I loved God of War, though I can’t imagine playing it on such a small screen.

Here it is! Many of you out there have been waiting for this for quite a while. Watch as I flesh out the final run cycle for the main hero. If this is your first time on the site, check out this previous entry where I rough out the sequence. The animation in this video builds off of it.

How exciting! The first major piece of animation is complete, and without trying to sound too self-congratulatory I think it looks fantastic! Now that I have a general style of motion as a point of reference, I can quickly begin filling in the rest.

As you’ll see, I use line art drawn in the flash authoring environment to create the artwork for each frame. Some people out there might say that using the paintbrush is faster and easier, to which I completely agree. But, there’s a trade-off. Drawing a circle using the Paintbrush tool and filing it with the color red actually has 3 pieces of vector information: the outside edge, the inside edge, and the shape of the red fill. Because of that, the artwork takes up almost twice as much memory, which becomes more processor intensive to redraw on the screen every 1/30th of a second. I intend to have a lot of things going on at once in MageQuest, including particles and swarms of enemies. Flash tends to choke easily. The developers gave up fast screen rendering to accommodate a small file size for the Flash plug-in, so the best strategy to getting what you want is to make things as simple as possible.

Using Flash’s line art goes beyond file size. It also assures a certain amount of consistency. The join and cap properties of a line can be modified to give a very crisp, smooth appearance. It scales very well, whereas the paintbrush will produce some unwanted jagged edges unless you go through with a magnifying glass and fix it yourself. Therefore, if I ever decide to go High Def with this game (**cough** XNA port when complete **cough**), the artwork and animation will easily transfer.

One of the only bad parts to using line art is that it takes longer. Therein lies the trade-off to using it. Do you want it quick and dirty, or slow and clean? I’ve become rather patient since I first began working in animation, so slow and clean for me, thank you.

Let me know what you guys think! Sorry about how much the video squirrels around. I have Auto-Pan turned on in CamStudio, which is a nice feature, but when sped up to 600%, it can get a little disorienting. If you like, you can watch this video in higher quality on the YouTube page. Just click on the YouTube icon within the video to take you there.

Update: Here’s the updated engine with the new run cycle.

I get a kick out of people looking at the latest demo of the platform engine and saying, “Hey, he’s just floating around! Where’s the walking animation!” Some of you think I should have held off until a later version. Then I realized that y’all in the real world don’t really see what was really accomplished in the platform engine debut. It wasn’t just a minor update, a lot of things were implemented all at once to get it working the way it is. Here’s a quick list:

- Add keyboard control to a GameCharacter, in this case, the main character.
- Add a GameCamera object that follows a GameElement object, in this case, the main character. It can be easily switched to follow a boss, or a projectile, an important clue, etc.
- Confine the GameCamera to the game’s level boundaries.
- Move the background to sync with the GameCamera.
- Convert the backgrounds from vector to BitmapData.
- Move the two background layers in parallax with the main stage to give the illusion of depth.
- Load a separate platform level.
- Make the Hero interact with it, allowing him to stop falling if he encounters a floor, and stop walking when he encounters a wall.

So, it may just look like a simple update, but in all actuality a lot went into making it happen. There is still a lot of work to do to get this thing refined to my standards of gameplay, but you’ll get to see all of those steps too!

I have to study for an Algorithm Analysis Midterm, but soon after I’ll be making YouTube videos of pretty, fleshed out run cycles!! So exciting!!

I can’t wait to see this one!

The platform engine prototype is finally complete. This is the first time I’ve completed one for AS 3.0, and once again the new language and syntax threw a couple of wrenches into the gears. No matter. Now I can go about refining it. Go ahead and play around with it. The left and right arrow keys move the character. The up arrow key to jump. There are still a couple of glitches and jumpiness here and there, but nothing I don’t already know how to fix. I’m incredibly pleased at how much of a small load it puts on the CPU. Let’s hope it stays that way once I introduce frame-by-frame animation.

Now on to fleshing out those run and jump cycles I recorded earlier on YouTube.