Wow, reviewing some indie titles? I hear this game is nice.

Big update!

Here’s a video of an alpha test of Conjurer: Wrath of the Arcane. All the levels have been constructed! You get to see what a few stages look like in each level. I’m especially proud of the lava and ice levels. It’ll get even better once I add things like bubbling magma, stormy clouds, and sandy gusts of desert wind.

Next up is developing enemies, attacks, and bosses!

In other news… all the noise I’ve been rattling on about making my Actionscript engine a blit-based engine has proven to be a big waste of time. Shock and dismay! I was really looking forward to seeing a marked improvement in CPU performance by keeping all assets as BitmapData and drawing whatever I need onto a big Bitmap canvas. Turns out it gives the same kind of performance (or less!) as using standard MovieClips. Bummer!

Ah well, that’s how it goes I guess. Now I get to have fun developing the game’s enemies and bosses. This project is really coming together! Let’s hope I can get most of this project wrapped before Fall quarter starts up at UC Irvine.

I LOVE the Soul Calibur series! Though, Ivy looks weirder and weirder with every new release. Those boobs are gonna pop!

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.