Haven’t played them since the originals in the 90’s.

I have a horrid confession to make. Despite the fact that I’ve been animating for a long time now, I have almost zero experience animating particle-based sprites like smoke, fire, water, steam, etc. It’s something I’ve always should have done on the side, but never did. I wasn’t classically trained as an animator, so I never actually ran the gambit of animating every form of motion. There’s a reason why they have schools for this stuff.

I simply have to practice, but I’m not very good. For example, take this first attempt. I wanted to animate a small explosion. It ended up being more of a *poof!* than a bang. Ah, well. I threw some filters on it to play with the color and blurs. Since I’ll be utilizing a blitting approach within the core engine design, I should be able to throw 35 filters on these sprites and not suffer the CPU overhead. That should look nice… or amateurish. We’ll have to wait and see.

In the mean time, I guess I’ll record a video of some old favorites like Marvel vs Capcom/Street Fighter and study their flames, bangs, pops, dust and punch effect sprites.

Wow, it’s been a while since the last Conjurer post, and for good reason. The final artwork for level 4 is complete. Finally! Ye gods it was starting to get old. As I said before, this final level will utilize all of the new magic that the main character acquires throughout the game.

This feels so good! Now I can finally get into the fun stuff. Enemy AI, animation, particles, blitting… joy!

MaestroRage, the musician for Conjurer has almost completed all of the music and everything sounds fantastic! The end is drawing near. It’s all winding down! Now all I need to do is get this up and running before the Large Hadron Collider dooms us all! Yay physics!

Oh yeah, and another good reason why I’ve been quiet for so long is… well… because I got married over the weekend. More pics coming soon!

I guess he went to E3 this year.