Screenshot Saturday

I managed to get a "spawn" system sort of working. I was having trouble with it last night, but after some sleep it seemed to click into place. Time to start adding more rooms to this thing.

Here's a screenshot.

Roughing in animations...

I'm hoping to get rough versions of all the player-character animations in the game very soon, or at least made and ready to drop into the game. I've decided it's counter-productive for me to focus too much time on animation, so as long as I get a decent look/feel I can touch up details later. Here are some of the images I have so far.

Again, these are rough animations/sprites. I'm a fan of the proportions and overall look, but they definitely need some touching up eventually. May go with the whole thick lines thing though... gives the game kind of a cool feel. To be determined.

I've also decided to add a run button, because I want players to be able to slow down and have minute control, but to also be able to speed up if they need momentum for a jump or if they GOTTA GO FAST. Should be easy to implement, hoping to have that in this week.

Finding the right "game feel"

In my mind, the core of any great game is great gameplay. Even outside of the level design, the graphics, the sound, the story, the objectives... a great game just FEELs right. I'm aiming to match that.

But it's not as easy as it might seem.

There are a lot of things to consider, especially with a 2D platformer. Do I want my character to build up momentum and then slide a little bit, like Mario, or to move at a set speed and stop on a dime? Do I want jumps to have a set height or do I want the player to be able to control it? Movement in the air doesn't really make logical sense... should I include it anyway because it feels natural to gamers and adds additional controls? How far should the camera be zoomed in? To what extent should the camera follow the player?

These are all questions I am asking myself and have been asking myself for months. As of right now I have tentative answers, but nothing is set in stone. The character does build up momentum and slide a little bit, but I want it to be more subtle than it is right now. You do control your jump height based on how long you hold down the button, and you can move in the air. The camera is something I am constantly tweaking and it's sometimes surprised just HOW different a game feels with different levels of zoom. I am also constantly touching the movement speed and jump height and how strong gravity is. It's a very delicate balance, and touching one thing often means touching everything else.

Torque 2D has a built in physics engine that is incredibly useful, but can also be a bit limiting. When I want my character to grip the floor more to prevent too much sliding, it also reduces jump height. When I increase the jump height (which is technically a vertical speed variable) it just makes the character jump faster now without actually going as high as I want. All little quirks I will be attempting to work out very soon. I have been working a lot on animation because I do believe that having a fully animated character that looks at least somewhat close to final will help with adjusting the game feel.

Game feel is incredibly important and not to be taken lightly. I have played numerous amateur/indie games where the gameplay feels just a liiiittle off, and it has a notable negative impact on the experience. Game feel is too important to not focus on. I'm also very strongly considering changing the scale of every level I've designed so far to accommodate better game feel. It's that important.

New Rough Animation/ Pencil

I recently downloaded an open source animation program called Pencil. I like it so far, aside from some little quirks with the interface. It has been incredibly useful for roughing out my animation a bit more, and the result of an hour or so of messing with it is this:

Still very early. I still need to touch up the timing a bit (it's a little too consistent, needs to look more natural) and then polish it up with more appealing art but... it's a huge improvement over the way I had been animating before. I was just drawing layers in GIMP and hoping they looked okay when I exported as a GIF.

Side View

Here's a possible pose for my protagonist's walk/run/jog/whatever cycle. I spread my layers out to show some progression. Still not totally happy with the last one (the left leg specifically still looks off to me) but I've pretty much sold myself on this character design. I do need to solidify her proportions, and probably make a model sheet/style guide to be 100% sure I don't screw up. I'll probably use this as the basis for creating a walk animation and see how it turns out.

Character shape/motion study

I've been fortunate enough to have a friend lend me a drawing tablet for a little while. It's been a good excuse to doodle a little bit. I started messing around with the shape/form of my character and working out how I want her sprite to display in-game. Through my prototypes thus-far I've learned I don't really like to have the character all the way in profile. It was actually weird for me to realize that most side scrolling games don't put the character in profile, even though everything is flat and you're moving left and right.

Anyway, I'm not going to act like I'm a great artist but I do have some formal art training and I like how these scribbles turned out, so here they are. I'll probably never clean these particular scribbles up into actual drawings, but the exercise was good.

Character concept art

Main character concept art I drew tonight.

The tentative story is that her friend wakes her up in the morning to show her something cool he found (some sort of large, pulsing, floating black thing in a nearby valley). He gets sucked into it, she follows him. She ends up inside and he's nowhere to be found. Adventure begins.

I have a lot more planned out, but I don't want to give too much away.