Post 85 - A New Player

A NEW PLAYER

Today is going to be a smaller post, only because its so soon after the last one. Recently I started to create the new player sprite (Sprites). This didn't come without its fair share of complications, like crappy clothing design, and weird clipping issues. However I found myself a middle ground, a jump suit. Which makes more sense in a post apocalyptic setting, its easy to put on, easy to clean, versatile, and keeps you clean from all spewing liquids, i'm referring to blood and guts.

But don't just think I decided to make the Player wear a jumpsuit because it was easier for me! Because that's not the case, previously I had tested the idea of a jumpsuit, but it just didn't work. But now that I have given it another chance, I would say its my favorite so far.

I also added a nice hiking bag type thing. This looks pretty good and has some function in my animations as well, but I will get into that in a second. Here are some pictures and GIF's.  

Toxic Fumes

As you can see from the image above, we now have a gas mask. Justin and I talked about implementing some kind of toxic air in the past, but now we might actually do it. Maybe it will be an airborne virus like in the last of us, or just plain old radioactive dusty air. Either way its going to be something you don't want to breathe in.
Now back to the backpack having a function in our player animations.
*Drum roll*
He can pull items out of it. Honestly not that impressive, but its a personal milestone, and i'm in love with the results, so without further ado, here is the player pulling out a gas mask and putting it on his noggin.

Absolutely fantastic, in my opinion anyways.
If you can see in this horrible quality, the right arm goes behind the body and pulls the mask back to the front layer. A very cool animation technique.

Sadly all good things must come to an end.
And all bad things must come to an end.
That is why this blog post is now over.
Goodbye.

Post 84 - Animation & New Assets

ANIMATION & NEW ASSETS

Recently I started to create the new Dragger Sprite (The main enemy type in the game). This new version has around 3 times the pixels and detail then the previous. We are making this change because our new animation program allows us to go the extra mile with detail. Along with the brand new looks are some spiffy new animations. These animations are extremely better then the ones I did by hand, so a special thanks to Ty for showing me this program. Soon I will begin to work on redoing the character sprite, for maybe the fourth time? Honestly I have redone it so many times I have no idea anymore, but maybe this will be the last time.

On a personal note, I absolutely love these new sprites. But.
*Pause for dramatic effect*
Creating a sprite in several different moving rotating parts is very tedious.
So don't expect thousands of variations in design.

DOING ABSOLUTELY NOTHING

This is first Animation, for when the the enemy is... well idle. Hopefully that makes sense, because it should.
Just look at that flawless nothing, umm... nothingness?
Yeah nothingness.
Just look at how he breathes with pixel perfect accuracy.
"It's a fully dynamic breathing system that adapts to the game environment.
100% Super complicated Breathing Physics
ALL DYNAMIC!"

       - Honest Developers, 2016

Its actually none of those, its exactly the opposite and is extremely static. The text above is strictly a joke. Don't take it serious. Or do. Its up to you, I don't control your life.

KILLING, AND BEING KILLED

This is a dying animation, it is just as static as the idle animation. Sorry to disappoint.
Its more or less going to be our games generic death animation, I might add more types of dying animations.
I would want them to change depending on what weapon type the player was using, or the direction they are killed from. Or both.
This animation is good practice though, soon I will be making the player characters death animation, which will be fun to make. I think anyways. It actually might be awful.
Really who knows.
Not me, that's for certain.

WALKING FAST

And finally the last animation. A very, very important asset to the game.
Walking!  I guess it is more of a brisk, or maybe swift walk, doesn't really matter what you call it though.
*Clears throat*

AND FINALLY THE LAST ANIMATION!!!
Swiftly walking!
Not really better, but whatever. At least we aren't lying to ourselves anymore.
But in all seriousness this animation is extremely important to making our game actually feel like a game.
I think this is where I will end the blog post for now. So goodbye.
Come back again next time.
Even though nobody reads these, well, not all of them. And if they have read some, they wont be coming back to read more.
Its a sad truth. 


