Oh man, how is it that every time I work on a huge project, I forget about Lists? I don’t know why I keep fighting for Arrays. I just don’t. The only thing I can figure is that Arrays were the first structure I was introduced to in programming and it opened a whole world for me. I’m not sure how it was for everyone else, but that was about the time I had that light bulb pop up over my head when I realized how powerful programming could be. I can do ANYTHING!
So now I’m working on switching any single dimension arrays to Lists where it makes sense. One of those big places was in my animation engine. Because each animation could have a different number of frames, it makes sense to use something that lets me add and delete as needed. Speaking of which, I finally got a walking animation working. However, it’s of our old friend the stick figure, so I won’t be sharing it today. What I will be sharing is the first pass at a pixelated Mark:
Early art is both the worst and the best all at the same time.
Anyway, for the animation, I basically just run a few checks to get the next frame. I see what status the Character is in. I say Character and not Player because this animation engine will run for everyone in the game, enemies and such included. So once we have the status (i.e. Walking) we check was the last status was. If it wasn’t walking, we return the first frame. It if was walking, we check the timer. When the timer expires for each frame and the status is still walking, we return the next frame. And once we hit the last frame, we reset to the first. If at anytime the status changes, like to jumping or idling, we drop out of the walking animation and switch to the next one. The reason for the timer is to give some space between each frame. If we just blink from one frame to the next without any kind of delay, it’s basically a blur.
And so, the art heavy portion of the game really kicks in. The odds of us hitting our end of 2012 date are basically a million to one. Partially because of just the time it takes to do all this non-coding stuff, but also, I’ve been adding design elements as I’ve been going. This is going to be much more ambitious than just another 2D platformer. I’m stupidly excited about where this is headed.
And I’ll leave you with one last piece, early art of the basic minions you’ll be jumping on:
I swear it’ll get better.
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