I'm happy, I'm feeling glad,
I've got sunshine in a bag
I'm useless, but not for long
the future is comin' on
Aahhh, life is good. So today, although I kinda spent very little time on developement, was a great day. First of all, after spending all of my classes, my lunch period, and some time at home, I finally capped off the design for level four! All it took me was... aw, hell, I don't know. 3 days? I have some finishing touches, a few divider lines to be drawn, and a hell-of-alot of labeling of coordinates and sizes to do... but overall, it's a sexy level. It's actually exactly twice the area of the second level. My creativity went wild with this one.
Also, I have to extend a formal sign of gratitude to the Miraculous Mark the Artist. After seeing his work on my sprite in Sapo's journal, I was two sided. At first, I was like "Awesome, someone made me a small spritesheet", but at the same time, I was like "Damn, not only is a taste of greatness being hopelessly dangled infront of my face, but now I have to take time off from a design process to do homage to Mark's hard work and put this animation system together".
Now, after a bit of work on what seemed like a hopeless animation system, I discovered a bunch of things. First, my previous system was terrible. Second, the new system I was replacing it with was buggy to a point of errors popping up everywhere. Third, this whole system was not only affecting the player, but also the scrolling mechanics and the collision detecting.
So I put on some music, and sat down with it. I slowly worked on working through each issue, step by step, and after about 20 complete builds and a straight hour of eye-damaging work, I pushed through every bug and had a walking animation working. Now, this animation was put together from the sprites provided by mark, and at first I was weary of how good it would look, but nonetheless I put it together and run it. Not only did it look incredible, but it opened up my mind to the kinds of animation I'd like sylistically in my game.
Thank you Mark. You helped me a great deal. You will not go unrewarded.
So anyhow, that's all for now. I'm done working on the project for the night. Gonna go read some design articles, some journals, and get some early sleep.
Oh! And I already have the next peice of art Bruckner has for me. It's the action shot of ADLR-23, and outside the main character art, it's my favorite peice of his yet. He won't go unrewarded either...
More tomorrow.
-IV
[EDIT] Oh, and I have no more worries about the size of my game in terms of file size. More tomorrow... today was a great day.
