the same direction as the mouse cursor, because walking and looking backwards looks awkward.
So yeah. Whip. Tired. Good for now. Do more later.
Choosy moms choose .gif
Haven’t made much progress on the game these past few days- codewise, that is. I changed the post-damage routine so that the guy blinks a couple times instead of turning translucent. I was thinking about it, and I think I like the idea of making his transparency gradually increase as his health decreases, to fit in with the dream theme.
The majority of my time has been spent trying to engineer some animations for enemies. I finally decided on using one of the generic mannequin frameworks in Poser, applying some animations, and then rendering it at a tiny resolution and using those. I’ll just color each one differently to represent different enemies. The biggest issue has been trying to find animations. I’d’ve thought that sword animations would be all over the internet, but there are surprisingly few. I finally found a page where Carnegie Mellon has uploaded a huge repository of motion capture information, and I sifted through those and some Civilization 2 animations to find what I needed. I’m not sure what I’ll do for the bosses; I might have to just work at getting better at animating in poser, but then I don’t want to waste too much time on that, since these animations are really going to be nothing more than placeholders anyways.
I’m wondering if I had the Kinect for Xbox if I could save mo-cap information and apply it. It looks like that’s what some of the other people are doing. Don’t think it’s worth going out and getting one, though. I’ll just play around in Poser for a while longer, and put off working on the Player weapons.
Where’s Buckaroo Bonzai when you need him?
I swapped out the caveman sprite with a cheesy ninja sprite I found online, just as a placeholder. I completely modular-ized the enemy attack system, so all I have to do when I add a new enemy to the screen is give it a name. Based off of the name (Thug, Knifethug, Deckhand, etc) it changes all the applicable variables (range, damage, speed, fernkampf, etc). It took me a while to get the damage-dealing system down, and I’m still not 100% sure I like how the character turns translucent for the few seconds after each hit. It’s supposed to signify that he’s invulnerable to another hit, but most games make the character flash or something. I’m having a hard time coming up with a blinking routine, and I figured that the translucent thing would be more appropriate to a dream theme anyways. I dunno, maybe it’ll grow on me.
I spent the past 11 hours straight working on coding, and the progress I made today was incredible. Next I need to work on weapons for the player, and after that I suppose I’ll start programming in all the behaviors for the rest of the enemies. Thanks to the modules I created, it’ll be pretty easy. The only stuff that’ll require anything special will be minibosses and bosses. Though really, I’m looking forward to that quite a bit- those should be a lot of fun. I just need some sprites for them!
notes on final boss: Beast From The Other Dimension
Stage 1: Enemy flies, bobbing in place for 2 seconds (use a sine wave for natural movement). After 2 seconds, swoops to player’s position for attack. 1 out of x chance to start a ceiling crawl, where x starts at 4 and decreases by 1 for each swoop. During a ceiling crawl, Beast unfolds wings and dislodges chunks of ceiling to throw at player. Player must shoot at wings.
Stage 2: With wings destroyed, Beast gallops across floor at player. Player must use Mind shield at the appropriate time or get thrown back against wall by Beast. After each gallop, 1 out of x chance for another gallop instead of a leap (where x starts at 4 and decreases by 1 for each leap). Beast leaps to player’s position and commences a flurry of scything attacks with arms. Beast is completely invulnerable except for the couple seconds after being blocked by Mind shield.
Stage 3: Abdomen sprouts tentacles and claws. Large tentacle fires energy beam at ceiling to knock down rubble on to player. After 3-6 shots, tentacle curls into an ‘S’ shape for 2 seconds and shoots at player. Beast is completely invulnerable to attack.
After 2 shots at player, Ending sequence begins with guards and Emily.