Animated Screen Shots

So I think it's time for an update, it's been awhile so I'll have to dig through everything we did since last time.

I made my own built in screenshot taker for the game which outputs ordered bitmaps to a file. And along with this, I was able to make it record each frame so that I can compile them into an animated gif of the actual gameplay of the game.

So we've been adding in different gameplay elements for the grasslands area. I can't believe we are still working on this same area, we are itching to get into the more interesting areas, but we want to make each part of the game as good as we possibly can. Anyway here are some of the new things:

A pretty basic new element is the bouncing blant, which isn't anything too new to platformers but a basic part of platforming.

A turtle-like creature who walks around and blows wind out through a hole in his back.



A new enemy.

And a funny glitch that I decided to record. When I was adding in the ability for the bird to shoot pellots out of his mouth, I accidently made him shoot out other birds! That's just crazy! Birds don't shoot other birds out of their mouths! Believe me, I know, I watch Animal Planet.

The other thing that has taken up a lot of time recently, has been rewriting the entire companion system. Because the original game idea has changed so much and the companions were one of the first things I put in, they were long overdue for a reworking. I managed to get most of it finished and back up to the state that it was in before, but this time a lot better. So now the dog follows you a lot better and hardly ever misses a jump, making 'teleporting' back to you less common. Flying companions following you now looks a lot more naturual and not as jumpy as before. I'm still going to work on some tweaking of the companion AI but for the most part I am done with that.

So I moved back to working on the cutscenes and the actual game content. I started building the next section of levels a little bit, I plan to do the whole rest of the grasslands next week. I also added in the next couple of cutscenes, which are very time consuming to create, and realized that we needed a better way to organize the story and map out the game. For the most part right now we are remembering it all up in our brains. So we decided to write out a document that has an outline for all the characters, every cutscene, and every area in the game we need to create. I started working on it today and got a solid 4 and a half pages done so far. Unfortunatley it only leads up to about five minutes in gamplay (though a lot of it was history of the story before the game even starts.) So this document is probably going to take a while, but it will be worth it.

Hmmm what else did we do since last post? Oh yeah this!


Another awesome piece of work by Gutter.

Ok well I think I'm going to leave it at that for now. There will be more updates soon.