So I haven’t stopped making games entirely, I just took a long break.
Last summer I rewrote the code for the grappling hook because I wanted to pursue that idea. So right now I’m mostly busy with making sprites and other assets. It takes a looong time to get something done, but it’s fun and something good might come out of it.
Long time no see! Weekly, bi-weekly, what does it matter?
I’ve decided to take the jump and switch over to Game Maker Studio 2. The reason being that sooner or later, I’d do it anyways and so why wait?
I could import the old game into the new version run it without much trouble. Studio 2 creates a couple of compatibility functions. But the whole resource tree is a mess, and there are a lot of opportunities to improve on the stuff I wrote in GMS 1.4, now that I again learned a little bit more.
I also made an improved attack animation. It actually took the longest time to do the blade flash of the actual slash. Not because it took long to draw, but because I couldn’t decide on how to visualize where the attack hits while still making it look decent. So I tried a ton of different ways until I settled for this one which most clearly displays the time and area when the attack actually hits.
This is also the first time I drew the sprite in its original size from the beginning (not counting the one attempt I made in Pyxel Edit some time ago). It’s nice to be able to see from the beginning how it’ll look in the game, and I hope to be able to make more consistent sprites in the future. (And filling in colors is also a lot quicker. 🙂
I want to form a habit of keeping track of what I’m doing, and where I’m progressing. Also perhaps if anyone were to read this blog, it could add some additional motivation for getting things done.
Unfortunately, I no longer have as much spare time as I did in February when I started getting into this stuff and could make progress more rapidly.
As a hobbyist I don’t have any deadlines to meet, but I feel it’s necessary to focus my efforts at least somewhat.
The sprite to the left is for yet another new project I have started. The umbrella thing was more or less me implementing stuff as I learned along the way, without much aim. I do intend to go back to it eventually, but…
… at some point I thought I wanted to make a ranged weapon, and I tried to add a machinegun sort of thing. I drew the sprite to the right, and animated it a little bit, and then I realized that it’s totally out of place for the game I was making.
Also, since I kept exploring new ways of creating sprites, their look kept changing and I had to make a lot of small adjustments to keep the different animations consistent, which was really annoying.
In the meantime I’ve learned some things about random level generation and randomness in general.
The idea I have is to make a game where the player can enter sequences of spell-words and each sequence will trigger a different spell. Which sequence activates which spell is shuffled at the start of the game. You can try out different spells, but there are negative effects as well.
I already implemented much of the above, but I only made the player running sprite today, and there are no spells yet expect a test-fireball. So by the end of the next week, I’ll hopefully have finished the player sprite (idle, jumping, casting animations) and implemented a couple of interesting and fun spell effects.
Alternate title to sound like a Krita-Salespeson….
There are so many different graphics editors available, selecting the right one can be an overwhelming task. You’ll have to spend at least some time with each software to see whether you can warm up to it or not.
Krita is yet another image editor / painting software. You can get it at https://krita.org, it’s free, which is already a plus. I’ve found a couple of advantages about Krita that I want to share:
The moment I fell in love with Krita was when I discovered this. Basically, the stabilizer adds some “lag” to your mouse or pen inputs. The brush will follow your cursor at a distance which you can configure. This means that small wobbles in your hand movement will be eaten up by the input lag. It’s great for digital inking, or cleaning up lines, especially if you have a small drawing tablet. It’ll save you a lot of time.
There are other tools that have this feature, most notably Paint Tool SAI, and I think there are plugins that allow this for PS. But Krita has it out of the box and it’s generally a more versatile software than SAI.
Krita has solid animation options and great onion skins.
Many dedicated animation software is oriented towards vector graphics. While vector graphics certainly have their advantages, I was looking for bitmap animation.
Animation in Photoshop is possible, but it’s also kind of horrible. I realize that this is very subjective, but every other software I tried either had a cumbersome interface, no bitmap animation or some other deal-breaker.
If you’re looking for vector animation, I think the options in Krita are limited right now. But new stuff is being added over time, so the developers might improve on that in the future.
Not only can you configure your workspace in a lot of ways, Krita also has a lot of options for shortcuts. This is another area where the old PS is surprisingly rigid.
Krita lets you use sequences as hotkeys, so you could use, say, S -> R to switch to one tool, S -> E to switch to another, while still leaving just R and just E to other things. You’ll never run out of hotkeys!
Customizable hotkeys are also very important for lefties, because I feel like most default shortcuts and the keyboard layout in general are geared towards using them with the left hand, which in case of us lefties will be occupied with holding the pen.
This one is magical! It’s best described as a smart flood-fill tool. You’ll lay down a few spots of color all over the picture, and GMIC will fill the corresponding area with the color you put in there. It’s smart enough to detect boundaries, even if the linework is not perfectly closed.
