Listening to Kohina

I've been working on the game a lot recently. I'm just trying to implement some really nice parallax skies. Once I get it all sorted out I'll put a screenshot or movie here.

A few days ago I refactored a lot of the enemy code to make them a lot more logical, and a lot more like FSMs so the code is quite readable. Unfortunately there's a lot more to go, but at least this easier form of coding will make future enemies a lot easier to code.

Sick

Recently, I have been very sick and ill. I may not survive to release this game, as the diagnosis was very bad. I will try with my final time to do the best and will make sure my last will and testament states the source code for my game be uploaded to here.

Luckily though, it's just the common cold, and I am already getting better. I have recently been working on getting the large hulk robot walking around in the game.

Wibbly wobbly world

Hooray! I've implemented a lot of new effects. Here is a list.

Cookie-cutter fades and wipes: I implemented a whole lot of these and removed the pixel-type fades. I like them better and I'm just putting together a good working set of them. Unfortunately I'm going to have to go through every level and change the fade types used because they don't correspond well to the old types.

Wavy screen effect: When you get enough mushrooms the screen goes all wavy. Like "Touch fuzzy, get dizzy" in Yoshi's island, except not quite as good. I needed to stick to simple line shifts because otherwise it would take too long to process each frame.

Hit masking: When you shoot an enemy, they flash orange like in the Metal Slug games.

I still want to implement a new sky rendering system to make great parallax very easily. It would do this by calculating the scan position of the parallax (like raytracing, I guess) and then plotting it. The speedup would be by combining it with the background rendering so it only rendered the parallax in the 'holes' in the background.

I might also make an underwater effect or similar.

What are you talking about?

I have just realised that I can use the polygon rendering from my previous work to redo the interlevel fades for my game. The fades I currently use are sort-of based upon the style of Cave Story. I didn't want that sort of fade but I couldn't think of a better way of doing it. Now that I've done some polygon blitting, I've kinda done the hard work already, so I can completely change the fades.

SO, when I get round to it, the game will feature cookie-cutter fades, a bit like some of the mario games do. Hooray!

A short break and a tall robot

I was away for a long weekend so I didn't do anything. Now I am finally back in the mood for game making, I worked on some sprites. I tried to draw a ladybird, but didn't really go very far with it. Then I decided to draw a giant robot. Here's my sprite sheet.



I'm quite happy with how it turned out. This is actually for three sprites, the two legs and the main body, which will hopefully join up seamlessly in the game. I haven't quite decided how it's going to walk quite yet so it will probably need rejigging to get the leg animations to work right. Also featured are destroyed main body, stumps and feet of the robot for its death animation (which will feature a number of sparks, flames and smoke added in seperately).

I think it works well despite the fact it has dodgy perspective on the leg-joins. That should help it appear less like different objects in the game, though.