I worked on two major things this month. First was the rolling animations, which are the two most complex animations in the main character’s animation set, with the possible exception of the running animations. I’ve gotten better at doing animations so the work moved faster, but these two just have an awful lot of frames and each frame is different enough from the last that there aren’t a lot of shortcuts one can take.
You can also see that these are two of the most different animations of the left/right flip versions, so again they defy shortcutting for that reason as well. These animations, with their high rate of contact with the ground, raise an interesting issue: Right now, all of the main character animations have a cyan outline to make sure she pops against dark backgrounds – perhaps unnecessary, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. However, the outline disappears where she contacts the ground, which is usually fine because she only contacts at a relatively narrow point. However, with the roll animation she makes contact all along the ground, especially while her hair drags across it. It looks fine on flat terrain, but on slopes or coming off of a ledge it’s obvious where the outline ends. Of course the animation looks a bit off in other ways at those moments since it kind of assumes a flat ground surface, but that’s by far the most noticeable. I still haven’t decided what to do about that. Maybe I should remove the outline and create a programmatic solution, see if I can bang out some code to make her pop out the way the outline does. Or maybe that’s all unnecessary, maybe the white cloth will make her show even on backgrounds where her darker tones would otherwise fade in. Or maybe I should bump all the animations up a pixel, extend the outline underneath them, and then make it so in-game they all draw one pixel lower. Not sure yet. I guess the smartest thing would be to start experimenting with just removing the outlines and then go from there.
The other part of the game I’ve been working on is a stone tileset. You may recall me working on stone before, and though I decided that weird wet-looking tileset worked fairly well in the cave area, it looks pretty terrible outdoors amidst the grass. It took several days of experimentation to find a stone tileset that looked good outside, and it turned out that restraint was key. Most stone, it turns out, is basically the same color as itself: Adding a lot of details and cracks made it look like ruined bricks or stone blasted apart by some catastrophic event. However, creating blocks with just a bit of patterning, either something kind of rough and scaley for uncut/broken stone or something almost flat but with slight patterning for that more man-made look, really seemed to do the trick. I also took the technique I used before of creating different lighting levels and using them to sort of draw a three-dimensional looking chunk of rock out of sets of simple tiles. There’s still flaws in the result, but I am quite pleased enough with it to table it for now until the rest of the game progresses to the point where its flaws are more noticeable.
For the next month I’ll probably be focusing on a) creating attack animations, b) creating transitional tiles so the stone tiles actually fit into their environment, and c) developing some of the early levels to actually use all the tiles I’ve been making and look decent. I’ll also need to start seriously considering how to go about enacting the ideals espoused in the Problem Machine blog post earlier today, but that’s going to be a long road and I’m not sure what shape it will take yet. Still, lots to look forward to!