Baby Steps

fter spending some time away from game development, I decided to jump back in on things and try to get my clumsy sprite walking. I've made some progress... some... 

As you can see, the little guy doesn't quite know what to do with his arm there. At least his legs seem to know what's what. And he isn't really moving aside from all those long limbs. I guess we'll have to try this one again.

That's a little bit better. He's bouncing just slightly so we know he's actually hitting the ground instead of just a blue void. Still not so sure about that arm though. Let's see if we can just help him along here.

That's much smoother. A little tweak here and another one there and I'm sure he'll look just fine in-game. So here we have it. A little space engineer ready to go on a horrible journey through space and time. Yay!

=======================================

Update:  I realized that the above animations were just one step... so I had to tweak and expand some more. Here's a better version...

Walk Like A Sprite

So our little dude looks better than the last post. Good. He's rather respectable... has a loveable hairstyle and cute little goggles over his eyes. But can he walk yet? Sort of. I have all the frames of my side-facing walk cycle completed. I'm just a few tweaks away from getting Tech here to take his first in-game test steps. Once I tweak up his side walk, I can do the dreaded front and back facing views.

Wish us luck. Tech and I will be here... drawing endless frames.

The Walkcycle

For years, I struggled with creating a convincing walk cycle. I only passed that part of animation class by redrawing it three times and using extra credit. Actually, this is usually the stumbling block for me, I have no idea how to animate the character I draw and end up stuck for months (or years) with all these half-done graphics and nothing to show for it.

Well, a friend told me that I could use a biped in 3D studio max, pose it how I wanted and render out the frames. Then, I could use those frames to trace over. Brilliant! Now, over the long weekend, I can get started on animating and redrawing the little human bugger.

Resolution

Yes, I know what you're thinking... why am I talking about resolution now? Resolution here, will be screen resolution. And since this is an old school adventure game with a good portion of the gameplay being with a text parser, then I chose to make the game at 320 x 200.

Now, I know what you're all thinking. How the heck do you manage to make anything look good when the image is so tiny on that 20.1 inch widescreen? Well, I'm not too concerned about running the game fullscreen. I know that sounds rather arrogant, like I'm going to upset anyone by not really thinking about that sort of thing. But hey, how many people will actually play my game and will any of them not run it in a window? Besides, AGS has a 2x and 2x filter so that even if you want to run it "bigger" you can run it full or windowed scaled up. That's just handy. 

The reason I'm using 320 x 200 is that is is classic. Well, that's not entirely true. My first game, and the barely started second game (making this actually game #3) were in higher resolutions, 640 x 480 and 800 x 600 respectively. Do you realize how much detail you need to make things look nice in 800 x 600? All the rooms looked empty, even if the characters were a manageable size for me to draw.

So here's my current conundrum. I can easily do the backgrounds at this scale and find details to fill them. It's actually fun drawing at that size. But... I find that shrinking down sprites makes things a bit difficult. How can you make someone expressive if their eyes are only one pixel big? Oh, I know that some very talented people can do it, but I'm talking about me... who is used to drawing and scanning things to huge proportions and then scaling them down in Photoshop or Illustrator.

What do you guys think? Does my little robot pass inspection? Of course, he's just an inanimate drone, but still...

Now that I've got one character and given the floating drone a basic walk cycle, I should move on to the human character.

 

 Not as good. We need some serious anatomical work. While Tech needs to be tall and a little lanky,  I think he's crooked in more ways than one. And I don't mean morally. I've been trying to find a way to do a "simple" 3d stick figure so that I can get his scrawny proportions right. But that's another issue... and another post.