Pyxel edit, hooray!

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.

 

“Grappling Hook” Pre-Alpha or whatever

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:

• Make the hook travel instead of instantly attaching
• Tune character size / speed / hook length and so on
• Think about a way to attack and enemies
• Make some proper animations

Throwing Knives

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. 😀

Spinning Slash

This was rather fun to make.

Because I thought, the ledge climb (see previous post) was so dull and long winded. It’s a lot more fun to have an agile character. That’s why I went and implemented a mid-air backwards somersault spinning attack. Haha…

Here’s the final version with a bit of motion blur.

Also I’ve been improving the wall slide so just 1 pixel of contact to the wall won’t be enough. I’ve also reworked the movement system to make everything feel a lot heavier, at least on the normal jumps.
And I’ve tried to add more impact to the attacks by implementing some hit stun for the enemies.

Ledge climb….

I made a “ledge grab” that looks like the first frame of the animation below. It acts like the normal wall-slide, except you’re just there in one place. You can press down to slide down the wall, or jump to leap away from the wall, like the regular walljump.

However while hanging from a ledge, I thought it would be nice if you could climb up as well. So I started making the animation below, until I realized it’s much easier and faster (for the player as well as me) to just add the option to jump straight up when hanging from a ledge.

Maybe I’ll still finish and add the animation as an option, like holding shift (which now lets the player walk as well.)

So far unfinished…

Kasa Death Animation

I haven’t yet decided what her name is going to be, but in the game files she’s named Kasa (Umbrella) .

Below is a step by step process for the death animation. Creating everything took me about 3 1/2 hours from start to finish. That might seem long, but compared to the earlier running animations, it went rather smoothly. (This one’s 11 frames compared to the run cycles 8, but a run cycle is arguably harder to animate.)

For the earlier sprites I fiddled around a lot more on a pixel-level. Unfortunately, that lead to a really inconsistent look, because I didn’t have the creation process down. I’ll probably go back and rework all the existing sprites in the earlier demo to be more consistent with the death animation, since all following sprites will probably have a similar look.

…

On the “backside” of things, as I keep learning more about GML, I keep finding bits and pieces I could have handled better than I did when I initially wrote them. It’s odd  to think “Wow, I was stupid back then” when “back then” was merely a week ago.

Things are starting to take shape

More running animation testing.

Making the stick figure run in place really makes it easier to see if it “cycles” correctly.

In hindsight, I like how on one frame there’s this little black line that looks like a 8 that I didn’t bother to erase. It reminds me of old film, where some frames had hair or something on it that would show up on the screen.

Running Animation Tests

First Test. Looks a bit funny because the animation speed was set to 24 fps.

A more static “Strider Hiryu” running animation. I didn’t like the outcome. I guess the Strider Hiryu running animation has a lot more power in its motions.

First attempts at a running animation.

Funny enough, there is no animation yet. It’s merely a walk cycle or run cycle that I drew on one page.

The numbers above the head of the figure represent the “sub cycles” so to speak. If we had just an outline, I guess we could get away with four frames of animation. But since each individual leg has to make a full cycle, we need at least eight frames.

The pose however needs to be roughly the same (just inverted) whether the figure is on their left leg or their right. If that makes any sense…