Day 2 Progress
I intended to do a bit more feature coding work today but started getting wrapped up in player animations. The main character is probably the most complex animated thing in this game and is the center of what the player see's the most, so spending extra time cleaning up art and creating the animation base isn't a bad thing. First up I added some new sprites and modified the existing ones a bit. The 'Down' and 'Up walks work fully and their timings were tweaked so the player doesn't look like they're sliding. Placeholders were started for left/right and a new idle look around was added spur of the moment when inspiration struck during the drawing of the side animations:
Code was added to support input for the left/right movement and A LOT of time was spent getting those idle looks to work right. They're tossed in at random intervals and look pretty cool, if this were a full game I'd probably do them for the Up/Left/Right walks too (maybe I will later). Right now the Animation window is a bit of a mess but it works well (except for one little bug that isn't a big deal during the look animation exit transition):
Note, even though I use the name 'Chris' it was just a quick placeholder. I intended to make the character sprite somewhat gender "neutral" so the player didn't focus on it and just focused on what the character was going through.
That's pretty much it for today, doesn't seem like a lot but definitely some quality additions. Once I draw the animations for left/right and hook them into place the player movement should be pretty well completed. And since this is a game about walking around investigating I'd say that's a pretty great thing. Onward!