Breathing Some Life Into This Pixel Baloney

Hey-o listeners, things are getting rolling here at Sprixelsoft as we start to give life to our blood-filled (well, soon-to-be blood-filled) brawling saga. Today I’ll offer you on a candid little glimpse of what things are starting to look like as the game is coming together.

 
We have some life! Excellent. Stuff moving around on-screen.
 
The focus of these very early stages is to get a feel for how the sprite will animate and get some control parameters down-pat. The debug build reads everything from a config file, so you can tweak things like character speeds, accelerations, animation frame rates, and so forth. We’d like to be play-testing from as early on as possible to get this darling into a reasonably polished state as soon as possible.
 
Behold our first bruiser design jumping about on the central platform of our first-planned stage:
 

So, just what is that? What’s the point of this?
 
So far, we’ve only got the stationary animation down for bruiser #1, so all those colored boxes are placeholders for when the actual sprites get built. I threw numbers on them and changed colors around so I know the sprite is executing different animations depending on what the bruiser is doing (jumping, running, punching, dying, etc) and the numbers are just so I know it’s actually working. This is actually a slightly older build with the most simple jump possible; behold below the results of some time spent tweaking the jump:

Yes I know it’s actually kind of ‘worse’, but the point is that there’s more freedom and more parameters to pass in. I don’t know what our jumps will look like in the end, but now we can control initial jump speeds and accelerate differently mid-jump to limit the control the player has over their bruiser (from momentum).
 
There is no acceleration when walking. You’re either moving at speed ‘X’ or you’re not. When you jump, however, you continue at the same speed you were running unless you continue pressing the control pad; in this case, the character slowly accelerates in the direction you are pushing. One of many standard implementations of platformer jumping. I’ve seen this in some older games, and I’ve always liked this actually; you can jump and keep pressing the control pad in the same direction for that feeling of extra exertion, and the character responds appropriately by travelling that extra wee bit farther. Having the character simply move in whichever direction you press the control pad while jumping is another option, but gives the user an unrealistic level of mid-jump freedom. The limited control is the toss up between realistic fixed jumps and unrealistic yet fun fully controllable jumps. Anyway, I digress.
 
Quite obvious from this second video is that the character is frighteningly unaware of the ledge boundary and just walks through space. As of about Thursday midnight, this has been implemented as a 3D mesh system, but I can’t show it because I’ve since broken the build. Next time dudes and dudettes.

Here’s a pointless peek at my desktop (revealing all the “cool” names I give my stuff, and also that I’m finally getting around to writing this post in the middle of the damn night).
 

Actually, I thought I’d throw in a little picture of what I look at while debugging this creature. All the user-modifiable parameters are read from the open config file and can be changed on the fly to tweak the jumps, swap out sprite sheets, and change other in-game features. There’s a debug console running behind the game executable at all times as well that receives debug print outs in real time.

Next up on our list: polish the collision system, get some battle action happening between multiple characters, and add sound to this beast.

Actually, next up is twenty minutes of Parodius and then bed. Cheers!