Geeze, is it day 3 of Swamp Week already!? So exciting! So let’s talk more about enemies! How are they going to work? What are we doing here?
We start with the concept art. My initial plan was to draw the concept art all painterly and what not, and then redraw it with a black outline and color it in flash so the enemies would match the heroes. After I did a test of it though, we all kind of hated it. And, what’s more, is it’s actually slightly less work to just animate the concept art than it is to redraw everything and then break it apart in flash. So, I refined the concept sketch some and made a sheet of it for importing
Then, I put the pieces together in flash and animate it. I decided to make my life a little more complex and built a little previewer for idle/attack/hurt. I’ll probably need to add a ‘cast’ for magic enemies, but we’ll see exactly what I need. It’ll also be really simple for me to import the next set of enemies into this framework and make them adhere to the standard I set. I also have little to no idea how I am going to be exporting these for the game itself. Though, right now I don’t care a whole horrible lot. I’ll figure something out, so in the mean time I’ll just enjoy the ‘holy shit this actually works!’ high.
Whoo. What a crazy Swamp Week so far! I can’t wait to see how the rest of this week turns out!
Swamp Week powers on! I did more boring work on the background, tedious tedious, then sketched up monsters until I got tired (which is right now)
(Background lightened to see the concept art clearer)
What is the ever-pressing goal of swamp week? Simple! To get as much swamp related material as I can done by Friday. I believe we can plow through a decent chunk of the swamp this week, so long as nothing catches fire. The over-arching principal is that I work on what I feel like working on, but it has to be swamp related. So instead of being unmotivated and paining through weeks of animation bases, I can do whatever feels right that day. And swamps feel so right.
As a disclaimer, I am nobody’s programmer. I have only the slightest idea what I’m doing here, so take everything here at face value.
Thus far I’ve just been talking about the work in flash itself, but I mentioned before that these images will be saved and imported into the game as pngs (hereby referred to as “old-school style”). So how do I plan on doing this?
What we have here is the exact same movie clip eight times. What I ended up doing is telling flash to freeze each of these different clips at a different frame (1-8), and to hide everything that isn’t what we’re wanting to see. So for example, we’ll show the shirt, how it is in every different frame, and hide everything else. This creates the entire set that we’ll then save and import into the game itself. This part of the system is basically finished, I am just fumbling my way through an actual save button (because a print-screen is for chumps). I’m also trying to work through the obvious conflict that you can see with the shirt and the far arm. The way things are layered in flash isn’t the flat image you’re getting to see here. I have a few options for fixing this, the most likely of which would involve me just editing the flat png image slightly before import. It seems like work, but a little bit of erasing is going to be a lot easier than demanding our best-friend programmer layer each piece individually, not to mention he’d probably murder me.
The part that’s missing mostly is that they aren’t lined up properly yet. I’ll have to figure out out of the entire set what the widest point is, and what the tallest point is for the animation, and then make sure every frame is basically centered to that standard.
This still isn’t the blog update that you need, or that I want to be writing. I’ve gone from broken to busy to missing. In my infinite wisdom I managed to ruin almost all of my separated of groups for different categories and am scrambling to get them back where they need to be. Every piece lines up like it’s supposed to, it’s just a matter of finishing the directional break up (again), animating the idle pieces, and redrawing a couple “broken” leg pieces.
Join us next week when I get my life together and show you a finally finished animation.