A sad truth that only deserves mini text.  
  

Class 83 - The last class

Today was our last day of the class. I started the day by taking the Improved zombie sprite and splitting it into multiple images, these images being every single separate moving part in those animated GIF's, which are my demonstration of our new animating program.
This program takes the annoying long process of picture by picture work and shreds it into thousands of pieces, then incinerates those pieces with the strength of ten supernovas.
The GIF's on the side are not even close to being final form, they are works in progress.
I started learning the new mechanics of this animating system today.
Some of those mechanics being the bone system. The bone system allows me to create a skeleton with bones that are connected to each other, think pivot (If you know what pivot is). It allows for the different sliced up parts of the image to bend separately from the other bones. This creates a sort of 2D rag-doll, or puppet. And of course I am the marionette, moving the joints throughout the time line, then the program works its magic and makes the parts move smoothly between the positions. This creates a very good animation, within minutes. VERY, VERY EFFECTIVE.
Learning about our new program took up around 80% of the class. But it was totally worth every second.

The next thing I plan on doing is completely remaking all the sprites for the third time, But I will be making them in a higher resolution. And in separate parts for animating.

 (Would recommend this program to be taught in some way to the other classes, or maybe just recommended to other people making games)

- Start of forgotten material
I also implemented a new animated picture into our main menu, I did all the sprite work and animation work at my house last night, so sorry it doesn't get a proper blog spotlight - in fact I almost completely forgot to blog it and added all this in post.

 - End of forgotten material. 

Another thing I did today was grab all my stuff, all my files, all my pictures, all my work, and put it into my USB. This was a sad moment, because that's when it hit me. This is our last day in InfoTech.
But, Justin, Howard, and I have all agreed that we will continue our work on our game out of class. This gives us more freedom in a sense. Maybe? Actually not really... We already had tons of freedom. The only rule was to blog daily... Which isn't going to happen anymore. But this is not going to be my last blog post, it will be the last blog post labeled with the words "Class #"
So in that sense, Goodbye.

And a special thanks to Mr. Bilesky for allowing us to work as independent students!
Overall I think we learned a great deal about Game Development, but most of all, it has made me want to learn more! So thank you!
 

Class 82

Today I started by putting the background into Gamemaker as a sprite, this allows me to see what it would actually look like in game. Sadly the animation plays way too fast, and just like I suspected it needs to be more frames then 8 to be slowed down. Currently when it is slow it looks very, very bad. So bad it doesn't even qualify for a GIF. So here is the GIF of it swinging too fast.
This time its not me clicking between images.

Another thing to note is the slight shutter in the shadow at the top of the GIF, right as it begins to swing left the shadow jumps forward, then backwards in a single frame. This is just a small error in my animating. Its not technically challenging to fix, but I will not being going back to solve this problem.
Only because when I do the new animation, it will be impossible to make this same type of error. It will be impossible because I wont be moving the shadow and the body separately like before, I will be moving them as one image.

So after that failed attempt, I decided to take the original image and split it into two separate images, one being the Corpse, and one being the actual wall. This will allow me to take the corpse and animate it separately, this way I won't have to create a separate image for each part of the background.

After I split the image, I put them both into game maker as separate objects, the hope was to use code to make the corpse swing slightly back and forth. Howie and I then began to work on it together. Despite both our best efforts we only achieved breaking the game and Gamemaker.
But being so closed to the bell, we couldn't continue our work and fix the code.



Tomorrow is our last day to blog. So what i'm going to try to do is use a different animation method to create my background. We could efficiently do it with code tomorrow, but I want to familiarize myself with other types/methods of animating.

Class 81

So today I started by figuring out what I wanted to do. I looked through my current options and decided if I wanted to do anything, it would be the background animation, so that's what I set out to achieve.
Currently I have extracted all my home sprites onto this school computer. I also cleaned up my desktop because the clutter was making me annoyed.