You can put down base colors for the whole image in a minute, without having to fill in everything by hand.
Combine the GMIC filter with the stabilizer mentioned above, and Krita lets you turn a sketch into a clean, base-colored image very quickly. This is great because it not only saves time, but these two steps are also very laborious and unfun.
Well, it’s a free software. You don’t have to be a pirate or make do with some trimmed-down version of a software that came with your graphics tablet.
As of right now, there’s only one serious drawback that’s bothering me:
An eraser is not just there to correct mistakes. If you use a soft-edged brush, you could use a hard-edged eraser to add some sharper edges where you want them. But Krita makes this difficult because it lacks a dedicated eraser tool.
You can turn any brush into an eraser and all, and Krita can remember different opacity or size settings for eraser mode and draw mode of the same brush. However, if you want to have a different shape / hardness setting for the eraser, you’ll have to switch to a different brush preset. Now brush presets are one of the few things that you CAN’T set a hotkey for. There are still ways to switch presets rather quickly, but I find it still takes too long if you have a habit of rapidly switching between drawing and erasing. (I’m now in the process of changing this habit.)
Other than that, Krita has a lot of interesting options that I haven’t fully explored yet. Like mirroring your brush strokes across an axis, or perspective guidelines that you can set up and snap your brush to. It also has a handy ruler shortcut that will let you draw a straight line from point A to point B, not just horizontally or vertically.
If you want to see progress, it’s probably better to spend all your limited time on one thing, to drive it forward.
But that is the opposite of what I’ve been doing:
This little frog sprite is from another small project I’ve started. The game lets you use all alphabet keys to determine where the frog should jump. The goal is to catch flies while not dropping into the water. (This frog can’t swim, you know).
Next, I’ve used Pyxel Edit to try and create tiles.
I’m not very fond of the look of them, but I guess I need to practice and refine. It’s not the type of environment I want to create either, but Pyxel Edit makes it really easy to set up tiling and I like the software.
The edges of the blocks are actually in the center of the tile boundaries, as shown on the right.
I want to make the characters feet overlap somewhat with the ground, to give some feeling of depth.
For collision, I guess I’ll use invisible objects that just line the boundaries of the level.
Lastly, I’ve been trying to extend the attack animation to make a combo option. I’ve been doing this in Pyxel Edit as well, because I want to simplify the animation process by already starting out with the final image size.
Sadly, sprite edges in Pyxel edit have to be made smooth by hand, by manual dithering. Seasoned pixel artists might call this heresy but I find it very tedious to do this. On the other hand, creating the animation in a larger image size first and then downsizing it to sprite-size meant I often had to make adjustments anyways.
Pyxel edit has a lot of export/import functions, and the option to export as a spritesheet makes it easier to bulk apply filters in other applications.
In the past week I haven’t been working on the Umbrella game. Mainly because I’m not sure which direction to go in. I feel like I should make some levels, but I don’t know how to approach it. Tiles aren’t really up my alley, but it seems to be the best approach. Sooner or later I’ll probably have to get into making tilesets anyways. Perhaps I’ll get Pyxel Edit soon.
Meanwhile…
I’ve been working on another idea I had: A game that features a grappling hook. Now this is no Umihara Kawase, but I must say that I’m a bit proud about the code I wrote for the hook. It’s nothing special really, but I came up with it on my own.
It’s in rough stages, but I made some placeholder sprites to get a feel for the size of the character, and the way she would move.
Some things that need to be done next:
A new demo version is available:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B-VDZaK_7ZJNSnVfRkFmNUlGZWs
I implemented and changed so many things since the first demo that I thought it was time for an update.
There are new enemies now, and the Zombies are actually dangerous. However I’m not a huge fan myself of how the birds turned out. The animation is way too static. Since they’re probably one of the more annoying types of enemy, shoving the player around, I’m not sure if I should invest more time in improving them or just throw them out.
Also, the level itself is not much to look at. So many things to be done…
Tomorrow I’ll hopefully find some time to color this and turn it into a sprite.
I want to give the player the option to throw at any possible angle though, which is giving me a bit of a headache about how I should animate it. Perhaps I’ll split the sprite into two, so the movement “swish” can always have the appropriate angle. Then perhaps it won’t look too weird even if the knife goes flying into the air. If I really want to add the option to throw straight up, I will at least have to alter the animation though.
Update:
Colored Version
Looks like a grain of rice got stuck on the screen. 😀
So I went and set up a Twitter Account and also polished up this page a little bit. You know, cleaning up in case any unannounced visitors show up.
In the meantime on the development front, I’ve been adding combat options with the jumping slash, hit points and enemy attacks, a hit-stun system, a new and bigger level, some more sounds / voices, and last but not least, I’ve been working on some ranged attack options. I want to keep these limited but powerful.
I also made a logo.
Spinning Bird Studios 