What's new this fortnight?
Releasing on Steam Greenlight involved a lot of tweaks and polish. The week before I filmed the trailer, there were still placeholder graphics for the main characters:
The graphics for the character don't change the gameplay, and so they'd been left alone while I worked on more important things.
Obviously this was going to have to change!I re-drew the characters in HD, ran the graphics through the GIMP export script, and dropped in some animation files from my Kickstarter trailer. Voila - the characters came to life! It was sufficient to film the trailer, but some rough edges and unwieldy file importing meant I had to make a few extra changes this week.
Puzzles : 3 co-op / 2 stand-alone
Objects : 8 tutorial / 9 ship
Animations
During the development of the trailer, I implemented a whole bunch of tweaks and changes to get everything looking polished. I've been going through and ensuring that these are bug-free, then merging them into the main development build. The character animations imported nicely, but even with only a handful of different actions I started running into problems.The animation file is stored as plain text, and looks a bit like this:
It's all generated by my blender export script, except for the names of the animations. These names are used by the game to play the correct action, and because there are only a few, I've been adding them by hand.
Unfortunately, each time I changed something in one of the animations, I had to go back and add in all the names again. This started taking longer than I liked, and made me think twice about tweaking the animations. One of the most helpful changes I made this week was therefore a small but important one:
I discovered things in Blender called animation markers, and exported them along with the rest of the file.
Instead of worrying about the time it takes to create and export animations, I can have an animation up and running in the game within about 10 seconds. I've already gone through and animated everything in the first level that can possibly move, and now I'm excited to start work on the next!
Watch this Space
With character animations out of the way, I'll be fixing some of the issues with the HD version - including the problem that some of the assets are too big to fit in memory. Alongside these cosmetic changes, I'll try to find some time to work on the ship puzzles and gameplay.
If you'd like to keep up with the development, remember to head over and subscribe to the development blog. Updates are also posted to Facebook, and I'm trying to tweet more about the development procces on Twitter. And as always, if you've got questions or comments just leave them below.
