Some monsters still have heart :D

Today I got another three monsters done. I really like the way that these came out, my favorite has to be Lovesick Heart.

Name : Lovesick Heart

Speed : 3

Strength : 5

Sexy : 1

Uncommon






Name : Bower Hat Brawler

Speed : 3

Strength : 4

Sexy : 2

Uncommon









Name : Atomic Waste

Speed : 2

Strength : 6

Sexy : 1

Uncommon

And the creatures keep on coming!

Got a few more finished today :D

Name : Old Lady Velma

Speed : 2

Strength : 2

Sexy : 8

Rare

Name : Manly Beans

Speed 3

Strength : 3

Sexy : 6

Rare






Name : Ac-U Puncture

Speed : 4

Strength : 3

Sexy : 2

Uncommon

Name : Gentleman Cannon

Speed : 4

Strength : 4

Sexy : 1

Uncommon

Guess it's all about the flesh color

So I had some more time today so drew up three cards for the card game I'm developing.

 Name : Weedle The Needle

Speed : 5

Strength : 3

Sexy : 1

Uncommon

 Name : Surly Mop

Speed : 2

Strength : 2

Sexy : 2

Common

Name : Tonne of Flesh

Speed : 1

Strength : 4

Sexy : 1

Common

A few more Monsters

I've been working at an internship recently so I haven't had much time for side projects. Today I thought I'd a few more monsters finished for a card game I'm making in my spare time. I used some pencil sketches I'd already done up to base these off of. I used the pen tool to outline everything, then colored it. They won't have to animate at all, since they're pictures on cards, so I made them all graphics instead of MovieClips. This will save a little on memory when using them in the game.

 Name : Bucket Bill

Speed : 1

Strength : 3

Sexy: 2

Common

 Name: Super Fat Cute Cat

Speed : 1

Strength : 2

Sexy : 6

Uncommon

 Name : Unlikely Pear

Speed : 1

Strength : 2

Sexy : 3

Common

Name : Warpen Worm

Speed : 7

Strength : 3

Sexy : 2

Rare

Name : Moo Moo Monster

Speed : 2

Strength : 3

Sexy : 1

Common

Name : Sassy Slug

Speed : 1

Strength : 2

Sexy : 3

Common






Name : Motorized Cityscape

Speed : 4

Strength : 1

Sexy : 1

Common

Concept Art

This is some concept art for a mini game that I'm designing.  These are going to be different cards in that game.

Name: Sir Nom
Type: Uncommon

Speed: 2
Strength: 5
Sexy: 2

Name: Tony Trapper
Type: Common

Speed: 2
Strength: 3
Sexy: 1










Name: Party Crasher
Type: Rare

Speed: 5
Strength: 2
Sexy: 5

And then things get artisy

I'm nearing the end of major programing, I still have several things I have yet to build and some parts of the code I'll have to rebuild for better performance however the majority of it is behind me. I got the stat bars art redone, still rough but it now is more along the lines of what I want. I also redid a lot of the buttons with roughs of what I'd like the final version to be. On the instructions page I did some basic color fills for the book, just so you can't see through it. I also updated the instructions page background and redid the art on the garbage pile, rabbits foot and skateboard.

Some bugs that I fixed included the savings box not being killed when the rest of the boxes were. I had an error where the first and second jump power were getting reset to 15, I found a place where I had hard coded that number earlier before I had tweaked with it. I had an error when the percentage that was being saved on the lives wasn't showing up, turns out my math was a little off. I had some trouble with hit detection and  the man hole however once that was working it wasn't a problem. I also has a bug where you could super-fall at a moving cart and either phase through it or go about half way before shooting back up, this was fixed extending the detection rage and changing a multiplier to match that of the max fall speed multiplier in super-fall.

Some things that I've added are manholes that appear in the later levels, they are open to different extents depending on the current level, their position on the screen is also randomly generated ever reset. I added in darkmatter which is needed to super-fall, and it can be purchased along with other equipment at the shop. I added in a falling animation to the manhole along with a rough running animation to the rubbish. Finally I added the feature of being able to continue if you currently have extra lives, this unpauses the level and spawns a new rubbish. This would allow people to not have to replay a 2-4 minute level if they did near the end or got a really sweet drop of good garbage.