 After doing that I started by figuring out how exactly I wanted to animate the background. I decided to just do it frame by frame. After completing the animation, I see some flaws with my idea. Personally I think it will be easier and look way better to take the animated hanging corpse, make it its own sprite, and place it in the main menu and have it animate through code. This is all possible because I have made the background in multiple layers of images.
The actual animation I have made today works, but i'm not sure it will be good enough. Currently it is just 8 frames long, which is really, really short. But if I want to make it have more frames I have to decrease the amount of pixels its moves over each frame. This would take a extremely long time to do manually. So I need to find some sort of program that will allow me to just easily make it look like its hanging, or attempt to do it in some sort of code.


Please note that the uneven speed at which the frames switch between is not the actual animations fault. That is a physical flaw in my clicking ability. I'm to lazy to actually put the PNG's into Gamemaker and have it play as an animation, so I just make a GIF of me clicking through all the pictures. Interesting how the lazy method of doing things always seems to require more work. Like writing this explanation, and clicking between pictures really fast.

Tomorrow I will attempt to use different animation styles, hopefully by doing that I can find the most effective way to animate this background. 
I also might add some sort of particle effect to the background. 

Class 80 - New Year, New Menu

Today I wasn't in class, however the background I needed to create for Howie required some specific sprites, these sprites also just happen to be on my home computer.
What Howie wants from me is a cool image that will be our main menu picture or background thing, whatever you want to call it.
So I started to make the background and ran into a few problems, first my sprites where too small for the actual background, so I needed to scale them to fit it properly. My second problem was when I scaled them it made them look like blurry garbage. So this took me awhile to figure out what setting in my Paint program was doing this. It was actually extremely simple to figure out. Turns out it was just a quality setting trying to make my picture look good, but because it is only a tiny little sprite, the only thing it achieved was making it look uglier then sin.

 "Best Quality" - Made it and ugly blurry.
 "Nearest Neighbor" - Made it look perfect.

I then proceeded to create the background with the proper sized sprites, I decided to use a older blog post to help me make a wall texture for this background. The post I am referring to was on "Subway Walls". I thought the walls would make a perfect backdrop for our new main menu. 

I then did some gruesome google searches of blood stain pictures (Wouldn't Recommend).  Basically trying to find some inspiration for nasty things I can smear on the walls of this background... And I found one that was pretty good. Sadly, its a little cliche, but what can you do? Cliche things are Cliche for a reason. 

Now I have completed a version of the background, it looks pretty good. But I want to animate it to make it feel more alive. I might do that another day or maybe even later today, I haven't really decided. Another thing to note with this background is the shadow, which isn't something I would normally add. But I wanted to try something new. It was actually a pretty simple little trick, I just copied the hanging corpse and made it completely black. Then I took that image, put it on a layer behind the original, changed the opacity, and shifted it to the left. It was an extremely effective easy method for pixel art. It also adds a great deal of depth to the image. 

Not saying its the most complicated thing to learn, but hey! It works! 

Tomorrow I will work on this background, and if not that maybe I will start another overwhelming animation.

Class 79

So today I decided to work on the main menu screen with Howie,  so I went to Justin to get my sprites, but instead of listening to me, he was to busy crying about his broken game. So I changed my mind and sat down with Justin. We looked through almost every single file, yet nothing. The problem is the background is being resized I'm the second room, this wouldn't be that much of a problem if it didn't look absolutely garbage. Despite our best efforts the game continued to stretch the image into a distorted mess of an image. So we switched to Justins other copy if the game, however this copy has a deep dark secret. Obj_Sand, a weird sprite/object that Nick created. This object stops at nothing to break the game. Object sand has been deleted 3 times, and I know there's more times it has been deleted, but I have personally witnessed it's destruction 3 times. However just like the zombies we are trying to create, it reanimates itself into an indestructible wave of game crashing code. Code is the worst enemy to make, it is ruthless and has no mercy. So
 what I learned today is, One - Don't let Nick try and code our game. Two - Don't ask Justin for sprites.

