The Work Continues

It's been slow and steady on the game-front but I am getting somewhere. The final animations for the Wizard should (fingers crossed!) be finished this Wednesday.

All the code for how he animates is done already so it's just a case of dropping the graphics in place. I'll then upload a little video to show how he moves :)

I've done a bit of work on the HUD which is quite simple but shows the Wizards health bar and Magic Power bar. As mentioned in a previous post, when the Wizard fires his wand the Magic Power bar will decrease. This seems to work well but will need some tweaking when the "real" enemies are in place.

After that we need to move onto the first set of tiles for the "Edge of the Forest" scene/level. This will be at the very start of the game and will be where our Wizard hero first sees the Castle.
This will be a very short (scrolling) level but will include a rather large monster - friend or foe?? You'll just have to wait and see !

It's a Kind of Magic

This is a little screenie showing our wizard firing his wand. I need to record a bit of video footage to really show off the animation but you can see that when he fires his wand he jumps up in the air slightly as though he's struggling to control the power that he's unleashing.

I've also been thinking about how the firing of the wand will work. For now you can just keep your finger down on fire and have a massive blast of magic (like above). This looks great but I thnk it will make the game very easy as even from the start you'll have quite a powerful weapon.

One idea is to have an energy bar that depletes when you fire. If you keep your finger on fire it may last 10 seconds before you have to let go and let it charge up again. Short bursts of magic won't affect the energy bar.

It's probably far too early to decide and I'm sure the design of the game will go through many changes, but it's good to try a few things out to see which one fits.

Animated Wizard

Above is a few animation frames from the main player wizard character. Obviously he looks wonderful when in action but you'll have to make do with this screenie for now.
Still loads of work to be done on him including his special stealth animation which I think is going to be really fun and look fantastic.

For now the working title of the game is "Colmar".
There's a good reason why it's called this but I won't go into the details for now.

Wizards Head!

This is the face/head of our main wizard character. The one on the left is the real size and the one on the right is zoomed in.

Adam is working really hard at getting the style right. The first design was a bit too cartoony, which was mainly down to me not explaining what was required. I'm really pleased with how he's starting to look now.

Hopefully his full body and some animation will follow this weekend. There's quite a lot of animation for this character so it's going to take some time. He's also got some nifty "special moves" which I can't wait so see when fully animated.

I'm on Fire . . .

. . . said the song.

Currently working on the firing routine for our main character. I want something quite spectacular so have gone with a bit of a particle routine to create a kind of fire effect. It's looking really nice so far but needs tweaking a bit.

It should look really good when it explodes out of the wand. Yes, a wand! The clever one's among you will now have guessed that the main player character is a wizard. More on that soon.