Carts hurt

Today I was mostly working on getting  the shopping cart up and running, but I also worked a little bit on the garbage generation system. While I was doing a test run I noticed that I was sometimes getting ten or more bad garbage in a row. I found this became frustrating  and boring very quickly so I knew I had to make it so that a good garbage would drop every few bad garbage, making sure there was always a goal on screen for the player to work towards. I had to partly rebuild my garbage generation system but it's defiantly for the better now. I was using a while loop to try and generate a piece of garbage, if the garbage selected was too expensive then it tried again. One problem with this was that only the good garbage had a chance of being rejected since the bad garbage doesn't take away from the remaining points for the current level. I fixed this issue by moving the while loop to inside the good garbage generation inside the general garbage generation function. This way if the good garbage was too expensive it would try for another good garbage instead of possibley spawning a bad garbage instead. I also put in a counter that, after four bad garbage have spawn makes it so it automatically spawns a good garbage next, just in case the random numbers keep coming back bad garbage.

For the shopping cart I have it so if your at the front and it hit, the cart bouncing back some and your rubbish is pushed the other way for a second. It also takes away one health when it hits. I get around having to make giant leaps over the whole cart I added in that if you land on the top of the cart it bounces you up to near the top of the screen, you can't jump any more after that but you can fall quickly if the down arrow is pressed. In the video that's posted the bouncing off the top of the cart hadn't been added yet.



The last thing I add is that once a jump is started you can only travel in one direction. After coding it though I didn't think it was as fun to jump around so I've commented it out for the time being, however I might change my mind after I've tweaked with the jumping some more.

Isn't Jumping Fun??

Today I worked some on the gravity levels, max fall speed and base jump power for the rubbish, I was finding that you couldn't jump high enough, and then you seemed to just float down. So after some tweaking I was able to find a level where there is still lots of room for upgrading your jump power but you still are able to go quite a lot higher. I also added in the functionality to the down button which allows the rubbish to descend rapidly from the air, faster then the max fall speed would normally allow, in case they need to hit a rat or grab a garbage that's below them. I think that I'm going to make an upgrade that allows you to do this instead of allowing the rubbish to do it from the start of the game.

I also added in a very basic cart which only appears after level 7. So far all it does is spawn on the right side, roll across the screen then kill itself once it's off the left side of the screen, however I plan on making it so if your rubbish gets hit by the side of the cart they take 1-2 damage. I was also thinking of allowing the player to bounce off the top of the cart if they are currently falling, this would add more strategy to the game along with extending the amount of time a player can stay up in the air, however they wouldn't get their jumps back.

Select Your Side

Today I've spend about 3-4 hours working on my game, I've gotten the double jump working, bad garbage can now hit and kill rats, and the level selection page is working.

For the double jump, I was having a hard time getting it to do what I wanted, but after taking a look at the code I've been trying to use I realized something, it would be far easier so just delete the guts of the function and start over. After looking back I saw just how complicated I had been making it, when in reality I was able to cut down between 5-10 lines of code and get it to work perfectly.

When I wanted to get the garbage to his the rats as well as the rubbish I first didn't think it would have to be done any differently then the hit detection I have for the garbage hitting the rubbish or the rubbish hitting the rats, however after did some thinking I had to consider that all the garbage and rats only has two targets they were looking for, one is the single rubbish and the other is the non-moving ground. This was easy enough to do if I just kept track of the rubbish's current x and y, along with it's height and width, but since there could be multiple rats and bad garbage I had to think of a different way. I ended up making a 2D array, with each position containing a smaller array containing information about that particular bad garbage. It has it's current x and y positions, it's width and height, if it's been removed from the screen(I used a Boolean) and it's name. This allowed my rat, every time it tried to move, to scan through this array using a while loop, checking to see if it was currently colliding with any bad garbage that was still on screen. The rat kills itself then modifies the array referring to the garbage that hit it, so when the garbage updates it see's that it's collided and shouldn't be on screen anymore so it kills itself.

