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.

Lazy days

Well, I spent a while getting a startup logo for my game. It's a nice distraction from coding the NPCs which can get a little tiring. I have implemented some simple vector art functions so I can make a nice animated logo that's rendered in real time. Not very impressive but at least fairly honest.

Here is a craply looped gif of a tracing of a falcon. I made it wobble around a bit.

Might look better in firefox because last I saw, IE couldn't render fast gifs well.

Anyway I do need to think of a name for my development (consisting mostly of me) along with a logo. Then I can use it in the future. Hilarious antics!

The Strangest Thing

Well, I can't get this bug to reproduce for the life of me. I've tried all sorts of stuff for ages and it just doesn't seem to be crashing any more. I went through the code and it all checks out. I guess whatever it was wasn't my fault. Still, I'd like to know.

I've finished up on the boss and now I've drawn and partially implemented a little scorpion. That's pretty narly. I need to implement a lot of bad guys, mostly from a list but I do need to brainstorm for some more non-mammalian creatures to use as enemies. If I make a sprite-sheet I am particularly proud of, I will post it here.

I was also thinking about what I'd like to achieve in the future with regards to games which I make. The next game I make will more than likely be a shmup because there's less of a media black-hole in regards to development of graphics with them. In the future I would also like to make a metal slug type game.

Here's a list of what my long-term game creation interests are:

-Levels streamed from the disk.
-Large seamless worlds (would be interesting in 2d, wouldn't it?)
-Pseudo-3d effects.
-Effective scripting or effective precompiled bytecode, similar to what is used in zDoom or Quake.
-Online cooperative play, as well as writing online games with fair protocols.

Oh, well I guess I have nice ideas for most of these but some of them are idle interests that I might expand on in the far, far future. Such as, 2015.

Soggy bumps

I've got a mysterious crash with my boss now. That's not good. Anyway, it only happens when the cannons are firing so I suspect the cause is in the cannon-firing code.

I added a small red blob effect whenever you hurt anything damagable. It's very subtle and kind of annoying. Ideally I'd like a palette shift flash like in the metal slug games, but as the game is not paletted that would be rather difficult. Maybe if I make the motion more jerky it'll seem more like I'm hurting the enemy.

I also changed it so the enemies release a lot more puffs of smoke when they explode. That's better.

Bossy boots

Today I implemented the boss attack and worked out some sound effects, which I might replace later. I also worked out how to get the boss graphic to align with the background, which has applications elsewhere in my game.

I've also redone the gp2x build a bit, it's a little faster now.

Tomorrow I aim to misbehave sort out the levels a fair bit, as the crypt and basement need work badly, and a few places need (temporary, at least) music.