Update: 07-15-2016
Update: New Demo video, Collision Handling Changes, Hammer Ability Prototyping, and Placeholder Enemy Attack Animations!
Hey hey! Welcome to another week of Dev updates! Today we got quite a few things. First off there is a new video showing what we had for our supercon demo. As always, it is a work in progress and there are many animations and art still missing, but the demo showcases the horde map and the boss map.
Next up, we have a report on our collision changes by our programmer, :
Well as some of you know (looking at you: ) I’ve been asking around and pinging for ideas for collision. The way I had handled collision was not to my satisfaction and I knew it could be handled better. In my quest for glory I as well found some details as to how old school games handled collision, as well as when to even collect that data.
For example: Legend of Zelda games would check collision on link’s attack during a stretch and squash animations. This gave me the idea of changing when to check for collision and refactor collision boxes on my sprites(using paper2d editor).
Previously I had it that, when I would attack, I would check every frame of collision on a tick. On every frame I’d grab all actors of a base enemy class and deal damage to them accordingly. I realized I would prefer to just have it naturally and ambiguously. So I implemented my own overlap function and assigned it to the flipbook I use to play my attack animations. It only registers data at the moment when you attack, and that data only looks for enemies.
In computer science terms, my previous collision check was at least O(n^2) and with the current implementation, I can assume it’s safely O(n), as I no longer use loops to go through all “collected” actors.
I’m also looking into FPS locking for a prototype implementation so I can avoid any frame skipping that might come. Thank you again for that advice.
On the other side of the fence. I’ve been working on weapon test beds. Currently re-doing enemies from the ground up to have desirable functionality that can be toggled into having specific types of knockback, as well as certain kind of damage recognition/handling. This has allowed me to create weapons that feel different when used on the same enemies.
Next up, we have a couple of GIFs of our new WIP of the Hammer special ability, all in prototype for now!
http://i465.photobucket.com/albums/rr16/pedwar2/hammerDOWN_zps81ubya5l.gif
http://i465.photobucket.com/albums/rr16/pedwar2/Ilovetobowl_zpsngixwufq.gif
**Last but not least today, we have some initial placeholder enemy animations. I say placeholder because these were the original first enemies we created and not sure if we are going to be keeping them through the game, but here they are anyway. **
http://i465.photobucket.com/albums/rr16/pedwar2/Zumbi_Down_Attack_Animation_zpsf45cacbt.gif http://i465.photobucket.com/albums/rr16/pedwar2/Zumbi_Left_Attack_Animation_zpspz4ka7yt.gif
http://i465.photobucket.com/albums/rr16/pedwar2/Zumbi_Right_Attack_Animation_zps9kwmsqhx.gif http://i465.photobucket.com/albums/rr16/pedwar2/Zumbi_Up_Attack_Animation_zpsi9scneot.gif
That’s all we have for this week. As always, feedback is appreciated, and we hope to hear from you! Til next week, everybody!