WIP: Special move animation

The dragon breeds will get their own special move animation. For the European dragon I was going for a classic dragon move- breathing fire! Or it could be interpreted as a giant roar. I may have over scoped this one though as I keep getting into animating it but it keeps getting longer and needing more frames. It worries me because I wanted to make the dragon sprites for an entire breed in about a month. I figured that I'd use the current sprites as a base and replace parts as needed to match the look but keep similar animations. If the special is different though and will take a while, it means I wont be able to release a dragon breed in a short period of time... perhaps. This sort of speculation is all touchy since I'm not focusing my efforts on just one breed of dragon's art assets, let alone working on just the game either. So it's really hard to say.

Update to the work in progress:

Cherry Blossoms

I'm working on trees right now. Pretty trees to match the elaborate tiled road. Naturally the prettiest tree I know of is the cherry blossom tree. So here we are with tree #1. I have a leafless version of the tree, but it has no shadow with it right now. I think I'll do some maples, willows... I'll look into some other trees that might looks nice with the current tree and road as they are.

road endings done

I'm really unhappy with the tree line, but I'm really happy with the fancy road. I'm not entirely sure I want to keep em... I mean the tree line is pretty great but not quite what I need to give a solid look. The trees seem to be too short really... And some tiles don't match quite right. I might chalk the tree line tiles to me trying to figure out how to do a good tile map. After all these are my first attempts and each time I do something more I learn even more about what I should be doing.

Another issue I've run into is the Pixel purest thing out there. Most pixel artists demand that each and every pixel is placed by hand and that one needs to work with a limited palette. What I want for my game is for it to look awesome. Does it need to abide those archaic rules? Probably not. The reason those were ever rules in the first place was due to the lack of computing power- to which now my smart phone can easilly handle multiple colors and sprites. Hmmm I wonder if my phone's capabilities are equal or better than that of the ps1 by now...

New road tileset

I've been working on new tiles, and this one is a tileset for a fancy stone tile road. All I need to do to finish it is doing broken pieces and fade-outs and it'll be done. For now he's a preview!

Colored Calcatrix

The Forest Calcatrix

Calcatrix Idle redo

Here it is, the finished version of the idle animation. Yay!

Back on track with a new baddie

A first go at the Calcatrix. It's basically the Cockatrice 2.0. Energetic little birds that can be pretty nasty when cornered. This will be an enemy encountered in battle for the game. I expect to put them in other places with different colors. I feel like it's idle is anything but subtle. I might redo it, but for now I'll sit on it.

Tiles updated & more

Tile sets are harder than I originally thought. I still need to do the grass, cave entrance, level entrance and exit, then some flavorings besides the tiles that are obviously not done. The tile set is hard because of the volume of the tiles I wanted to do.

I also did the idle animation for the Briar boar. Yay!

Tileset updated!

I'm working through a lot of things and details but it's getting there. When it's your first go, it's bound to be a learning and slow experience, which this has been. Dragon was added for scale.

Workin on a tiles.

Well I'm still doing art.

I know I said I'd do more coding, but instead I did a bunch of sketches for enemies. I was pretty excited for the Briarboar, which in my wiki has this description:

A boar, pretty much like any other boar in almost every way. What's unusual about it is that a briar plant has taken to it, wrapping it's root system around the boar, but also giving he boar a defensive thorn armor. The older the boar, the stronger it's thorn defense. Young piglets will actually seek out their own briar seeds as soon as they are able.

The sketch to the side is a really quick and dirty version. Based off this sketch I've managed to finish the base sprite that all it's animations will be made from, which is shown below. The briars are separate from the boar sprite.

Taking Damage finished!

And with this one done, all I have to do yet is the Magic type attack. This one could be harder than all the rest. I don't have a plan on what it'll look like yet. I might sit on it and wait until I'm sure of what I want the attack to look like. I'm kind of sad I stuck with the original pixel art base frame from years ago instead of updating it. At least I know the next batch of dragons will look better. My pixel blending and detail skills have grown by leaps and bounds since ... when ever I first made the base down frame.

For these Damage animations, the actual attack has it's own animated effect (a slash, a flame, etc) that will be displayed on or around the dragon. This will allow for a wide variety of abilities to be used without having a giant amount of animations required.

I'll be refocusing on some more coding this week, but I'll also be doing some off computer work. This means doing some enemy monster sketches and ideas (such as the briar boar).

Taking Damage animation

Damaged animation!
This one is done.

This other one I'm still working on. All I need are the tween frames between the damage snap key frame and the base pose key frame. Tween being the smoother frames between key frames.

And yet more animations!

Fainting animations DONE! Yay! I'm so close to having the whole set of animations done for a breed of dragon. No... I'm not procrastinating the coding part by doing animations...

>.> Yea.. I am procrastinating. I promise to focus on coding next week.I only have two more animation sets to do for the European Dragon; Taking damage and ability attack.

More animation!

And I'm done the other basic attack! Next I need to finish the fainting animation. I took out the 1 second pause just because I did.

Dragon Regular attack

I did another animation for the game, cause you know, change of pace.

Checking in!

Back from Vacation, and working out states. Not US states, but states like modes or something. I have to build a bit more of the basics to get into the nitty gritty of the combat portion because those details rely on such things like states. It'll make more sense later I swear it ^.^

I'm also working on some placeholder menus to help facilitate things. I have family visiting this upcoming week though, so not much will get done during that time.

Time Transplants pls!

Okay I don't have much to actually show, because all my work has been just doing things in code that don't change how it looks. I don't even have anything working to the extent that I could post a video or gif. BUT what I have been doing is getting everything in place and working to make the A* pathfinding working, which also comes into play in allowing the the player to move their character. I went a head and made a tile class, a node class, converted the multidimensional array into a working list, and had that draw the tiles for the tile map.

I've also picked up a short order job to model/texture a 3d portrait, as well as I am still working on a 3d logo for someone else, which I'm trying to focus on currently. SOOO, for the next week it's just me, Maya and Zbrush. Then after that it's vacation time for a week. Hopefully I'll be able to get back to this as soon as possible, because I know what I need to do, I just need time to hash it out. I need a time transplant!

Pxl Perfect

Alright! I haven't posted anything in a bit even though I've been working diligently. I found out that moving the character is going to be a wee bit more difficult than previously thought. I need to use A* path-finding to create a moveable field. This seems to be part of the AI (small part)as well.

I did fix the camera size ration portion so all the pixels show correctly for the map. I also figured out the values needed for the diagonal movement when not in a battle ( aka not restricted to tile to tile movement). Check out the pixels! Well now you can see my place holder tiles have holes, which I knew. The tiles I'm using as placeholders are 64x31 for some reason. My tiles will be 64x32.

Tiles tiles and more tiles!

Look, look!!

I was able to get tiled maps working using data from Tiled. Yay me! Okay so ... now that I'm done that... I guess... hmm.

I know! I'll work character movement I guess! It seems to be the next hardest thing to figure out.