Day 1
I'm going to start off by saying that I'm really proud of my progress today! A lot of what I did wasn't actually too complicated, but I still had a lot of trouble with some of it, and figuring it out was a really great feeling. :')
I started out the day by trying my hand at some pixel art:
This is Mari. She's the first pixel art character I've ever made! I probably won't animate her for a good while because making just the one frame was already a work out. In making Mari, I tried limiting myself to just a few colors. I'm going to try and make Mari Quest using just colors from the NES's color palette, which has been a fun restriction.
Mari can do a few things. Like jump!
Mari's not the best jumper, but she can get around okay. However, sometimes when she jumps weird things happen. For example...
Ahaha. I would like to say that this was an intended feature, but I think I might have just programmed her jumping weird. This is something I'm going to try and fix tomorrow, hopefully.
Mari can do more than jump though! She also knows magic!
She can cast magic in three whole directions! Whoa! I think at some point she will even be able to cast magic when crouching. Also, if you haven't noticed the HUD yet, it displays Mari's health and energy, which she uses to cast spells. I had a lot of trouble trying to figure out how to properly implement these variables in Stencyl. At first, I tried making it an actor attribute, but then displaying it was super complicated. Then I tried making an invisible actor to display the information, except that you couldn't see the actor behind the black bar and when the actor tried to access Mari's attributes they both displayed as "NULL." Eventually, I figured out if I made Mari's health and energy game attributes, then they could be globally accessed by both scenes and actors without issues. So now when Mari casts her spells, her energy decreases. When it hits 0, she can't use her magic. It'll recharge on its own if she waits around though.
(Currently Mari's health doesn't change unless I hit the enter key. This is purely for debugging purposes.)
What does Mari use her magic for? Right now, just for hitting targets.
After 3 hits, the target "dies." Look at Mari do a little victory hop at the end. She really hates targets!
That's all I've implemented today. Tomorrow, I'm going to try and work on Mari's jumping. More than that I'm not sure! It depends on how long it takes to fix the jumping bug, I guess.
Thank you for reading!