The level selection page wasn't that much extra work because I've been coding this game so far so it works off what the current level it, so all I have to do when a different level is selected, is to then assign stats.currentLevel to the number of the button clicked. I did have a few problems trying to catch the event that was dispatched when a level was clicked but I was able to fix this by having my map page listen for the buttons on it, then dispatch it's own event to the main page controller when something was clicked. In order to place all the different level buttons using code but without taking too much time I ended up using 2D arrays again with a while loop. Each array inside the main array just contains the x and y position of each level button, this way all I have to do is change those two numbers, which are all in one location, in order to get the buttons to move around. I'm starting to use arrays more and I have to say they really cut down on not only the lines of code that I have to write, but it also makes it easier to go back and make changes later, if you arn't a big fan of arrays I'd really suggest finding a few tutorials and trying to slowly incorporate them into your projects, before long you'll hopefully find them as helpful as I do.

Book flipping

Today I spent a little bit of time working on getting my book for the instructions page up and running. I had to finish the final book section animation and then copy and reverse all the page flips so the pages can be flipped both back and forth. I then created a book class that contains all the functionality for the book so on the instructions page all I have to do is create it and call it's setUp function. I'm quite happy with how the coding went, I was able to sit down and get almost all the coding done without needing to test it much, the only thing I forgot to add the first time were if statements checking to make sure that when you went to move forward you weren't on the last page in that section, or when you went to move back that you weren't on the first page of that section. I'll come back and fill in the instructions once I more of the game completed. I built how it changes pages and sections so adding more of either wouldn't be too much work, if I want another section I'll have to do a little more rough drawing for page and section flipping.

Mini me

I've been working on getting the mousetraps to work, killing a rat if it's ready when the rat walks past it. I also have it so once the trap has been released, a counter starts that doesn't allow the trap to be rearmed until a given amount of time has passed, which can be reduced by upgrading the mouse trap speed stat. Another thing that I worked on is getting it so the hit detection area for the garbage isn't based upon hard-coded numbers, but instead based upon where I place the top and right hit points, the bottom and left are based off the origin. This allowed me to remove the generic background I had been using as the basic hit box, and instead have the invisible hit box suited for each different shaped garbage. I also scaled down the size of just about everything, from the garbage and mousetrap, to the rubbish and rats. Lastly I've added in a background to the level that changes depending on which level the user is currently playing.


This is a video taken before most of the work was done described in this post.


This is a rough animation I did for the instructions book.

SO MANY RATS

So I've made some major strides with my Rubbish game over the past few days. I had a lovely fatal error that was causing my flash program to crash whenever it encountered the problem, the really annoying part was it was randomly happening and since it was crashing flash I couldn't even read the traces to find out where the error was located.

Luckily I had time and process of elimination by my side and after commenting out large, then progressively smaller chunks of code, I was able to find where the problem was located....i can only assume. The strange part was it had to do with my garbage spawning however the problem shouldn't have been one. To decide wither the garbage that was spawned was going to be good or dangerous I had a random number chosen, 1 or 2, using my randomNumber function. Then if the number was 1 I would make my isBad Boolean false, else i would make it true, I would then pass this along to my garbage class and it would use the Boolean to choose from the correct array of items. This should mean even if for some strange reason the randomNumber function was wrong and I got a number that wasn't 1 or 2, a garbage would still be created. If I always spawned a good garbage, flash wouldn't crash, and if I always spawned a bad garbage flash wouldn't crash, I just commented out the if statements and the randomNumber generation and hard coded in the true or flash in the setUp function of my garbage.

I was finally able to fix my problem by simply having the same code, but in my garbage class so the playScreen class would just spawn a garbage and then the garbage would figure out if it was good or bad, using the same method I was trying to use on the play screen. For some reason I haven't had a crash since even though it shouldn't make a difference wither I do the randomNumber and Boolean assignment inside garbage or outside and pass it in.

I was able to get rats added, with different amounts and types spawning depending on the current level the player is on. The rats move forwards and can only be killed if the rubbish jumps and falls on them. If a rat makes it all the way to your garbage pile alive, it takes the last item you caught, along with the number of points it's worth and runs off screen. Soon I'll be able to add a few more btns to the level select screen and I'll have my basic first five levels complete.

Let the trash collecting begin!

