Laying a Backbone

Buenos dias all,

It’s been a fairly quiet week in terms of quantifiable progress here at Sprixelsoft, but in the spirit of maintaining weekly Friday progress reports, I’ll ramble on pointlessly from the comfort of my bed for a few sentences about what’s been up lately before dozing off.

Stephen’s whipping together some new background art for what will almost certainly be our first complete stage/arena, while I’m continuing to put a control system in place for the bruiser characters. More on what Stephen’s up to next week, but from the technical side of things I’ve mainly been dumping my time into making the character sprite “do stuff”, as in respond to controls and interact with its environment (which is next to empty at the moment. Fun stuff). Add some minor bug fixes and a pretty full-fledged profiler in there, and you have what I’ve managed in the space of this last week.

There really isn’t a lot to note thus far. One of the more common problems I keep finding at this point is that I’m often over-thinking things as I work. Take the collision system for example. While a rather simple topic and implementation really, the fact is that the style we’re going for with this game is quite retro and all of our in-game entities are essentially flat objects with simple bounding boxes with a depth threshold. The collision dynamics here are quite easy, but I keep wanting to add precise depths and shapes to the entities, and to work-in more intricate (read: unnecessary) nuances to the collision detection (ie: limb collisions, etc). I think it would be awesome to generalize the engine for this kind of thing, especially for future use, but if I get bogged down with such details, then I can see the project slowing to a crawl pretty quickly. More on this stuff later possibly.

Anyway, time for ZZZs. Happy Friday.