Games by Andrex

4kg Dev - Night 9

Whoah, how long has it been since one of these? Almost three whole months!  Hard to believe I’m that unreliable. Well, not really.

Anyways I took a couple jabs at the game tonight on a couple different fronts. I started out by spending an hour or two trying to add support for 4kg’s custom object types. In the demo I’m basing my game on, there are really only two: the player and the enemies. And one type of enemy at that. So for my game to work, I would need to expand that pretty drastically. Stuff like doors, ladders, etc.

Well I hit a pretty big roadblock that I’m hoping some other Akihabara devs can help me out with. I have a good idea of why the error is an error, I just can’t trace it to what’s causing it…

Even though I hit a roadblock coding-wise, I wasn’t going to call it quits for the night. There’s still tons of sprites I have to make! Not to mention the level backgrounds (which will probably end being really simple.) It’s amazing how much art has to go into any game, even if it’s really small. The only “easy” game I can imagine is Tetris, and even then, there are some quite beautiful Tetris games out there.

So in terms of spriting, I was able to push the art total up a whole 10% from last night, which I think is pretty sizable. I can’t tell you how nice it is having a list of sprites that need to be done. You just go down the list, do the sprite, and basically check it off. Seeing the percentages go up is like a rewarding game in itself.

I’m also becoming better at tiling, that is, taking (related) sprites and putting them all in one big image. My flow right now consists of making a 32x32 sprite in Paint (Windows 7), expanding the image, copying and pasting that sprite for the different frames of animation, editing the frames to be different, then importing that into the GIMP so I can change the whitespace into true transparency.

A nice feature Akihabara has is that tiles don’t need a specified alpha key, it just uses the alpha value in the PNG itself. Although really, this might just be a feature of HTML in general. Still, it’s nice not having to drench the backgrounds of my tiles in some putrid neon green or pink.

Here’s some of what I accomplished tonight:

From the top row down:

1. The red balloons mark the end of a level, and they either pop or float up in the air based on a special game metric I have.
2. These off-color balloons tie into a secret, sorry.
3. These soda-pop machines dispense power-ups and upgrades to the player robot. The second and third sprites in this row are the animation when it dispenses an upgrade. It kinda rumbles.
4. These colored shards are one of the few collectibles in 4kg.
5. This is the door sprite and its associated animation (and a ladder, too.) I’m not really happy with how it looks…
6. These are magnets spikes and magnets. When the player robot is over these, he is either repelled upwards in the air (positive magnets) or attracted downwards towards them (negative magnets.) The spike versions damage you and are more prominent later in the game. I’m somewhat happy with the spike versions, but not the normal version…

Here’s the balloon in action:

The first version uses all the tiles of animation I made, and it goes through them pretty quickly. The second is only using the first two frames, and is slowed down to around 250ms per frame. I’m considering just using the second because it seems more realistic and less “DANCE DANCE BALLOONULUTION!”

Anyways, that’s all I got for tonight. Hope you guys enjoyed this post!

Oh actually, there is something else. I have recently completed the official soundtrack for 4kg. I still have a couple permissions yet to be granted (if you’re going to upload music to a site, put your email on your profile or something, jeez…), however I’m thinking of doing a week+-long reveal for each song. I dunno though, I think they’d have more oomph if you listen to them the first time in the game. Anyone care to weigh in?

For the record, the soundtrack is fantastic. I practically have it on loop 24/7.

See ya around!
-Andrex