Over the past few days I've finished up the shop screen for now, adding in a pop-up window for buying your lives, stats and equipment. This shows what your saving if you've bought the bargaining chip and what the total cost is going to be. I've also made quite a lot or progress on the main game, the rubbish can now jump, can only move between two boundaries that I've set up, and he also has has health. Good and bad garbage falls from the top of the screen, so many good garbage fall on each different level, and the number of bad garbage that can fall is based upon that number. It currently counts down the number of good garbage left to fall, the amount you've caught and the ones you missed. Also when you get hit by a bad garbage your health goes down.

The level is finished once you either get hit and lose your last health, or once you've collected the last good garbage/let it fall to the ground. If you died or didn't meet the required good garbage points/ catches for that level then it only shows a 'try again' option and a 'level select' option, other wise if you've beaten the level then it shows a 'shop' and 'inventory' button as well.

I've also gotten some rough art done for the good and bad garbage, so it's easier to tell whats dropping while I'm building the game.

I'll update with pictures later.

Life's really just garbage

Today I worked on the lives page in the shop. I ended up adding several more stat boxes, one for current lives, cost of new lives your going to buy and the percentage saved with your bargaining chip. I also added a button for purchasing your new lives, along with several constraints. One constraint is the fact that you can't select more new lives then you currently have the garbage points to buy, and you each new life price is based upon the current number of lives you have plus the current number of new lives your trying to buy, this way someone won't just stock up on 100 lives at the start, it'll cost far too much, and the less lives they have 'floating' while they play the more points they'll have for buying stat upgrades and equipment.

New Game's a Load of Rubbish

Over the past few weeks I've slowly been starting on creating a new game, it's about a living trashbag and how it just wants to give other trashbags the gift of life! I've done some rough concept art and have also gotten about half of the menu working. Something that I'm doing differently with this game which I feel with help quite a bit is having most items have their own class. An example of is my general button class, I save myself a lot of lines by having the button set itself up after first creating it, then calling one function called startThis, it takes the x/y positions, the name of the button I want and the current movieclip that the button will be placed in. I have all the event listeners all set up by themselves for state changes and the only event I'm listening for is a custom event for when it's clicked. I hope to update this as I get more completed.

Demo Reel

The fights are starting to look fair :D

I've been able to get most of the combat done today. I added in the blood effects for the pistol, sub and shots along with adding in ammo for the sub and shot. I've decided that the player has unlimited pistol ammo, don't ask why or how just be thankful, this was mostly to get around the difficulty of some zombies and how both attacks were needed to get past some tougher zombies healing. I fixed the exp bar at the top and the addition of the exp for the final zombie kill. I also was able to greatly improve the zombie AI along with it's stats generating around a more reasonable level. I also added a combat stats screen that shows up once all zombies have been defeated, this shows you the exp you have, still need along with the ammo and money you've found and how much you now current now have. I have just a few finishing touches like adding a finished button to the combat stats screen. I also have to clean up some of the animations and attacks.

And the fights just keep getting better

So combat is moving along at a good pace, tomorrow should really be an interesting day. I was able to fix a bug so that all the weapons work for attacking the zombies. I also fixed an issue with the zombies blood, it was going out of sight when the zombie still had a few hp left. The problem was that the blood extended far enough past the bottom of the heart, so when the hp was at 1 or 2, it was just below the mask that was hiding the blood. I just had to go in and make the blood a little smaller and move it up some.

I got the experience bar at the top working, it adds the total experience that the player is going to get during a battle, filling the syringe up as more experience is gained. When the user is finished the battle, it fills up the rest of the way and injects the experience into the heart, I still have to clean up the animation a little and make it fill up quicker. I fill up the syringe using a timer event so I just have to shorten the delay on the timer.



One of the final things I was able to get working tonight was the button for eating your foodstuffs. When pressed it checks to see if the player has any foodstuffs left and if they do it plays the eating animation, then fills up their heart and restores all of their hp. When it's clicked all the event listeners are also removed for the weapon selection, and the two selection fingers are still moved.

Lastly I added some blood effects to the zombies attacks along with the zombie students death animations, this was done with frame by frame and the onion skin. I also got the blade and blunt weapons for the player to show blood, but the guns aren't working yet.  Tomorrow I'll be aiming to add in some smoke cover for when a new chibi appears, fix up the experience bar so that it's fully working, add in place that shows your level and an animation for leveling up. If I have time I'd also like to work some on the zombie AI so that it chooses it's attacks more randomly and that it's stats are a little more reasonable.

