Wednesday 29 February 2012

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.

Tuesday 28 February 2012

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.

Wednesday 22 February 2012

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.


Tuesday 21 February 2012

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.


 

Friday 10 February 2012

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.

Thursday 9 February 2012

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.

Wednesday 8 February 2012

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. 




Friday 3 February 2012

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 :)