The development on Blockadillo continues, here is the first devlog. This week we did a lot of work on the animations and the platforms. We started with simple sprite based animations of a torch. This was hacked together in a few hours including support in our self made editor. This is what it looked like:
To juice things up a bit we added a particle system that consists of four different emitters. The first two emit dark and light smoke, both with the same cloudy 24x24 pixel texture. The other two emitters randomly emit red and orange sparks. This results in a nice smoke effect:
Pleased with the results of the animations we went on to create platforms. After a little brainstorming we came up with the following requirements for platforms:
* We want to support at least 2 directions (up/down, left/right)
* We want some graphical indication where a platform is moving to
* We want at least 2 modes of movement of the platform (back/forth, onetime, circular)
We started with the graphics of the platforms and made four different tiles that could be used to create a variety of different platforms:
In the editor we had to create a new move component that could be added to a Sprite to make it behave like a platform
In the screenshot you can see the four waypoints of the selected platform. Currently it is in the mode "back and forth", which means it moves from one waypoint to next until the last one is reached and then it moves back to the first one. The initial direction is "forth" and the speed is set to 25 px per second.
In the next screenshot you can see how the movement range of the platform is indicated via the wheels and the rope.
We are pretty happy with the results and will now move onto the next things on the todo list. The next weeks will show if the platform editor is sufficient to create new and exciting levels.