In reality I learned a little bit more about code and how one little mistake can absolutely break everything you have ever created.

Class 78

Today I started by converting the dying animation into a PNG. Once I converted it I threw it into Gamemakers sprite editor and changed some things around. My first change was I actually moved the sprite from its original starting position throughout the animation, this make it look like it was actually falling backwards. This greatly increases the dynamic flow of the whole animation.
The next thing I did was extend the last frame, this consisted of stretching it into another 15 frames. I then took those frames and started adding a little bit of blood to each one. I personally really like the effect of the blood pool forming under the dead body. It adds a great deal of atmosphere!

Howie and I then decided to go out and hunt for something, sounds. After previewing Ty's game with sound. I got a little jealous. Sound brings the whole thing together, it almost instantly makes it feel like a game. So we grabbed our phones and set off!

Later down the hallway we noticed Nick and Justin running behind us, I guess they got lonely and wanted to help us on our quest for a squeaky door! 

Basically we just walked through the whole school opening a bunch of doors. 

We then found the best door ever. The grad hall stair case! Normally filled with annoying sounds of echoing banter from grade nines, but during a class... its silent. The hallway gave the sounds a very eerie echo! So of course we just opened the door, and let it swing shut again! This made an amazingly exaggerated door effect, perfect for a creepy 2D side scrolling video game.   

Class 77

Today I felt incredibly sick so I thought it would be best to just stay home!
However you cant just miss a day and a blog post. So I decided to get more familiar with Pivot.
The reason I want to get more familiar with Pivot is in my last blog post.

""Currently I have been animating the frames as I go, basically just winging it. But I want to change that, so next time I do an animation, I will start by creating it in something like Pivot. This will give me a nice reference to what it will look like without taking up a lot of my time. The reason I want to give this a try is because it takes me forever to create these animations, but because i'm just making it as I go I have no idea what it will look like in the end. So if I do it in Pivot I will have a rough idea of what it will look like, plus I can see how many frames I will need!
This should hopefully make my animating way easier!""

  So in order to do this I need to be able to use Pivot, which I have used in the past out of boredom and InfoTech Assignments. These assignments where a very, very long time ago. So today will be my refresher course! But using this to plan my animations will hopefully increase the quality of my animations. Either way it will definitely help me!  

So far I have started on a simple walking animation. Currently it is 9 frames long, which is significantly smaller then I expected. It is running at 30fps (Thirty Frames Per Second) and is looking somewhat smooth.

However the animation is a little stiff on the top, So I think I will go back into the frames and change that. Going back and changing frames is an extremely tedious task, so a little bit of advise would be make sure you animate everything in the frame before you proceed!
Now there is some basic movement on all the parts of the figure. Obviously this animation isn't the greatest, but I didn't want to spend a long time making a walking animation that would serve me no purpose other then helping me re-learn the basic controls and functions of Pivot.

Tomorrow I will ask Justin what he wants me to do, then decide if what he told me was actually worth my time and effort. Then if it is, I will do that. But personally I would like to finish up the Zombie animations. E.x (Walking) (Running) (Attacking) (Idle) - Anything that makes the game look more like a game.

 

Class 76

Today I started with trying to finish up my dying animation as always. I kind of rushed the last two frames, so I might touch them up next class. But other then that I would say its pretty much done. Tomorrow I will definitely convert this animation into a PNG file, then put it into Gamemaker and maybe add a pool of blood that forms under the dead body.


- Possible Idea for next animation
Currently I have been animating the frames as I go, basically just winging it. But I want to change that, so next time I do an animation, I will start by creating it in something like Pivot. This will give me a nice reference to what it will look like without taking up a lot of my time. The reason I want to give this a try is because it takes me forever to create these animations, but because i'm just making it as I go I have no idea what it will look like in the end. So if I do it in Pivot I will have a rough idea of what it will look like, plus I can see how many frames I will need!
This should hopefully make my animating way easier!

