“On Game Design”

The method I was using to color the letters was very expensive, so I’m trying out a cheaper method.

Any thoughts? Compare the way this looks:

To this:

What do you think about the overall effect of it? I couldn’t get one that looked exactly the same, but hopefully that won’t deter too much from the overall impression.

(Ignore how smoothly the animation may or may not run. The fact that both flash windows are active at the same time means they’ll probably both run very choppy.)

So I wrote a thing that takes the image above, rotates it around the center point, and coverts the output to ascii art.

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This build is a huge step forward in terms of background tech, but there’s also enough cool stuff to show that I’ll post it.

Here’s what’s changed:

Behind the scenes:

• Made the tweening stuff work a lot better
• Made it so I can mirror animations (sounds easy, but it wasn’t)
• The camera is scrolling now instead of the world. Before, the world was scrolling and the SFS was running in place. Now there’s actually a world and it’s the camera and the hero that are moving

Cool stuff to play with and see:

• I gave him a hat and a sword. Now he looks more like a samurai!
• Press Left/RIght or A/D to run left and right (you may need to click on the game first)

The character runs back and forth and tweens between his animations as he does it. Very cool, since this represents the very first build with a controllable Stick Figure Samurai (even though he only runs back and forth at the moment).

This isn’t TOO exciting (since it’s really close to the run cycle demo), but I’ve now got it so my figure can play multiple animations and can smoothly blend between them. This will help me out a lot since if I was doing this with sprites I’d have to make each frame of the animation, and if I wanted to have a smooth transition I’d have to do each frame for that, too.

To see the demo below, click on it and he’ll transition from his idle to his run (and vice versa). You’ll notice that when he goes into the run, he shifts onto his right foot and then starts running. The shift is all automatic and looks a hell of a lot better than if he just popped into the animation.

Ignore the wierdness with the cherry blossoms, that whole thing is really temporary right now anyway.

Also, in case you’re wondering, I did the animations myself. I’m not very good at it yet, but I think they look pretty good all things considered.

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Here’s a test run cycle for the Stick Figure Samurai (the hero of a game I eventually want to make). This is using the AnimeStudio plugin I wrote. The cherry blossom particles are a quick edit of the snow particle. The background is a straight up hack to test if the run cycle looks right.

Credit: I borrowed the scrolling background from this site: http://www.wiredgirl.com/gameart.html#. Though I balanced the colors a bit grayscale just to see how the SFS would show up against it.
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