Major decision since the last update – I’ve decided to completely redo my main character!
If you’ve been following on TIGSource or Twitter you probably already know this (and might have even helped me out with the decision) but as the visual style of the game has progressed I’ve become increasingly unhappy with what was the main character. Even though I liked the design and animations in their own right they didn’t seem to fit with the way the game was developing – so it was time to go back to the drawing board.
I wanted to go for something smaller and more obviously ‘pixelly’. Ironically (given it took me about two and a half hours to design a floor tile last week) I managed to come up with something I was happy with in about three minutes(!) Feedback from Twitter and TIGSource was good so I went ahead and took the plunge.
Redoing the animations took longer but wasn’t too painful. What I did notice when I tried the new design in-game was that everything looked kind of too small so I’ve bumped up the pixel scaling a notch. I think it looks much better like this.
Working with a smaller character and fewer pixels means that even a one pixel shift in an animation looks more extreme, consequently some of the animations are now much simpler. The jump animation in particular hardly animates at all – whatever I tried looked too much.
Lastly, as you’ll see from the images, I tried a new jetboard as the old one was always kind of a placeholder. Whilst I quite liked this it looked weird when the change was made to the rocket jetboard for the ‘weaponised boost’. As a consequence I think I’m going to leave the jetboard in rocket form all the time and change it when you pick up different weapons.
Dev Time: 0.75 days (including project setup)
Total Dev Time: approx 17.5 days
The New Guy – Simple Vertical Thrust
Now He’s Picking Up A Bit Of Speed
Riding The Rocket Board And Weaponised Boost
Falling Off
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