Found this neat animation program Pencil 5 minutes before the competition started.  It does layers, frame-based animation (no interpolation) and -- most importantly -- saves in a simple XML dialect.

Spent about an hour writing a loader, and now I can load animations with associated collision boxes (via creative overloading of the term "camera layer") into the game.  Easiest thing I ever did.

Here's the game so far.  Still waiting on the first asset drop from the artist :-)

 

Today has been pretty much a let down on my behalf, I spent the whole day trying to work out what art style I want to go with. We plan to do animations and I've been trying to work out what would be the best and prettiest way to do so. I still haven't made up my mind but I hope that I get something done before Alex comes home from work tomorrow.

And while I haven't done anything today this doesn't stop me from doing stuff that's pointless =D  
 
I'm pretty excited about this PyWeek... why? Well yes, PyWeek is awesome but for the first time in (my) PyWeek history the compition has landed on a mid semester break, so unlike past PyWeeks where I could only spend about 25% of my time I can actually spend about 50-70% of my time on PyWeek! Whoo!  
 
Look forward to random art spam! 




 

Yesterday I discovered that our game idea doesn't work at all.  The opposite of fun.  Not even entertaining.  It turned out to be systematic and predictable.

Anyway, had some ideas on how to fix it this morning which I'm trying out now, with a sprinkle of optimism.

In the meantime we've been trying various art styles; the most important aspect is how to convey different tribes of birds without tying the artist to a chair all week.  We're pretty pleased with this early test.

 

I can't draw birds, if you watch my twitter you would have seen two very ugly drawings of birds I did on day 1. I've had to draw birds in past PyWeeks and they end up as one of the things I spend the most time on. The bird from Make Me took me about two hours to do and then you don't see half the detail due to resizing it. The birds I did for Kite Story are just plain ugly and makes me sad.  

So when Alex told me his idea for Feather...I kind-a hit a wall... The game idea involved birds.  
Day one was a bummer, I couldn't make up my mind what I art style I wanted to go with pretty much wasted a whole day. 

Yesterday was much better, I spent some time and gave myself a crash course in drawing birds. I have to say things came out pretty well and I ended up with about 2 and a half pages of birds. 
 
Once getting the art of drawing birds down I went back to see what art style I wanted.     


After going back and forth with a number of different programs, my weapon of choice for this pyweek is photoshop. I ended up with a water-colour look, which sadly didn't seem to transfer when I resized the image. :( 

To save time I'm colouring the birds with shades of grey and then are tinted with code. So our little grey bird became colourful:      
 

 And I was like "Wow that's cool!  But Alex was like "it'd be _really_ cool if we did two-tone" 
 
 And so we did:  
 
A little worried about having to clean up the pencil line art I took the image file into openCanvas and traced the outline. Which lead to a much nicer two-tone-ness.  
 

And then it was bed time. 

Today I did some work on animation. 

Whee it flys. 

So... Um.... Alex is missing...I haven't really heard from him or seen him online...

I think work has eaten him up or something...

I finished up most of my animations last night. There are a few more animations I could do and I could always improve the current ones but I'm a bit tired. There's about 8 animations, each frame hand drawn. Took so much effort for just a little out come, I have to say it's a little disappointing.
Each frame is made up of about 7 layers; the sketch, and then a line art, white fill and a colour layer for the wings and body. The wings and body are one different layers to achieve the whole two tone effect.

Last night I replaced some of the temp images/animations with the new ones and then went to bed.

This morning I woke up and drew a background and without a programmer around to help import it into a game I though to myself "This will be easy"

Two hours later and still confused by the pyglet programming guide I some how got a background in the game: