Progress report. I wanted to be done with the project by know, even though I knew the deadline was slightly unrealistic it helped me get a lot of the art and mechanics in. Still working away on importing the art and creating and fine tuning mechanical elements. I also had a great friend of start with help on the backgrounds, I think the mood is spot on. Over all behind on schedule my fault but on track to making it way better than before.

Geyser animation. The idea is it will keep pumping away and if the ball lands in it, the geyser builds up and explodes. Need to finished this as a final animation and the next challenge is exporting it in a way that I can manipulate the frames rendered with code. So say I want it to be on pre-burst for 1 second how to hold that frame for X amount of time and make the animation ease into the pause. Anyways we will see. Maybe I am overthinking it. 

Finally the Tortosaurus has finally made into the game, the idea is similar to pin ball, nothing can land and stay on the Tortosaurus. You might hit a good shot but if you hits a Tortosaurus it will ricochet away from the Tortosaurus depending on the angle. On the animation side the Tortosaurus hides away upon impact, but after a while he will emerge again. All up quite happy with him.

Have been working on the foreground for a while now, need a break. And considering a long time ago I was told by a boss, “change is as good as a holiday” started work on the much needed Tortosaurus. This is the initial animation sketch I will go over this with a inking pass, then under paint various tones. Animation its Coding have been the most labour intensive portions of the projects. Though the foreground image has been kicking my ass also.

Adding foreground imagery. And I quickly found out that I need to change my work flow in photoshop to facilitated the same look as before, but now with parallax. When painting a single image you have strict control over every aspect and how soft each edge is and you don’t have an issue with having a 50% grey next to 50% grey element of the background, but now due to parallax this may happen. So I have to be more careful around what values I use for each layer in the parallax. Also being ultra careful that the alpha edge not having a light or dark fringe, this becomes extremely evident during parallax.

Finally the character sprite has made into the game, something needed to change with the implementation of the sprite. For example the jump from the idle to the swing was too jarring. So the solution for that was to be use a animation of a swing and lead from the idle, and at the apex of the swing switch to the animation of the swing that can loop endlessly from high power to low power. I have also added the water splash back in, really adds a lot to the context of the water and/or loosing the ball. Starting to look like a game.

Going back and seeing what I can use from the previous character animation. This was one of the most time consuming tasks from the prototype. Really glad looking back that I animated in a much higher resolution than I needed. Some animation frames for the swing will have to change progression order but for most part work. The order change is due to the change in the hit mechanic. The new mechanic ramps the hit up and down, then repeats.

I had to add more to the pausing. One thing was a full screen overlay and also wanted to store the stretched version of the ball and also store the direction it was travelling. Quite happy with the results at the moment. 

Next step in the game creation was getting the parallax backgrounds to work. Issues number one is that the current game room is 3000 pixels by 6400 pixels and having an image or a number of images that size for the background was not an option. Raising this issue over a few beers with my Gamemaker Guru and friend Jordan, he recommended I fake it by having a image or a number images the same size at the view that have a slight parallax based on the balls position in the room. The idea sounds great. I didn’t know how I would do it but it sounds great. So here is how I did it.
I created an object for each layer of the parallax, in the object I saved screen position (screen meaning what area in the game the view is showing) second I saved the updated room center.

The view/screen position always follows the ball. I did some funky math and it worked. Than it broke so I did it again and this time it didn’t break. I’m asking each layer to be in the same position as the view. After which I get the difference between the center of the room and the view/screen position and add it on. Also each layer has its own divide by numbers.

Layer one 10 for x and 2 for y.
Layer two 15 for x and 3 for y.
Layer three 30 for x and 6 for y.

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screen_center_x=view_xview[0]+(view_wview[0]/2)
screen_center_y=view_yview[0]+(view_hview[0]/2)

x=screen_center_x+((room_center_x-screen_center_x)/15)
y=screen_center_y+((room_center_y-screen_center_y)/3)

image_xscale=2
image_yscale=2
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At the moment for a room that size I am using one 1024x1024 map and 2 1024x512. This may change in the future if its hit the performance.