Today i’m posting a short video of the centaur character walking around. The background is just something used to test collision detection. He’s walking based on input from the keyboard – the up, down, left, and right arrow keys.
The walking animation is pretty smooth during gameplay, but this video of it is pretty choppy. I can’t seem to get a good recording of the screen using Camtasia. I’ve tried setting the frame-rate high, and playing with some other options, but I always end up with a video with many dropped frames. If anyone has had better results with a screen capture software please let me know what I’m doing wrong!
Anyway, I’m happy with the results of how it actually looks when the game is running. The screen isn’t scrolling yet, that’s up next on the things to do. Followed by collision detection between the user-controlled character and buildings. Then I’ll be working on creating the first town :D
Link to the Video (3.8MB AVI)
I figured out how to animate my characters with a background that isn’t just white. The trick was quite simple, just refreshing the background after each movement. I’ll be working on interaction next, triggering events when a character moves to a certain place on the map. Such as opening a door or engaging an enemy. I believe I’ll be using collision detection for this.
Also,I’m posting the sprite sheet for the centaur character below.
After a couple month interuption (completely due to the arrival of the Wii) work on Spark is back on track. I’m still working on SDL stuff. I can move my characters around the screen with input form the keyboard, but only without a background image. Next week I’ll be working on animating characters within an environment and after that I’ll be working on interaction between characeters and the enviroment.
Progress is going well on the Spark engine. I’m using SDL and OpenGL instead of DirectX. I decided to go this route so that the game is open to as many people as possible – not just windows users.
I’m setting a goal now to have some kind of playable demo up and running by the middle of 2007. It will probably just be one town to explore and one battle – but that would me the core programming for the game is done, since shining games are basically just these two gameplay elements repeated over and over.
A lot of work still needs to be done on asset creation, which is why the demo will be so short, until more assets for various towns and characters can be created.
Just a quick update here to say that more models of characters have been completed. Current models include: A centaur (playable), dwarf(playable), human(playable), evil crustacean(enemy), insect warrior(enemy), and a stone golem(enemy). The have all been rigged and textured, there animations are being worked on now. I’ll be putting up screen shots soon on this site once I’m able to.
The game engine is also progressing slowly but steadily. Slowly being the operative word there ;)
