The Shining Source

I just found out about the site freesound. It has many sound effects distributed under a creative commons license. I’ll probably be using some of these in my game, since I don’t think I’ll be able to create the sounds myself.

I’ve just about finished the sprite sheet for the hero character. Here’s part of it below. I’m still working the creating the first village, then I’ll be back into coding. I’ve got to create the collision detection for the hero and all the new buildings in the town next.

Things seem to be going a bit slow with my project right now because I’m working on two things at once. The ‘young swordsman’ character, and the first village. Neither are quite done yet, but I’d thought I’d post some images of the works in-progress. The young swordsman character will be one of the two main characters you can choose between in the game, and the only main character available for the first demo, which I’ve decided will be a tutorial style demo. So that way I don’t have to worry about the story yet :)

I’ve spent the last couple days working on grid-based movement. My character was animated and walking around before, but he wasn’t confined to a grid. If you think of it like chess or checkers, you can only move a piece from one square to another – not half on one and half one another. Which is what my character was originally doing. It looked fine, but I’m sure it would become a problem when I get into developing the battle system.

So now my character moves from square to square, and the animation looks just as smooth. I’ve also started working on the first town of the game and creating the main ‘hero’ character. Actually my idea for the game was to allow a choice at the start of the game, to choose between one of two characters to start as. With a different storyline for each choice. For now though, I’m just concering myself with creating a demo, and for that one main character will do.

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)