I also helped Nick with his game. His game so far is just a crude sprite of me that slides from side to side on these grass platforms. He has been trying to learn more about code in Gamemaker so he can help with our game. But he still needed help with integrating the Physics system into his game and code. After some very glitchy attempts we finally got everything in its (really bad) working condition.


I also helped Justin with solving a background issue. He wanted the background to just loop on forever so I just told him how he could fix that by making the mountains line up in the background creating a very simple fix to a even simpler problem.

Tomorrow I will try to put my animation into the game! And once i'm done that I will do more animations or see if anyone needs help! 

Class 75

Today I started continuing my work on my zombie death animation. I started off by finishing up frame five which was unfinished from last class, it didn't require too much work because I had already moved the body in the proper position, which is the hardest part to move. I then did the sixth frame and noticed something strange. My missing frame, was missing? I had noticed the patchy spot in the animation last class I worked on it and fixed it by creating the frame and saving it into the animation. HOWEVER it somehow got saved as a ".5" file (Because of me being stupid and not looking at the "save as" button properly)
I quickly went into a panic and scanned the web trying to figure what to do with this useless file. I ran into this forum that explained what it was and how to fix my problem https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1131547?tstart=0

Turns out all I had to do was turn on extensions and change the file name to
"Zombie Death 2.5.psd"
which is a very, very simple fix. So thank god for that. Well more like thank internet forums.















So here are the frames I created for today's class. The first frame is frame 5, and the next one is frame 6....     Obviously.




And of course the current state of the animation!
Honestly it probably isn't the best plan to do the dying animation before I start the running animation for the zombie, let alone finish the players running animations. But whatever, you learn from your mistakes. And the order I am doing the animations in is one of them... Basically if I could go back and do this any other way, I would.
But HEY! Its not looking too bad!
Keep in mind the animation doesn't move from the center spot currently, which is just something it will be doing well i'm creating it. When its in its final form it will fall backwards and look significantly more dynamic!

Tomorrow I will "ATTEMPT" to finish this stupid dying animation! Or maybe I will help Howie with the new main menu, or help Justin with whatever hes doing. Basically help someone or animate all class and wither into an empty husk of a human. 

Animating sucks. There, I said it. 

Class 74

So Today I am working from my house, so I will attempt to learn a little bit more about coding and how it all works together. I will start by working on my old game that I started to learn more about the physics system. It has had some minor improvements since the last time it was seen on this blog. The most noticeable being that there are now some art assets implemented. The game consists of two small rooms, both without a purpose currently.


The second room in the game is currently a test at what my platformer could become. I didn't try to hard on making it look realistic, instead I just made some very lame obstacles for the player to try and jump over and across. These jumps become significantly easier if the player learns when you hit the shift button you run faster, and when you run faster, you jump further. This is a simple mechanic I added simply by messing around with the basic physics system.


Anyways, enough looking at what the game actually looks like, lets get into the really fun stuff. Code.

 Using scripts is very useful for making your code neat and organized, which for me is the most important skill to have in coding. Because if your code is super cluttered and messy it becomes very hard to work on your game.

So what does the Scr_Get_Input script do exactly?

Inside the Player Object there is a line of code that calls the Input script to its page "Scr_get_input();"
This makes all the long code from "Scr_get_input" appear inside the Obj_Player.step event when the game starts. Effectively removing clutter, and making things easier to find.


This is an image of the Obj_Player.Step Event. As you can see the blue text shows you how the "Scr_get_input" is actually incorporated into the page.

You can also notice the foot notes in the code, marked by their light green tint and "//"
"//EXAMPLE"   
Putting in two forward slashes makes a set of code do nothing but look fancy, So this becomes very effective for organization and management. It is a must know for coding beginners



Next Class I will continue my work on animating the dying zombie animation and or helping Justin with whatever he needs help with.

