Weekend Updates - Indexing and Graphics

A hodge-podge of generally undirected game updates took place over the weekend which I wanted to write about.  Now that the in-game menu functionality is working I'm getting close to having nothing but a handful of random details to cleanup before the engine and game are actually playable entities.

Indexing

One thing I found that I overlooked in my originally programming of the engine was the fact that, since the player is movable, the player may at some points be in front of an object while at other points might be behind an object.  The problem came in when I realized I was not re-ordering the array of on screen objects, so when a player walked behind an object, the entire player sprite was still drawn on top of the sprite for the object which they were supposed to be behind.

On the surface this isn't a major problem and I was able to write up a sorting function to pass to Array.sort which ... sorted things out.  Writing up the function however brought a larger issue to light.  In order to get objects which were literally on top of other objects (ie, a coffee cup on top of a table), I had to introduce a gameHeight property to each game object.  This property I used to indicate how far off the ground something was assumed to be and my sorting function could take this into account when calculating an objects relative position.

This may end up being sufficient for this game, but I feel like the engine in the end needs to more robustly handle the fact that I'm essentially working in a 3d environment but drawing in a 2d context.  For instance, I may end up reworking the object positioning mechanisms so that their position is defined in 3d space and the engine does the work of calculating where to map those objects to in 2d space for presentation purposes.

Graphic Work

I've been putting off drawing more sprites, largely, because I got so sick of it after making all the sprites for the room itself.  This weekend however I decided to hunker down and start work on the panda walk cycles again.  It was as much of a pain as I expected it to be, but I got the forward walk cycle done and am now moving onto the left walk cycle (which will be repeated as the right walk cycle).

All of this graphic work has led me to the conclusion that, for my next game, I need to just pay someone to do this for me.

I still have some cleaning to do, but here's the general idea of what the final walk cycle will look like

So, what is left to be done?  I'll try to get a list together for a future post, if for no other reason than to provide myself with a checklist of sorts.

DnL8Tar

First Look at the Panda Facing Left

I took some time this afternoon to draw up the template image of the panda facing left ... or ... right I suppose from his perspective.  

Looking left

The black outline will serve as the frame of reference for the animation of the panda walking left (or right, I'm going to cheat and just flip the image, making any minor corrections for the rotation necessary.

Panda Town - Hotel Room

I find that working on at least two projects at a time is a good practice, so long as time constraints are imposed on neither.  This way, when one project starts to wear on my soul, it can be temporarily dropped in favor of the other.  By the time the second project becomes a grind, the attractiveness of the first project has freshened.

Finding myself in this situation with Panda Town, after realizing that the art of drawing sprites was quite tedious and time consuming, I allowed the project to take a back seat for a month or two in favor of a Resource Container project which is a concept I've been tinkering with in one form or another for the past couple years. Over the last week I've found myself in a position with that project which is fostering a renewed interest in Panda Town, namely the position of being sick of thinking about the project.

So here we are, firing up Panda Town development again, and with a lot of the initial graphic work out of the way, I'm free to start focusing on the story line and puzzle aspects of the game.  While I haven't solidified things so much that I want to start talking about the concept of the game, I can say the format is going to be puzzle based insomuch as you are confronted with the puzzle of how to use various available items together in the proper sequence and time frame in order to achieve an end.  I'm sure this genre has a proper name but I do not know what it is nor do I have the patience right now to look it up.  Why I've chosen this genre is a subject of a potential future post, but not today's.

Current State of the Hotel Room

Where is the project at?  As I noted above most of the initial sprite work has been done and the general room layout is setup to my satisfaction.  There's more graphic work to be done, namely animation, which I feel is going to be even more draining than the initial development, but this level of completion gives me a test bed on which to develop the story and puzzles.  I've posted an image of the hotel room in which the game takes place and while I'll be cleaning up some of the graphics as time goes on, the image gives the general idea of how the game is going to look and feel.  Tonight I'm going to start really diving into puzzle design as this afternoon I came up with a better mechanism for laying out the story and puzzles than notes in a notebook which I found to be too static for my liking (probably the topic of a future post again, that's two, two future post topics in this post, ah ha hah).