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Triptych in the making
As soon as I obtain resized sprites from Kieran and modify the tiles accordingly, I will begin the process of designing the levels that will appear in the final game. As a result, I have taken time to finalize character movement as the characters should be as similar as to how they will be in the final game as possible in order to have effective playtesting. Changes I made for the engineer include shortening jump height, modifying momentum changes which occur when hitting a wall, and fixing a glitch which would allow the Engineer to make the jetpack explode twice if the first explosion occurred on the ground. For the Dark Wizard, I restricted the orb from being able to move through surfaces, fixed a minor glitch which prevented the parachute from opening after a teleportation if the teleportation occurred on the ground, and fixed another glitch which gave the Wizard a couple of frames to jump in midair after teleporting from the ground to the air (I actually thought this was a neat glitch that would make a good professional/speedrunner move, but designing levels that are accessible for both regular and professional styles of play is a task I am not yet experienced enough to perform). For the Shield Maiden, I modified her fundamental movement to allow her to move when holding her shield sideways or upward, modified the jumping arcs for the shield-jump, and increased the shield's ability to keep up with the Maiden when she is moving quickly. Unfortunately, the Shield Maiden is a monster of a program compared to the other two characters, and I will likely need to do another debugging session with her before she is ready to be in the final game. I said in a past blog I would program death, which I did do in this phase of the project. It wasn't very difficult however, so I've made it a side note in the captions. The process was identical to normal collisions, except with red tiles and a different reaction when the character collides with the tile
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Mini update time! Seriuosly, its a really mini update with another sprite. Sorcy here is in the process of moving, which will include more sprites that show his cape flowing (Which will be quite the feat to finish). The cape is a bit lighter than when he is teleporting due to his positioning with a downward light source. Consistency is a bit more difficult than expected, but I’ll get through it.
That’s all for now. Spell ya later! Last Thursday, the date of when this glitch occurred, I was working on the project as one would expect. My itenerary for that evening was to fix and modify several small elements of character movement, as I deemed it important to solidify character movement completely before moving on to the next phase of the project. I will explain the majority of these small changes is the next blog, because this incident is worthy of its own blog. While working on some collision issues for the Engineer, Gamemaker suddenly and inexplicably crashed, and my computer froze. Under the morbid fear that I had forgotten to save my past couple hours of work, I waited fruitlessly for several minutes, hoping the computer would unfreeze. finally, I had no choice but to restart the computer. Upon reopening Gamemaker, I was relieved to find that my progress from this evening was saved, with one major exception. The Shield Maiden was gone. The entire object Shield_Maiden, encompassing over a hundred lines of code and several hours of work had vanished, leaving nothing behind but a question mark where the instances of the Shield Maiden used to be. Fortunately, just before I broke my computer out of rage and lied crying on the floor in helpless self pity, I discovered that the Shield Maiden code, though mysteriously deleted from the project, still existed on my computer's OneDrive. though I could not open these text files in GameMaker, I used a different compiler called Enthought Canopy to open the files, and, from there, copy-pasted the code back into a new Shield Maiden object. In conclusion, I learned the importance of saving multiple versions of your project in case one is mysteriously sabotaged, a practice which I will now employ for the rest of this project.
After the doozy that was the summer, I’ve been working on some fun stuff. I can now officially show off my first in-game sprite! Check him out below. Exciting, right!? This image is the position in which the character will assume while initiating his special ability. He will not be a still image as this is, but this gives you the idea. I have finished several more frames with him teleporting, but I can’t give everything away before the release. I plan on releasing updates like this frequently throughout the year as I continue my work now that summer is through, and hope you are excited to see what else I have up my proverbial artist’s sleeve. Before I go though, I can confirm that more sprites are coming very soon.
Kieran Morford Hello Blog! This is my first time posting an update on my work since the genesis of this website, and boy do I have some fun news! This summer was awfully busy in so many ways, but I still managed to get some work done on the artistic/visual aspect of Triptych. Below are my three final character portraits with their final animations! The Dark Sorcerer The Shield-Maiden The Engineer You may notice that each character has a different level of detail in their backgrounds and foregrounds, which is exactly what I was going for. There is a distinct divide between each of the characters which I decided to highlight through their portraits. I’m trying my very best to capture subtleties in my art, and I hope you enjoy it. Before I go I want to show you one last thing. (Despite some slight mishaps and failed saves) My final triptych which will house the portraits is complete. Well that was what I’m going to show you of what I did this summer, and I hope you are as excited as I am, because this is going to be one heck of a ride! Happy school year!
Kieran Morford |
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January 2020
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