Class 73

Today I started to finish up the zombie death animation. I started by adding in the missing frame from yesterday making the animation look more smooth in its current state. The second still image is the start of the fifth frame is unfinished sadly so that means i'm working on it tomorrow.
My animation process has slowly turned into chopping off limbs, bending them in ways that break them, then fixing them, then sticking them onto/into other bodies. As gruesome as it sounds its pretty effective. Basically what it consists of is multiple layers, each layer having a different limb. This gives me the ability to change the limbs angle, rotation and size, all without breaking the rest of the image. This technique has definitely sped up my animating. So tomorrow I will I attempt to finish my dying animation once again. Its pretty close to being finished, not really. It could be awhile. Maybe a week. However the extra time has really helped me get to know just how hard it is too animate and create sprites. Honestly this whole game developing process has given me a greater respect to game developers. Next class I also might ask Ty about his animating process and program, all I know is he bought it on sale, and that basically what his program does is it takes pictures and connects them together and allows them to rotate. This style of animation not only looks very different from mine but is also done very different from mine. It's almost like pivot I believe. Either way I'm going to try to remember to ask him about it next class.
I also helped Justin fix a house sprite made by Howie, the house sprite was designed in a almost 3D fashion, which doesn't fit our 2D game. So I helped Justin squish the garage back into a 2D space making it fit with the game.



This is the missing frame.


This is the unfinished frame


This is the animation in its current state 

Class 72

Today I continued my work on the zombie death animation, despite my late arrival I managed to complete 4 more frames to the animation. However one of the frames had a saving problem, I saved it and it showed up in a different file format. I tried to open the file in PS but it just denied me access because photo PS cannot open that file type, I then proceeded to find the file and determine what it actually was, but somehow when I clicked on it again it vanished. SO my animation today has a frame in the middle looks slightly rushed, or jumped, however you want to say it. It just looks bad around the third frame of the animation. Tomorrow I will recreate my missing frame and attempt to once again finish up the animation.

Class 70

Today I decided I would make some more animations, I started off using Gamemakers sprite editor tools, but then quickly switched over to Photoshop. I switched over to PS because Gamemakers sprite editor tools aren't very advanced and only allow a certain degree of photo editing.


One of the biggest perks from doing the animations in Photoshop is the ability to move parts of the pictures rotation individually within layers. The only downfall to using Photoshop is the speed that I can make frames, in Gamemaker I just hit a button and it starts me on my next frame, and shows me a little preview. But in Photoshop each frame is a separate PSD. This can really slow the process of animating, for example I only managed to create two frames today. And to make a preview GIF of the frames I had to manually switch between the two pictures after lining them up. So this is the zombie death animation in its current state, it looks more like a vulgar dance move. But it is a work in progress and is only two frames long. Tomorrow I will definitely continue my work on this animation so it doesn't look like air thrusts anymore.  

Class 69

Today is the first day back from winter break so we didn't do much work because we needed some time to get our crap back together. We also started to experience some technical difficulties with Gamemaker studios, Howie believes it is something to do with a windows 10 security update. Either way Howie managed to fix it on his own computer and is now attempting to fix it for everyone. This problem isn't the end of the world though, because we haven't been working on this game for a long time, so we have kind of lost our way, so the extra time to plan what we are doing next is good. Looking back on my old blog posts I can see that we were doing particle effects not for anything specific but more as an experiment. Next class i'm not sure if we will continue on particle effects, but most likely will because that is what we were doing before. So yes, next class Justin and I are doing particle effects, or at least we plan on it, who knows though, our plans change all the time. Basically what we have all learned from this is that MONDAYS suck. Seriously.





Some comments on doing work tomorrow.

" Can I sleep instead? "
     - Justin Hunt, 2016

" What work? "
     - Simran Sran, 2016

" Can I get a comment? "
     - Nick Fleming, 2016