The BitBull Blog

Another 1.5 days or so in and, surprise surprise, things aren’t going as quickly as I would like. This is mainly due to the art though which always takes me ages. There won’t really be that many main character animations in the game I guess so I might as well make the one’s that are there as good as I can get them (with my limited pixel-pushing ability).

First off the main ‘riding the board’ anim. This looked OK in Photoshop but in-game it didn’t seem to work. Seemed too wobbly and unnatural. Looking at a few vids people stay pretty still on skateboards/surfboards when they’re riding them and only wobble about when they’re going to fall off!

So after much trial and error I decided to ditch any kind of movement when the player is riding the board. I replaced this with three key positions that vary depending on how fast the board is moving. As the board moves quicker the player leans back more. I also added a couple of ‘spring’ frames so that when the board thrusts upwards the player ducks down slightly. The combo of these two things seems to work pretty well – though I’m not sure if the ‘leaning back’ position is too much ‘walk like an egyptian’! Any more animation just looked too ‘wobbly’ (that’s the trouble with having an 18*18 sprite, it’s very hard to do subtle movements).

Next up was the controls themselves. I was quite keen on this being a ‘two button’ only game but using the same button for thrust and reverse (long press for reverse) just wasn’t working. It was too easy to reverse by accident and too natural to expect holding ‘thrust’ to keep thrusting. So I’m moving to a three button system where the button left will be ‘reverse’, bottom right ‘thrust’ and top ‘fire’. This is pretty easy to play on the iPad but I’m a bit worried fat fingers will get in the way of the gameplay on smaller phones (such as the older iPhones which seem tiny now)!

A knock-on effect of this is that thrust now works based on a continual applied force than a single impulse so I had to tweak the various parameters involved until this felt right. I’ve ended up with less thrust being applied as you reach terminal velocity so there’s a kind of curve going on. I’ve no idea whether this follows the laws of physics but it certainly feels nicer form a gameplay perspective.

Last but definitely not least in terms of time was getting the ‘jump’ action correct. A core feature of the game is that your jetboard becomes a weapon when you’re not riding it so this has to look and feel right.

Getting the basic movement was pretty easy – pressing fire causes an impulse which make the jetboard fly dead straight for a certain distance (so it’s easier to aim). Getting the player to jump and return to the board was also very straightforward (there’s a bunch of scenarios you have to think about but none of them present and major issues).

What wasn’t so simple was getting the ‘jump’ animation for the player to work. As the jump movement is done in code it’s very hard to preview this in Photoshop so I felt I was kind of working blindly. My first effort (which took ages) wasn’t too awful but felt more like a weird mid-air run than a jump. In the end I had to make the animation sequence fairly complex – we start with a kind of ‘run’ movement which is played again in part as the player reaches the zenith of the jump, the anim then transitions to a ‘descent’ position which is held until the player lands back on the board. When he lands a short ‘spring’ animation is played.

I’m pleased with the way this works now though I’m sure it could still be better and will gladly take any comments! I messed around with the frame timings a lot. Will probably come back to it but it’s time to move on.

Next up – probably adding some really simple enemies to test targeting and a simple lose life/new life loop.

Dev Time: 1.5 days
Total Dev Time: approx 6 days

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