Student Game Dev Part Sixteen

Student Game Dev Part Sixteen - Editor and Art

Soan

New Zealand194 Posts

March 14 2014 21:39 GMT

Part One - It begins
Part Two - Technical Foundation
Part Three - Game Design
Part Four - Input and Physics
Part Five - More Physics Things
Part Six - Even More Physics
Part Seven - User Interface
Part Eight - UI and the Editor
Part Nine - Editor Progress
Part Ten - Progress, and videos
Part Eleven - Fixing the Physics
Part Twelve - Unproductive

Part Thirteen - Context menu + enemies
Part Fourteen - Enemies and Problems
Part Fifteen - Play testing

This Week
Hello again TeamLiquid! Welcome back to my blog about the development of The Adventures of Sam the Pirate, the 2D platformer I'm creating as the final game project for my Bachelor of Software Engineering degree. Last week I talked about continuing on with implementing the basic enemy, fixing the camera, multiple levels, and the first play testing session. I also showed off a new piece of concept art. This week I'll be talking about fixing a couple of smaller issues, working on the editor a bit more, and have some early art of the main character.

Smaller Issues
Movement was adjusted so that sliding when coming to a stop happens much quicker. Because of how it was previously, a simple tap of a movement key would result in the player moving at least a couple of tiles in that direction. Some of the feedback I got from last weeks play test mentioned that they could not do very precise movement because of how long the slide was. This was good feedback, as I was definitely looking for other opinions on how movement felt last week. So now, rather than just applying a force in the opposite direction to movement until the players velocity is close enough to zero, I am cutting it back by a percentage amount, which seems to work better and have the desired effect of allowing for more precise movements.

Finally added controller input to menus as well. This was something I should have done ages ago but just never got around to it, which led to a bit of an embarrassing moment for me when testers picked up a controller last week and tried to navigate the title screen menu. So that works now, although as the accept button is the same as the players jump, starting a new game causes the player to do an unusually large jump. Fixed this by putting in a small timer on the player input so nothing is triggered until everything is ready.

Editor Work
Added a menu to the editor this week as well, to allow for easier saving and loading of levels. Until now, the file name for saving a new level had been hard coded, and loading was being either through a debug console, or also hard coded. I managed to implement loading before the end of the week, so saving is next on the list to get working. As I am using the built in windows save/load dialogs, however the editor is currently being run in full screen, so whenever the dialog opens the editor is minimised. It's a bit annoying, but I'll just have to run the editor in windowed mode instead. Doing so will be a good test of whether or not things will display correctly at a different resolution, which is something I haven't tested yet because I've been slack.

I might look at writing some custom dialog stuff in the future, so I can run dialogs in fullscreen if I choose too.

Character Concept
Early work on the main characters running animation.
[image loading]

What's next?
Next week, I'll continue on the with the editor. Saving, via the dialog, should be pretty simple, and then I need to be able to add moving platforms. I'll also be looking to get some level designs done, and create a few more levels for the game.

Keep up to date!
Be sure to follow me on Twitter, and like the Facebook page to stay up to date on future content and blog posts when they happen. If you have any questions don't hesitate to ask, either through Twitter or Facebook! You can also check out the blog, previous posts, screenshots and videos over at my site.

Kleinmuuhg

Vanuatu4091 Posts

March 15 2014 13:23 GMT

I just envy your motivation. Keep it up!

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Student Game Dev Part Sixteen - Editor and Art

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