Nothing like a ruler to the face

I've been working away at the combat and have run into some very annoying problems, covering just about every part of my combat so far. However as of right now the player can start combat, a random number of zombies stumble into combat, if there is more then one it shows a chibi of the waiting zombie type. The player can select both their melee and gun, and once both choice are accepted the player does it's two attacks.

If the zombie is alive at this point the zombie then picks the attack it's going to do, or possibly even heal itself, and then plays the corresponding animation. The player can kill the zombie resulting in it's death animation and if there is a waiting chibi, it will walk forwards to take the previous zombies place. Once it gets to the right location, it stops moving, one of the three possible zombies from the chibi's zombie type is spawned and the chibi is removed. It then checks to see if there is another zombie waiting, if so it then adds another chibi and combat starts again.

Tomorrow I'm going to work on adding in the 'snack' option for players to heal themselves along with fixing the zombies healing so that it is fully effective. (See video for glitch)

I think you lost an arm there....

Working on combat, I have a lot of other projects on the go now so it's not going as quickly as I wanted. The zombie that appears is randomly selected however it's only currently from a list of three. A function is then called inside the enemy class that assigns all of it's stats like attack strengths, hp and lvl.
I was able to get to so that the player can scroll through the weapons they currently have, select which they want then attack. It plays the corasponding animation and the selected weapon appears in their hand. The 'blood level' in the zombies heart also goes down depending on what percent of it's maximum hp it's currently at. After the melee and gun attacks have been made it plays a function in the enemy class that; using data like it's different attack strengths, it's current hp, the players current hp and a bit of random math; chooses an attack and plays that animation for either it's ranged, melee or healing. I'll update with a video later :D

More rooms for trollin

So today I worked on allowing the player to walk around the whole map, both the math and science wing. I also set up the closet to give the person playing the zombie survival guide the first time they check it with a key. Some things that I'm going to have to clean up are the detection areas for the rooms and hallways and figure out a place to put the stats btn without covering up anything.  Tomorrow I am going to start on my combat, even though all the other quests still haven't been done yet. I want to focus on the combat this week and get that done, then I'll go and add all the quests and other people along later this week/early next week.

I had to rework two of the hallways a little bit and I still have some more work in order to clean them up. The doors and zombies in the windows for the middle upper hallways are a little too large so I'll make those smaller as well. I also have a bit of a problem with the user being able to get there person to walk on the edges of things like walls and lockers. This will just take some time cleaning up the hit detection areas so that enough space is left for the bottom of the person.

Overall I think after this week I should be mostly on track and I'll have enough time to finish the game while still being able to polish it some.

Navigation Test

I've started my navigation now, and so far the player can exit into the hallway, re-enter the room they were in and go into the classroom right beside the first one. I have different functions that I'm building that hold all the info needed to enter each room, allowing me to just call these functions when needed instead of having a lot of repeating code. I also have it set up so it checks which exit you're currently facing so there only has to be one event handler for for changing rooms with an if statement checking which exit they are facing and from which room they were exiting. I have see-through MovieClips over each room that has an event listener attached waiting for the user to click the location they want their person to walk to. I have this so that the user can't click and thus move their person outside the hallway and into the walls. I should be able to get all of my basic navigation done by early next week and then I can work on my combat for the rest of march break.:D

All I need is a little conversation

I've been working on building the conversation trees for my first NPC, along with the items that they give you for completing certain quests. Later I'll start working on leaving the first room and moving around the bottom level, slowly adding NPC's and their conversation tree's as I go. I'll post more later.

Walking can be frusterating

Today was a snow day and that can only mean one thing, lots of time for working on my self directed. I came over to the school at 12:30 and finished working at 6:30, in that time a was able to get my person to walk around the screen without being able to walk outside the bounds. I also got my first parent so that the student can walk over and talk to them, I've only gotten as far as the first conversation and accepting the first quest but I'm happy. The way I'm trying to build the code allows for things like the current room, npc and student that you're playing to be stored in a variable, allowing for a lot of the code to be used for all the rooms and parent/other student interaction, cutting back on the time it will take to add each room.

One major problem I was running into was getting the student you're playing as to walk where you click, while maintaining a reasonable speed. I ended up having to start a new test file to figure out what I needed, then copy it over to my main file and use the same structure but different variable names.

