Third day lots of things moved, we made a map, made a wind from fan, it's getting interesting...

Last night I tried out making feather collection give the player and enemies stronger flaps. I failed.

In the player's case, there seems to be no utility to stronger flaps. Flaps which are too weak mean the player has to flap like crazy to stay aloft. Flaps which are too strong make the player hard to control - you overshoot a lot. Playing either way is annoying, and it seems bad to make the player have to contend with either of these circumstances.

Also, changing enemy flap power made the rudimentary AI harder to tune and get right, with no actual payoff.

So I'm thinking of scrapping variable strength flaps. Collecting feathers gives the player points (with flashy combos, I hope), and gives the enemies more smarts (I hope)

I have a little legal proceeding to attend to, so I just don't have the time - again. Grrr!

Since I won't be able to code during this Friday / Saturday due to PyCon Argentina, I need to "optimize" time.

Levels:

• A simple SVG (inkscape) parser that generates Box2d code. (it seems that everybody is doing it)

 
Tiles:

• No time for tiles.
• I'll use box2d's DebugDrawData

Characters:

• It seems that squirtle can't draw circles, it's raising an exception, so I'll use raster images.

Sounds:

• cfxr

Intro:

• Only If I have time to do it

*yawn*
Well, after getting almost no where yesterday, I called it a night rather early and hit the ground running this morning.
So far I've implemented hitting the badguys with your shots and them dying.
And I found an interesting bug that I'm gonna turn into a feature.
Basically, when shoot badguys they scale out/in on the x/z axes, and when you kill them they collapse.
Well, the boss shapes (sphere and ellipsoid) really mess up their textures when you do this.
But it kind of looks like they are getting knocked out of whack and have to re-focus, so they won't be able to hit you while like this...

LOL

TODO for today:

1. badguy logic (including shooting at you, moving, LOS)
2. model and implement the command console
3. integrate our new weapons from nicolas

Ciao for now, hopefully I have a good day :)

I spent at least half of today's effort working on animations. This consisted of creating the animation poses in Inkscape (tweaking the character design a little in the process) and saving off the PNGs for the animation frames. I then wrote the animation module for the game which doubled as an editor for figuring out the positioning of each frame. I ended up with quite nice walk animations going left and right.

The problems began when I added them to the game proper. The animations jumped too much from frame to frame (I was using the actual distance travelled for each frame's step to move the player). I tried making it smoother but it only worked going right and not left. Ugh. Eventually I gave in and I now use the same animation technique I've always used in platformers (hell, in anything) - a fixed frame rate of showing the frames and the animation is independent of the speed the player is actually moving. So the player moves smoothly but the character seems to slide across the landscape a little. It bugs me, and I'll be trying to fix it.

Once I got that out of the way I also worked on:

1. animals
2. yuck pools
3. puffs when baddies are done for
4. invulnerability after damage
5. more level 1 tweakage

One of the animals is in today's screenshot:

(bigger)

The other animal is a rabbit. I like the bird better. I'm hoping to create more animals.

I also spent way too long debugging the rendering of the yuck pools. My own silly fault, of course.

Didn't get much time for it today, due to unwelcome distractions such as work. Made some progress, though. Can now generate folios with missing pages and select items from inventory. Have started on a folio management interface.

-Finally added the main sprite.

That took far too long. Still need an alpha to greyscale conversion to avoid transparency where there shouldn't be. Also it probably won't be animated because its downloaded free clip art. I don't suppose there's a place to find animated clip art on the web.

-Probably won't do much for this project until the last day.

I wanted to give SVG a try, but I've never done it before today, so I didn't know how hard it would be. I downloaded Inkscape and played around with it, and it seems easy enough, so I'll go ahead and use it, though I'm still sort of getting used to it. I drew one enemy and one screen so far, so let's call that my first screenshot, even though it's not part of the game yet:



(Full-scale image here.)

Well, I spent day 2 and day 3 playing around with cocos2d and pyglet, and designing the application screens, menus and the main scenario. I know, I haven't developed anything of the game logic yet. But I love deadlines and I know I'll do my best performance at the end of the challenge =P. So it looks like I'm going to have a heavy-coding time on Friday and Saturday. Having in mind that I suck at GFX stuff, I'm more than happy with this screenshot of the game main menu. The main scenario will look similar to the background of the screen capture.