Hm it seems we are moving to another workshop, but keeping all the progress we made in this one. I welcome more time to work on the game though! As it stands I have just turned in module 6 and hope to move on to 7. A new workshop will give more time to add some of those little extras I have tacked on the end of my game design document!

Progress to date for the game:
Most of the assets for the first level and introduction screen are done. We have road tiles, trees, an enemy castle, a friendly castle, and the basic troop frames done.

On the programming side of things we have some basic AI up and running, troops move towards bases and charge enemies if they get within a certain range. Next up is getting them to fight to the death in certain situations.

All in all things are moving along nicely, but we still have a ways to go. We need more maps and sounds, possibly some more units (extras). I put an initial guess at the game being around eight levels.

Hope to see some other students accompany me to the next workshop, and for others reading this I hope my ramblings help in some way!

And Module 5 was a success! In module 6 we are refining the sprite sheets further for a final draft of the animation cycles. In my case the feedback was: The knight animations look a little jittery and jump around a bit, also it was not clear what was happening in the death animations (not enough movement). These changes should not take too long to make... I just go into photoshop and bring up the frames, make my tweaks, and import them back into flash files en mass. Then I save the files, gather em up again and seek more feedback or move on to the next module. I plan to do one set a day, so by the end of this week (Sunday) I should have another submission for the workshop if all goes well.

With less than 3 weeks to go in the workshop I am putting my foot on the gas so to speak to see if I can rise to the challenge of finishing it in time. It was a slow start, but now I am gunning for the home stretch, Module 9 is the final module and it is my goal to make it there!

Whew, Module 5 was a lot of work. Not only did I have to add a lot to my sprite sheets to make better animations but I also had to find sound effects for said animations. I looked around and found a couple good ones at http://soundbible.com/ but for the most part I ended up creating custom sound effects with Audacity (.wav recording program) and adobe soundbooth. I also got news today that the workshop ends in 3 weeks, and there are 4 modules to go! thankfully I think the last two are wrapup modules but it will be a busy time coming up that is for sure.

So I made it to module 5. It is basically refining my sprite sheets to create better animations. So those 6 frames from the knight sheet turned into this:

First column is the new attack animation, second the new walk, third the new death animation. Each animation used to be only 2 images each, now it is a lot more and thus brings more life to the character. The all combine to create something like this for an overall character animation:

 Diving into Module 4 discussion:

"Let's get the art and development team sharing information on what it takes to display animations in the game. How do sprite sheets work? How are the sprite sheet assets created? What is the optimal format for the sprite sheet?" - Westwood

A three part question eh? Well, first off sprite sheets are basically a grouping of images that change slightly to create the animations we all know and love in games. For example a walk animation has to have the feet, arms, and even head move each step. Each stage of the animation is a separate image. All these images in one place create a sprite sheet for the movements of a character.

Creating a sprite sheet is usually done in a graphics program such as Photoshop. You want to copy an original image and move parts of it slightly to make a realistic animation (too much and it is jerky, too little and the movement is too slow). The sheet can then be tested to be sure it is all working properly in Flash or some other program that can combine the images in the form of frames to create a movie clip of the animation. The links in this module go to programs or sites that help put these sheets into some form of order. With more complicated sprite sheets this might be necessary (though with the one I posted I think I got it under control).

The optimal format for a sprite sheet seems to be a PNG image with the sprites that make up an animation evenly spread out. When discussing this with my partner they requested that each sprite be the same size as well. So in my case each sprite was 64X64 pixels, so each frame of the animation is that size. The reason that the images are PNG are so that you can see the background, since PNG supports transparency layers.

It seems I already have most of this under wraps, but I will see what sort of feedback I get from the instructors on my submission in a bit.

Moving on to module 4! It appears this module focuses on the sprite sheets. While the last focused on model sheets like this one:

It could use a bit more polish, but was my overall best. I think I will try and make this one portfolio worthy over the weekend and then move on to refining the sprite sheets.

So far here is what I have for a sprite sheet:

The black and red are the enemy troops while the grey/cyan are player troops. From top to bottom the animations for said sprites are: Idle, right foot, left foot, ready to attack, attack, death. I uploaded these to adobe aftereffects to test out animating the sprites with these poses. The right and left foot alternating can make a walk animation, while the others are poses for actions or events in the game. I look forward to seeing how I can improve these with the resources mentioned in module 4. So next week I get to work with animating in flash and plan to submit a swf file by the end of the week.

Whew big update, moving forward with things though and I am starting to think of features that will make my game idea unique and fun. Time to kick back and enjoy the weekend for now though!

This week I focused more on sprites. I had the concept art, so now it is down to model sheets and deciding how they will look in game. I will probably just use very simplified graphics rather than 3D models, though 3D models have the advantage of being easier to animate. In this case I just plan to have different poses to signify events like attack and defend, maybe an in between frame or two to smooth it out.

My partner has made a list of the assets we need and I already have a good start on that list. I look forward to getting the basics done for the sprites next week and maybe looking a bit more into the storyline of the game.