EverEnding DevBlog, August 2016: Obscure

Another month, another set of animations. At this point I’ve got all of the basic movement animations nailed down, so next up is fixing minor issues with them and expanding out into the special movement and attack animations. These animations are generally longer and more complicated, but there aren’t as many of them so hopefully it will be manageable regardless. I feel like I’m really starting to get the hang of converting my prototypes into final animations, too, very quickly using them to build outlines and filling those outlines with something that feels properly expressive. Early on I was trying to pull a lot of shortcuts, using the prototype as a mask for the colors which resulted in a lot of barely visible transparent pixels messing with the frame. I’m glad I saved most of the complicated animations for later, since I think I will be way more able to tackle them now.

The other big thing I’ve done this month was go in and get the lighting system working properly in-game. This actually ended up taking a lot of debugging of weird problems with the parameter editor that only emerged when I created a behavior class that inherited from another behavior class, since it wasn’t set up to deal with that. Now that I can properly use the entity/parameter editor to get lighting entities into the game and assign info to them, I can see that there’s still a lot of improvements to make – but it’s now, at least, very easy to make a dark room, and beginning to be possible to achieve more complex effects. It’s not a realistic lighting system, there’s no directional lighting or anything, but it can still achieve a number of interesting overlay effects that are reminiscent of the representations of light and darkness that were used in older games. In the animation below you can see most of the basic movement animations at play and also see the ‘lighting’ system used to create a foggy environment. It’s still got a ways to go, and there are a number of features I’d like to add, as well as numerous details I want to add to really sell the fog effect, but the visuals are kind of starting to come together now and at least vaguely resemble the game I want this game to be.

Next month will largely be more of the same: Attack/movement animations, more refined and advanced fog/darkness effects, and probably some forays into creating rain/fog details to finalize the look of the fog. I probably won’t get to it over the next month, but the hills also look quite sparse here, and will also eventually be augmented with environmental details that should make things a lot more interesting.