Game Development

It's been a while since I updated the progress, and I totally skipped any mention of alpha 0.0.7. Now we are at 0.0.8 and although I will be rolling back on some features, I think it's time to show the progress.

I have been working on two main areas of the game: NPC VI and Level Generation.

ChiChiLand Adventure will use procedural generation for many of its elements, including zones within the levels. Within these zones, the entities (zone citizens) will be simulated based on simple sets of rules. In the garden, for example, I am planning to have some animals and some trees. Every x amount of time, each tree will have a chance to bear fruit. The fruit will fall down and roll in a random direction until stopping. Each animal in the zone will have a hunger meter - as they get hungry, they will seek out fruit and eat it. There will definitely be more behaviors, but that's the basic logic.

Some days you just have to take a break from work and do something silly. As my next tutorial (coming Tuesday) was rendering, I grabbed some Perler beads and made myself a water glass coaster featuring the main character from the ChiChiLand Adventure game I am developing. Stupid little thing, but made me happy :)

I would not go as far as calling it Concept ART, but as I was working to develop a number of idle animations for the player sprite, I realized how little I understood about what I am drawing.
I use pixel art is an abstraction, a simplification of an actual form - but I never really stopped to think about what this actual form may be. Needles to say, abstracting something that does not exist was quite tough.

Making the character walk around the screen was fairly easy. Keep in mind that at this point there is no interaction with any environment elements or vertical movement, so the whole thing will have to become more complex over time.
At the moment however, the whole system works on few basic principles.

With the look of the character worked out, I begun the basic animation for the sprite. The ChiChiLand Adventure will use a mostly top-down perspective (slightly off vertical), popularized by many Nintendo titles such as Pokemon or Zelda (especially the handheld versions).
I wanted the character to have a cute, bold, slightly stumpy way of walking. Here's a first pass.

I have decided to learn how to create games. It's really a no-brainer. I've been playing and following game development for most of my life now, I already use code in my animation work - why not give it a shot?
At the moment I have a more-less fleshed out idea of what my first game will be (more on that in another post) and I will document my journey through the posts in this brand new Game Development category on QubaHQ.