I'm really happy with how this is coming along and I can't wait to work on it more this week.

Saving reduces rage

Yesterday and today I've been working on getting my game to be able to save, and have two different slots that the user can choose to save to. I've played far too many games that only allow one save slot so I made sure to have at least two save slots. This allows for people to either save to different files and save, experiment then reload an old save, or for two people to play on the same computer and have their own save data.  I made the save slots into brains floating in a jar because it follows the zombie theme and you're saving your data to a 'brain' :D

It didn't give me too much trouble however it did take a lot of lines of code to get it working and to save all the data. This will only grow though as more and more variables are needed to keep track of what the person has done and where they currently are.
 I'm basically on track for my project, I've just started on the player movement, and don't think I'll have to put too much time this weekend into this project.

Screens Animated

This past week I've been working on the coding for the screen navigation. I've gotten the start, stats and end screens to work. For the start screen the user can navigate to the controls page, flip through those and then select if they want to start a new game or continue their saved game. I haven't written the code to allow for saving yet however that's the next thing I'll be working on. On the stats screen the user can flip through eh controls pages as well as go to the backpack pages, flip through and select which weapons out of the ones unlocked they'd like to select. It shows the weapons and upgrades that they've unlocked so far as well as the dmg that each weapon currently does. The final page under backpack shows how much of each item the user has as well as showing if the user has the lockpics, zombie survival guide or keys.


 

One more week

So it's the end of another week yet again, and I'm getting into the last leg for all the assets. Next week I should be collecting the needed sounds and finishing off any extra animations like muzzle flares for the guns and blood spats for the combat. I should be able to start some programming before the end of the week if nothing comes up, putting me basically back on track with my gantt chart.

I animated my main student today and added an idle at the start, it's simple enough and looks good so I'm probably going to go back and add one to each of the zombies. I can just set it to loop until they have to do something else, making sure that nothing is just standing still for too long.

I re-animated my janitor, the bone tool just wasn't working for me, but luckily I put to use what I had learned about animating using motion tweens so it wasn't too much trouble. It helped to copy and paste the bone tool animation I already had, into the motion tween movie-clip, and just lock it than place it behind everything to be used as a guide. I then set to the task of swapping out all the parts for the three different zombie animations that I was happy with. This doesn't take too much time and makes me really happy that I built my zombies to allow for quick swapping of parts.

Animation nation

Today has been all about finishing off my screens, animating them and animating the chibi's :) The only real problem I ran into was when I was using the same animation for all the zombie chibis and just swapping out the body parts. Everything was going great until I got to the final swimmer zombie, for some reason it stopped letting me grab the MovieClips and was forcing me to move their movement paths. Flash crash on my shortly after, I'd saved before trying to do the swimmer animation so I was all good, and I went on to just animate the swimmer from scratch.

Screens and fun

This week I've been working on the different screens for my game, from the start to stats, controls to backpack. I had to set up a movie clip for each object for the backpack pages. For the melee weapons and guns their had to be three frames, one that was blank, one that had just the weapon and one with the weapon and upgrade. This will allow for the backpack to reflect what the person currently has without showing them any weapons or upgrades that they haven't found yet. For the other items page several of the items are ones that the player has to collect a certain number of, because of this I allowed them to see the picture from the beginning and the number below each item reflects how many they currently have. Three of the items the player either has or doesn't and because of this I had two frames for these objects, so they couldn't see what it was until they had it. I also has to create some of the odd items that I had forgotten about until now like the ammo box, three different shell types, the keys, zombie survival book, science jar, money and foodstuffs. 

 

For the start page I created a small animation of the main student zombie moving every few seconds, as well as two animations of paper crumpling up when the user clicks on them, one if for starting a new game while the other is for continuing an older game. I'm almost done the pages, should complete them today, and then I'll just need to do the student animation and the chibi animations. Overall I'm about half a week behind on my gantt chart but I feel like I can put in some extra time this weekend and I should be able to catch up. 

Zombies are a go!

So all four zombie types have been animated, I still have to swap out the animations with the other zombie skins but that shouldn't take too long. I played around with the bone tool and I've currently learned a lot, though I don't know if it will be directly useful for this project.

