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Check out the blog, I just updated it with draft artwork of the level 3 boss.

Let me know what you think!

I just completed a draft of the level 1 boss's artwork. Let me know what you think.

:-)

Hey guys,

I just completed a draft of the artwork for the level 2 boss, the Ice Widow. Still working on the coloring. Let me know what you think.

:-)

At 7/3/08 01:38 AM, gdog163 wrote: lol, thats hard work. Ill just paste him onto a new document and and copy him when needed

(Im SUCH a cheater)

For stick figure animation? You're not cheating. You're being lazy. Just animate the motion using frame-by-frame or tweening.

There will be a final fourth left after the magma spire. It's still in development, but should hopefully be ready by the end of the week. :-)

Thanks, man. :-)

Level 3 artwork is up on the blog. Check it out and let me know what you think!

:-)

I just posted the artwork for level 1 and level 2.

Let me know what you think!

:-D

I thought you all might like to see a sneak peak of the level artwork I'm churning out this week. Let me know what you think!

I've posted some rough draft images of the first three levels of MageQuest. There's still a fourth level to figure out, but I explain my reasons as to why I'm holding off on it.

Feel free to give me any feedback you like. If you think you might have an amazing level design idea, let me know. It might make it in there.

:-)

At 5/27/08 01:04 AM, WillAlvein wrote: very fluid fast movement on those attacks, looking nice. Though, if you really want my opinion, I think it's lacking some epicness, if you're going to use that all over the game. I don't mean big fancy attacks, just something like a blue-fire-y kind of effect to the attack to look more amazing, and not just hack-hack-kick-staf-staff...

Good ideas all around. Perhaps I'll incorporate some particle effects if the main character is 100% on mana?

:-)

At 5/27/08 02:08 AM, Nuggs wrote: Looks pretty damn sweet, but I would think about adding a transition from walking to climbing a ladder. It seems kind of jerky now.
But then again I'm just being nit-picky. Awesome engine.

Good call. I plan on doing a transition for both pulling yourself up off a ladder at the top and kneeling down when you start the climb. Technically the same animation, only one of them uses it in reverse. ;-) I noticed a bit of a jerk in the screen when you start climbing, but that's because the camera follows your body as it snaps to the middle of the ladder. Not much else I can do about that. Maybe I could have the camera ease into the object it follows as opposed to snapping to it.

At 5/27/08 10:45 AM, BoMToons wrote: Good stuff. I love how solid your art feels...like it has weight and substance. Good work!

Thanks, dude. :-)

I just finished the 5-hit attack combo for the main character. Let me know what you think!

Next up, the spell casting animations!

Hey everyone!

The hero's ability to fully interact with his environment is complete! He can run around, climb ladders, jump from platform to platform, etc. Head over to the blog and try it out for yourself!

with the paladin game i never noticed the lag but then again my computer is preety good, but another reason could be is the semi- 3d terrian that the game has it moves as your character does.....
(look at the beginning and the wall you walk through)

LOL! I know what you mean. It plays great on my new machine, too. But try playing it on an average machine and you'll definitely see it start to bottleneck. Almost to a fault. The first time I played Paladin it was on a slower machine (only about 3 years old) and the gameplay really suffered.

At 4/27/08 01:05 PM, thedo12 wrote: wow , you draw weird O_o

i understand what your saying about the advantage of the pencil tool over the brush tool, however i think the brush tool just looks a hell of a lot better to me.

and about lag i mean, dan uses the brush tool and his games dont lag......

but seriously how long did it take you to do each individual frame?

Valid point. Dan uses the brush, but his games don't lag. But, if you look closely, Dan's visual style is simple. So it lends well to Flash development. However, check out Paladin the game and you'll notice some definite shortfalls to using the paintbrush. The game is huge (filesize-wise), and it gets bogged down when more than three characters are on screen while the background is scrolling or zooming.

As far as how long it takes to draw each frame, the first frame takes the longest. That can be anywhere from half an hour to 45 minutes. But after that, all body parts are in separate groups and making minor tweaks for easing or forward kinematics is quite simple. I usually use assets from a previous frame and build off of, so it isn't a complete redraw on each frame. I'd say around 10 minutes each after the first. Toward the end I refine the process and it gets very fast.

At 4/27/08 01:21 PM, GustTheASGuy wrote: http://cheezeworld.com/game-library/bitm apclip/

That so doesn't make a difference in the render speed though.

VERY interesting Gust. I'll defnitely give that a once over.

:-)

Thanks!

At long last, I've posted a video on creating the final run cycle animation for the main character. I go into detail about it on the blog, check it out and let me know what you think!

:-)

At 4/23/08 01:02 PM, thedo12 wrote: no running animation >:(

Yeah, that comes next. It's better to have the engine in place first to help refine the running, jumping, climbing, etc animations. YouTube videos coming soon of fleshing out the roughed-out animations you saw earlier.

:-)

The platform engine prototype is complete. Now the hero can interact with his environment. Go ahead and make him jump all over the test level I created.

:-)

At 4/18/08 02:37 PM, WillAlvein wrote: I really like the new version, if you keep'em little and fluffy it's way more cartoony, though, so if you're going for that just keep them...

But i'd rather play a game with mean enemies than with fluffy little ones ;P

I feel exactly the same way. :-)

The enemies in MageQuest look little too cute and cuddly. Let me know what you think of their leaner and meaner image.

:-)

At 4/16/08 04:39 PM, HandsomeJake wrote:

At 4/16/08 01:14 PM, mongoid wrote: Just a minor update. I added a background to the platform art you saw earlier.

-)

You had to triple post before some gave you any props? WTF?

Here are my props.

Use them wisely

Haha, thanks man. I know that most of these guys post their responses on my personal blog and NG user blog anyway.

:-P

The background parallax is working, and it looks AWESOME!

I'm so pleased with how this looks. It hardly registers a CPU load on my machine, and other machine's I've tested say it only carries a 10% - 15% load on the processor.

AWESOME AWESOME AWESOME!!

Just a minor update. I added a background to the platform art you saw earlier.

:-)

Hey guys!

I've just written a new post on the MageQuest Dev Blog. It's a big one! I'm working on the platform art and level design for MageQuest. You get to see a semi-step-by-step progression of how my earlier designs evolved into the final style that I'm using for MageQuest's first level artwork. Let me know what you think!

I actually do that. :-D Only it's with my keyboard input classes. I have static variables set to UP, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT, JUMP, ATTACK, etc. Very handy!

:-)

Yeah, I could have used a switch statement. But I prefer to use if - lese if -else structures because of the variety in how I can layer them to get the desired effect. I've never really seen a point to using case statements.

Oh, and I don't think that ActionScript supports enumerations. That's a Java / C++ thing, isn't it? Besides, using an enumeration wouldn't work, because I plan on the possibility that multiple states could be true at the same time. For instance, with the main character in my game, isCrouching && isBlocking && isBlockingAHit will play a "crouchBlockReact" animation.

Hey guys,

In this post, I explain a simple example in how to set up the logic protocol of a game character. I hope it makes sense!