Tiny Animations

Working on around 50 tiny animations for a scene that will only be visible for 20 seconds :)

And some screenshots while I'm at it...

Some development images from Four Last Things

Updated Trailer...

Also...

Here is a peek at my new cut-scene style...

Some screenshots, cos I didn't post nuffin in months...

'programming'

Visionaire Studio is a great tool, and for someone like me, with no programming knowledge, it is the only way I would be able to produce a game of this scale. However it does not make things 'easy'. Each step of logic still needs to be put in place, it is simply selected form a large list of 'action parts', instead of written in code. For example, below is the list of actions triggered by the fairly simple command 'Pick up' 'Fruit'.

Its starts by checking two conditions, one to see if the character already has fruit, and one to see what outfit the character is currently wearing. The second condition determines which 'pick up' animation is played. After this a noise is triggered, the fruit is removed from the screen, the first condition (determining whether or not the character has fruit already) is then changed to show we have the fruit, the corresponding item is added to the inventory, then after a short pause the animations required to show the fruit growing back are triggered.

As well as simple things becoming somewhat cumbersome, this system can also make less obvious tasks difficult to achieve, due to a lack of available 'action parts' (there are only ~100). For example, to achieve the lighting effect I used in the cave scene (see 3 post down) I needed to produce an object holding the 'halo' of light, and set this object to follow the main character around the scene. This should have been simple, however, due to no 'every tick' or 'set x to y' action part it became rather complicated. I eventually worked round the problem by triggering the light object to move within each frame of the characters walk animation.

I am still struggling to get my head around the implementation of dynamic music.

Digital Music Production: Not like riding a bike :(

Struggling to produce some acceptable music for my demo/trailer...

Thumbnails

Experimenting with possible thumbnails for steam greenlight etc.

Lighting a Cave

step 1: sexy fire animation

step 2: add slightly different inner shadow ('vivid light' blending) + drop shadow to each frame of character animation

step 3: add wobbly light animation on foreground layer of scene

step 4: spend an entire day trying to figure out how to make a large black PNG with a transparent 'hole' in it follow the character around the scene, eventually solving the problem by adding an action in every frame of the characters walk animation, triggering the PNG objects movements.

Step 5: do smug blog post :)