I know now that you can only have one 'bone' for every movieclip, so in order to connect the arms to the shoulders and the legs to the hips, the torso has to be split up into 2-3 segments. I also learned that you animating more complex characters, which is just about all of mine, it's best to have knee caps and elbows to allow for the gaps to not be as evident. I also learned that color options- alpha isn't something that can be selected for 'boned' objects, unlike motion-tween'ed objects, so the movieclip containing the animation would have to be alpha'ed and that doesn't allow for individual parts to be alpha'ed.

Since I only animated one zombie using the bone tool, and will most likely go back and redo it later on, I had to do a lot more motion tween animations and along the way I learned a few things about those as well. When doing several animations in one movieclip( attack 1, attack 2, healing, death) it's best to copy and paste the start/end frame to start a new animation. This way if your animation points don't become too unmanageable and if something does screw up, it's limited to just that one animation, instead of messing up all the animations and forcing you to painfully go back and re-position the object for every key-frame. I also learned that when just moving objects, it's best to press 'v' and use the normal selection tool, this makes sure that your only moving the object and not it's motion path.

Overall, I'm making good progress and I'm diffidently on track again :)

Hallways And Room Upgrades

It's only Tuesday but I'm posting again, I've gotten all the remaining hallways and rooms finished, just the computer pods left. I also drew up all the upgrades for the weapons. I'm falling behind slightly, haven't started my student or zombie animation yet, but at the same time I'm getting a lot done and have more work in my other classes then I thought I'd have.

This upcoming week I'm hoping to finish off the rest of my graphics and then I'll be able to sit down and tackle the animation. I was talking to Ayla, my girlfriend of four years, and she was telling me that someone in her class was using flash and discovered a tool that allows characters to be linked together, allowing for easier animation. I'm going to definitely check this out before I start animation, if it works like I understand, then it will end up saving me a lot of time and frustration.

Weapon Upgrades

Combat Screen

This week hasn't been as productive as last week, too many other projects and meeting going on, however I did get all 15 weapons created, the combat screen layout and graphics finished and several hallways drawn.

One problem I did run into was when I was placing all the weapons into the students hands for the combat screen. The MP3 player that I had drawn for the first tier of blunt weapons just didn't fit into his hand like I wanted, causing the hit zone to be way off from the Baseball-Bat and Crowbars hit zones. This would mean that I'd have to create two different attacking animations for the blunt weapons, and I'm already looking at around 9 animations for the students so I just changed the MP3 player to a Hammer, and switched out everything that had the MP3 player with the Hammer.

I feel like I haven't fallen behind schedule yet, however I will need to put quite a few hours into this next week to stay on track.

Week 1 of Zombie RPG

So my project has been approved and I'm now into creating the assets for the game. I've drawn the rough working versions for the four students and the twelve zombies. I've also drawn the rough working version for the chibis of the students, the four zombie types and the two parents. For each set of three zombies, it takes me about two hours to get them from a rough sketch to bodies that are colored and can be animated; the chibi's took about thirty minutes each.

One thing that I started using a lot was the swap button for graphics, this would allow me to just duplicate a zombie and all the body parts, then just change the individual parts and swap them out on the duplicated zombie, saving about 10 minutes with each zombie skin, just setting up the body structure and creating new graphics for all the moving parts.

Something that I noticed after doing several zombies was the speed it took, to go from the rough idea to a working rough section, was decreasing and I was creating cleaner drawings quicker. I'm glad to see some improvement after just one week, who knows where I'll be by the end of this product.

Start to my Self Directed

I've started working on my self directed project, for this class I need to make a project for myself that will teach me things I need to become better prepared for the gaming industry.

I've come up with a Adobe Flash Zombie Survival Role Playing Game. I haven't created an in-depth game yet; I've made one 'Choose Your Own Adventure' game and a single 'Point and Click'. My idea for the game is set in an after-school Recreation Centre. The person you first play as, wakes up after falling asleep in one of the activity rooms. They wake up to find one of the adult supervisors with them in the, now locked room. You soon learn that while you were asleep a virus has spread through most of the Centre, turning all who became infected into the walking dead. The supervisor gives you a metal edged ruler and a flare gun, unlocks the door and sets you off on your adventure to try and escape, alive.

I've created my gantt chart and have just started creating rough skeches now, as I get things done I'll post pictures here. :D